Kochi, Sept. 2 (PTI): L.K. Advani today asked the Prime Minister to clarify if he thought that previous governments had “missed the bus” by not signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Referring to Manmohan Singh’s recent statement that India cannot afford to “miss the bus” of nuclear renaissance this time, the BJP leader asked why previous governments, including the Congress, had not signed the NPT. “Was it wrong?” he asked.

Advani said the BJP felt the civilian nuclear deal with the US imposed curbs on India’s strategic options and that in the past 60 years, every government, irrespective of the party in power, had been opposed to the non-proliferation regime.

Now, by signing this deal, India has been made part of the regime, he said.

The BJP is opposed to the deal because it endangers national interest, Advani said. The curbs, he added, could come from several provisions of the 123 Agreement, which says “(US) national provisions will apply”. The US has many laws, including the Hyde Act, and they will apply to India, too, he said at a news conference.

“The government should enact a law which can counter all negative provisions of the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act of the US so that the country’s autonomy and independence in strategic progress and foreign policy was scrupulously protected.”

Advani said Singh had been trying to project that the Congress alone was in favour of promoting nuclear energy, which, he alleged, was a “deliberate” attempt to mislead people. “No party in India was opposed to enhancement of nuclear energy as part of the overall national goal of strengthening energy security,” he said.

“The BJP was the only party which had been for several decades an advocate of India becoming a nuclear-weapon state,” he said, adding that the Jan Sangh had passed a resolution in November 1966 on the country going nuclear.

Advani said the NDA regime “wanted nuclear weapons of our own. However, both the Congress and the Left parties opposed (it) and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was then the Opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha, had said the consequences would be ‘very bad’ for the economy”.

Advani termed the decision to set up a committee to study the Left’s reservations on the 123 Agreement undemocratic “as it has been constituted when Parliament was in session”.

The deal cannot be treated as a private affair between the Congress and the Left, he said.