By sending the draft safeguards agreement to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency before facing a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha, the Manmohan Singh government has violated not just an assurance its External Affairs Minister gave the nation two days earlier but also the most fundamental of democratic norms. As Pranab Mukherjee put it in a press conference, the norm is that a government that has lost its majority will not have the moral auth ority to "bind' the country to "an international agreement.' The reason the Congress-led government is abandoning both procedure and propriety is not hard to find. The Bush administration's principal concern at this juncture is that there should be enough time for the American legislative process to be completed following the proposed change of guidelines by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The indecent haste with which the IAEA Secretariat was instructed to circulate the draft agreement to the Board of Governors offers a fresh basis for the charge that the Manmohan Singh dispensation is concerned more with fulfilling its commitment to the Bush administration than in looking after the interests of the Indian people. What is more, paranoiac non-transparency has been the hallmark of the government's handling of the nuclear deal since March 2005. In the latest instance, the text of the draft safeguards agreement negotiated with the IAEA secretariat was kept a secret from political India after it was falsely claimed that IAEA procedure required the Indian government to treat it as a "privileged' and confidential document. Turning to the draft agreement itself, the 23-page text consists of three parts