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Indo-US biz body urges Clinton, House of Reps to lift sanctions

C K Arora in Washington

The US-India Business Council on Friday night urged the Clinton administration to order an immediate review of its nuclear-related sanctions on India and Pakistan, questioning its current policy of linking the United States' trade with India to its global non-proliferation goals.

Council chairman Dean R O'Hare, in a statement, urged an immediate follow-up to the amendment, approved by the US Senate early this week, seeking to suspend for five years the sanctions that the US had placed on India and Pakistan after their nuclear tests last year.

He said supporters of the Senate's India-Pakistan Sanctions Reform Legislation had argued that this linkage just did not make sense for two reasons. First, it was unrealistic to expect democratic nations such as India to yield to such pressure. Second, it was hard to justify opposing development finance to a country like India with more than 500 million persons living on less than one dollar per day, he added.

He said the Senate had given a strong impetus to US diplomacy in South Asia and done so in a way that reflected the broadest possible political support.

O'Hare was optimistic that the leaders of the US House of Representatives would concur with the Senate approach.

The Senate had made a policy statement, introducing the principle that export control should be applied only to entities that ''make direct and material contributions to weapons of mass destruction and missile programmes and only to those items that could contribute to such programmes.''

The council, a leading US business organisation dealing with commercial relations of the two countries, said the Senate measure established the foundation for broad-based, bi-partisan consensus on the US approach to a region where the United States had large and rapidly increasing commercial and national security interests.

The amendment, introduced by senators Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts (both Republicans) with support from across the political spectrum, had several significant aspects and should be considered in its entirety, he added.

O'Hare hoped that the administration would restore the funding for India's economic reforms which it had withheld in the wake of the nuclear tests.

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