WASHINGTON: The Bush administration will push for a vote on the US-India civilian nuclear deal in the US Congress on or around September 8 when it returns for its fall session after lawmakers on both sides would have finished with their respective party conventions the previous week.

By that time Washington also hopes to have piloted the deal through the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel that is scheduled to meet in Vienna on August 21. The NSG typical decides issues by consensus. "We're hoping to get a positive result out of that (NSG meeting) sometime in the next month.

And then, hopefully, we'll be able to present this to Congress September 8th - on or about September 8th. Sometime during the upcoming session of Congress," State Department spokesman Gonzalo R. Gallegos said Monday. The NSG meeting will not have the persuasive counsel of the IAEA Director General Mohammed el Baradei, who is largely credited with the passage of the deal through the IAEA board of governors last week.

While some 19 members of the NSG are also on the IAEA board, several smaller countries are expected to state their non-proliferation concerns at the NSG meet, countries such as Ireland, Austria, Japan, and New Zealand have suggested that their bending to El Baradei's reasoning at the IAEA board should not be taken to mean they will go along easily at the NSG, where the US will be batting for India without the reassuring presence of the IAEA DG.

Some experts expect these countries to expand on the non-proliferation concerns they expressed at the IAEA meeting, challenging the clean and unconditional exemptions from NSG guidelines that India is seeking. "The whole exercise of exemption is based on certain conditions, which did not exist before, like the 123 agreement and the IAEA safeguards agreement. Is it realistic to expect that the NSG would grant the exemption without reference to any of these documents?

Would such references be considered conditional or not?" former Indian diplomat T.P Sreenivasan, who served in Geneva, asks. "The whole exercise of the deal is based on certain conditions that India put forward in the Joint Statement of 2005. How can the NSG not take note of those conditions? If India takes the position that no conditions will be acceptable, a situation may arise when India will have to walk away from the deal at that stage.

Hopefully, India has its own understanding as to what unconditional exemption means. A certain flexibility in this position is essential to carry the deal through," Sreenivasan advised. The situation is a little more propitious on the Hill, where despite the presence a few law-makers primed by Washington's non-proliferation hawks, the political atmosphere during an election season is surcharged with debates on newer and wider sources of energy.

Going beyond the US-India deal which they both support, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama have backed nuclear energy in varying degrees in this wider mix. Obama is more in favour of renewables instead of nuclear energy, but is not averse to the US-India deal for other reasons. The fact that lawmakers would be coming for the Congressional vote straight from their respective conventions (in Denver and Minneapolis) where the energy issue is expected to be front and center should be reassuring for India -- provided it has crossed the NSG hurdle by then.

The September vote in Congress will also set the stage for a possible meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the annual U.N General Assembly session, their final one before the two countries repair for elections.