By Arun Kumar

Washington, June 23 (IANS) With the Bush administration set against "deal breaker" moves in the US Congress, the Senate foreign relations committee will review an original bill on the India-US nuclear deal on June 28.

A business meeting of the Senate committee, coming a day after a review of a separate supporting bill by a panel of the lower house, will consider and vote on a new bill "to exempt from certain requirements of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 US exports to India of nuclear materials, equipment and technology".

That the Senate panel is considering an original bill rather than the one moved on March 16 by the panel chairman Richard Lugar and five others is indicative that the Bush administration is close to building a consensus over a bi-partisan legislation that would avoid going back to the negotiating table.

Vice President Richard Cheney's remarks at the US-India Business Council's leadership summit, making a forceful plea for a quick Congressional approval of the deal as it is and expression of confidence that it will receive the strong bipartisan support, is another pointer that the deal is on track.

While the Bush administration is not averse to the Congress adding "its own ideas to the bill", its pointsman on the deal has made it clear that it would "favour, support, a majority vote, a straight up and down vote in the Congress at the end of the process" on the India nuclear deal.

As Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns told a forum on the deal, organised by Congressional Task Force on US-India Trade and US India Business Alliance, the administration is not willing to renegotiate the deal.

Because of the interplay between the Congress and the administration, a stronger bill had emerged and "we are optimistic that this legislation can now go forward," Burns said, describing it as an "opportunity to have bipartisan victory for the American people".

The crucial legislation has already won critical public support from the heads of the foreign relations panels of the two houses with Lugar warning that a Congressional rejection or delay in approving the deal risks wasting a critical opportunity to give a new post cold war direction to the American foreign policy.

The bill before the senate panel has emerged after the State Department responded to close to 200 questions on the deal and meetings with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Nick Burns and other officials besides several experts outside the government.

The chairman of the International committee of the House of Representatives, Henry Hyde, who himself introduced the enabling legislation in the house on March 16, 2006, too has expressed his willingness to push the bill through.

An open meeting of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations has been called on June 27 for the purpose of marking up or fine tuning a bill that would allow the US to share its nuclear know-how with India provided New Delhi meets a set of seven conditions and refrains from detonating a nuclear explosive device.

The Bush administration is keen that the foreign relations panels of the two houses finish their review process before the month end as Congress would be on a week-long recess from July 4. It would then have just about a fortnight to push the deal through Congress as it again goes for a month-long summer work break around July 27.