India is likely to renew its pitch for uranium from Down Under during Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith’s visit next week. Mr Smith will hold talks here with minister of external affairs Pranab Mukherjee and others in the government. His four-day visit (September 9 to 12) will take him to Chennai and Hyderabad too.

Coming as it would after the NSG’s extraordinary plenary in Vienna, the visit will tend to bring uranium sales into sharp focus. Australian Premier Kevin Rudd has refused to sell uranium to India because it has not signed the NPT. His predecessor, John Howard, had agreed in principle to the sale but Mr Rudd reversed the decision last year.

Mr Mukherjee did not make much headway in getting Canberra to reconsider the ban during his visit there in June. All Mr Smith said then was Australia can consider what its attitude to the nuclear deal should be only when the 123 Agreement gets past the NSG.

"We will bear in mind the view and the arguments, and the importance of the issue to India, when we come to that consideration," Mr Smith had told him.

Canberra’s refusal to sell uranium has come in for domestic criticism. The Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament, Dr Brendan Nelson, has described Mr Rudd’s arguments as "ridiculously stupid". Another Opposition leader Andrew Robb, in turn, has said supplying uranium to India would be the single greatest action Australia could take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Writing in the Australian, foreign affairs commentator Greg Sheridan has said the next logical step for the Rudd government, if the US-India deal clears its final hurdle, is to reverse its opposition to selling uranium to India. "After all, supporting the deal means the government supports other nations selling uranium to India," he wrote.

Australia is the world’s largest supplier of uranium. India also expects to import LNG from Australia. Traditionally Australia has been primary source of import of cooking coal for India.

Australian Premier Rudd can be expected to visit India. The Rudd-inspired International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament is likely to discuss the nuclear deal in October. It hopes to lay the groundwork for the next review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2010. Former Japanese and Australian foreign ministers Yoriko Kawaguchi and Gareth Evans co-chair the panel.