new delhi

The Indian government has asked its research community to show restraint while it considers how to respond to the expulsion of seven Indian scientists from the United States.

Up to 75 more may be asked to leave under the new US policy of expelling Indian and Pakistani scientists working on US government-funded projects or in institutions if they are affiliated to their countries' nuclear organizations, even if the scientists themselves work in non-nuclear fields.

The US action, intended to punish India for having conducted nuclear tests, has drawn strong protests. India's science minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, said India “expected more mature behaviour from the US administration”.

In a statement, he accused Washington of reducing science and technology “to a ball game for serving partisan interests”, and hoped that the US and international scientific communities would make concerted efforts to end such “discrimination”.

The expulsions also prompted condemnation from the upper house of the Indian parliament, with some members urging prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to retaliate by expelling US scientists in India. But India's science secretary, Valangiman Ramamurthi, says: “We do not want to take this battle to the street corner. We want to behave in a dignified and mature way.”

Nonetheless, India's science ministry is looking at options to hit back at the United States. Possible targets include cancelling an agreement with the US space agency NASA to share data obtained from its Insat geostationary satellites (see Nature 391, 109; 1998). Also in jeopardy is an agreement with India's Department of Biotechnology under which US companies were hoping to test new male contraceptive drugs.

A US State Department official describes the prospect of retaliation as “regrettable”, but adds that it will not affect US government policy. The seven expelled scientists, he says, are all affiliated to Indian atomic energy- and defence-related research organizations. They were working on research projects at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.

They have been asked to leave by the end of the month. Two have already left, however, and one is planning legal action against the US university which he says gave him 24 hours to leave the country with his family.

“The way Indian scientists are being treated as bonded labour is an insult to the US scientific community and its academic freedom,” says Ramamurthi.