New Delhi, Aug. 26: The Prime Minister is seeing in the nuclear standoff a parallel with the economic reforms he pioneered in the nineties, highly placed sources said to drive home the message that the government is determined to push the pact through.

Terms like “go-slow” meant little else than tactical manoeuvring, the sources said. Congress president Sonia Gandhi has also extended full support to the Prime Minister despite misgivings among a section of leaders, they added.

The sources said the Prime Minister felt that, like in 1991 when economic liberalisation was launched, the nuclear deal had marked a turning point in India’s foreign policy that was in the larger national interest.

The government is aware that the transition is never smooth and Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister, had been called a “World Bank agent” and worse but the country is enjoying the fruits of that decision now, the sources added.

But Singh is anguished that political parties are not willing to treat this shift in foreign policy with an open mind. The government feels that no international treaty has ever been so transparently debated as the nuclear deal.

“There is not even a piece of paper outlining the agenda or the goal of the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks. We know what the BJP was planning to give to the US. Now they have turned around to oppose the deal,” a minister said.

The government is attaching significance to the proposed debate in Parliament. “They (the Left) said the government should not proceed till our doubts on the Hyde Act are addressed. They have not said scrap the deal.”

On the timetable for negotiations with the IAEA and the NSG, a government source said: “It is not an event. It is a process. Consultations will have to be done over a period of time. We will like to do it at the earliest. But it is not like that the deal will be killed if we don’t present ourselves on a particular date.”

The government is also rejecting the idea of any domestic legislation to counter the Hyde Act.

But the government does not feel that the crisis has blown over, nor does it rule out the possibility of immediate election.

The dominant view is that the government should try to present the budget and show that the allocation in social sectors has gone up by four times since the A.B. Vajpayee government left office.

The Congress is also willing to run a minority government for some time if the Left withdraws support.