'Delaying N-deal can harm Congress approval'

WASHINGTON: Delaying the Indo-US nuclear deal will "jeopardise" its getting through Congress and the notion that India will get something better in a new Democratic administration is "misplaced", a senior Indian-American community leader has said.

"For Indian leaders to believe that they can wait for the next US President to get a better deal, and they are hoping that it will be Senator Hillary Clinton, need to look at the fact that there were 12 US Senators who voted against the Hyde Bill and they were all Democrats with nine of them chairing the most influential committees in Congress," Ashok Mago, Chairman of the Dallas-based US-India Forum, said.

Mago, who has been in the forefront of lobbying for the passage of the Hyde Act last year, said, "Our leaders in India do not understand the system in the US. They think the President sends a Bill to Congress and it is approved and done. In this case, the Bill which became the Hyde Act is actually not the one that President Bush sent."

This bill was basically prepared by Tom Lantos (currently Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Henry Hyde (former Chairman of the House International Relations Committee), Joseph Biden (current Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Bill First (former Senate Majority Leader), he said.

"I don't think that the next President can get anything more than what has already been approved by this Congress, because it is not the President alone who decides but also the Congress," he added.

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com