INDIAN political parties threw their support behind the government yesterday in firmly repudiating a draft nuclear test ban treaty. The parties put up a united front to denounce the pact after India prevented the accord from being adopted by disarmament negotiators in Geneva.
Mr Jaipal Reddy, a spokesman for Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda's 13 party governing coalition, told Reuter: "India cannot be privy to this highly discriminating treaty."
In Geneva, the Indian ambassador, Mr Ms Arundhati Ghose, told the Conference on Disarmament that the draft treaty would not halt efforts by nuclear weapons powers to perfect their arsenals using non explosive techniques like computer simulation.
Ms Ghose said the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) did not promote the realisation of "universal disarmament goals".
Mr K.L. Shana, a spokesman for the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said: "All parties in the country are united on this issue, that our country should not sign the CTBT."
During the 2 1/2 years of negotiations, India demanded that the CTBT commit the five declared nuclear powers - Britain, China, France, Russia and the US to a disarmament timetable. The five have resisted.
Mr Reddy said the treaty represented the views of the five nuclear powers. "They never care to address themselves to the security concerns of India because India is not a nuclear weapon state."
India, along with Pakistan and Israel, is one of three "nuclear threshold states" that have the capability to swiftly build nuclear weapons. New Delhi exploded a nuclear device in 1974 but has not undertaken any nuclear tests since.
In Geneva, the US disarmament ambassador, Mr Stephen Ledogar, said the real reason India had blocked the CTBT was that "New Delhi wants to maintain the Indian nuclear weapon option."
Shortly after taking power in June, Mr Deve Gowda's United Front coalition reiterated it would retain the option of building nuclear weapons until universal disarmament was realised.
Like the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the CTBT is widely viewed in India as a discriminatory agreement that would divide the world into nuclear "haves" and "have nots".