The Japanese government may have decided to suspend negotiations with India and four other countries on civil nuclear cooperation in the wake of prime minister Naoto Kan's call for pulling the plug on atomic power.
Kyodo news agency, citing an unnamed government source reported that any move to go ahead with the talks could risk contradicting the prime minister's policy.
According to the report, the government would suspend talks with India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates for sale of Japanese-made nuclear power equipment and technology. The decision concerned negotiations over completion of separate nuclear power cooperation agreements with these countries.
Negotiations with all five countries had been put on hold after the killer earthquake and tsunami in March triggered the nuclear crisis in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture.
According to the source, the government would not schedule any high-level talks with the five prospective nations on completion of nuclear cooperation accords without getting the prime ministers' appoval, the report said.
Meanwhile, the concerned ministries including the industry ministry and the foreign ministry would have to wait and see when Kan resigned.
The prime minister has offered to step down if three conditions were met during the current Diet (parliament) session, concluding end- August. This would include the passage of a bill aimed at promoting the use of renewable energy sources.
Tokyo's decision could come as a huge setback to India's ambitious civil nuclear energy programme analysts say. India and Japan had been negotiating a nuclear agreement since June last year and top officials of the two countries had so far held two rounds of talks but differences persisted on many critical issues.
There were worries in New Delhi following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, that the radiation fallout could affect the nuclear deal, the two countries were considering to formally announce during the Japanese PM's visit to India towards the end of the year.
The talks on the pact with India had led to an outcry in Japan from survivors of the 1945 US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over fears that the deal would hamper global efforts to realise a world without atomic weapons.
If the India-Japan nuclear deal is aborted, it would not be easy for American and French nuclear majors too, to enter the Indian nuclear market, according to analysts.
