New Delhi: The Indo-US Nuclear Deal has a real chance of making it to the final step in the US Congress on Thursday. The US Congress has listed the deal for approval. The move comes just hours before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is due to meet with President George W Bush at the White House for dinner.
It will be a "working dinner" between Bush and the Indian PM who is flying in from New York for just a few hours.
US Vice-President Dick Cheney and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, William Burns will be among others present from the American side.
From the Indian side Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, National Security Adviser M K Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, Prime Minister's Special Envoy on the nuclear deal and climate change Shyam Saran and India's ambassador to US, Ronen Sen will be attending.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will skip the meeting as she works the phone from New York to get the India-US civil nuclear deal done.
"We want to see passage by the full Senate and to see it go to the House of Representatives for passage," State Department spokesman Robert Wood had said on Wednesday expressing pleasure at a key Senate panel's 19-2 endorsement of the deal on Tuesday.
"This agreement is very important to the US, as well as India," Wood said while declining comment on "discussions we are having with, you know, members of the House of Representatives".
"We want to bring India, as we have said over and again, back into the non-proliferation mainstream, and this agreement is a good way of doing that," he added.
(With inputs from agencies)
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