'Careful' consideration of India's NSG membership, says New Zealand

India's diplomatic outreach for the membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) will likely go right down to the wire, as it did 8 years ago when India finally managed to get a clean waiver from the Group to carry out nuclear commerce. One of the 3 main holdout nations then, New Zealand, has told TOI India's NSG membership application will be a subject of "careful consideration" later this month.

New Zealand was the most vocal among a group of 6 countries, including Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway, which India suspected were instigated in 2008 by China to resist the India-specific exemption NSG was contemplating. While the remaining 3 relented after a while, New Zealand, along with Austria and Ireland, continued to seek conditionalities in the draft circulated for waiver to India, a non NPT signatory.

"Regarding India's NSG membership application, it will be the subject of careful consideration by the full membership this month," a spokesperson for New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Trade told TOI, adding that New Zealand would be part of those discussions but not be in a position to comment in the meantime.

NSG will meet Thursday for a pre-plenary session in Vienna and follow it up with the main plenary later this month in Republic of Korea. Interestingly, Pakistan PM's foreign affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz called up New Zealand's foreign minister Murray McCully Wednesday to mobilise support for Pakistan's own NSG membership application.

In 2008, New Zealand had declared that "like a number of countries" it had reservations about the NSG exemption for India and that it wanted these be "given full and effective consideration so that we could have added confidence in non-proliferation benefits an exemption might bring".

Government sources here said they were expecting New Zealand to ask some tough questions but added that eventually it was going to support India. PM Narendra Modi met his counterpart

John Key

earlier this year in Washington, DC on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit and in May this year, President Pranab Mukherjee visited New Zealand. Both the leaders touched upon the issue of India's NSG membership in their meetings.

New Zealand was one of the first signatories to NPT and remains an influential voice on issues related to non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Within the NPT, it works together with a Group of Ten to bolster international nuclear security and safety standards. All other 9 members of the Group are members of NSG and New Zealand's word carries a lot of weight with these nations.