CPI wants Centre to ‘deliver’, calls for ‘mass intervention’

In fact, the CPI is not alone in its ‘‘disenchantment’’ with the UPA government’s ‘‘vacillation over implementation of the CMP’’. Similar discussions took place in the CPM’s three-day Central Committee meeting which also ended today.

There too, the biggest Left partner was unhappy with the government’s ‘‘unilateral’’ decision to offload PSU shares. The CPM will make its formal statement on the Central Committee deliberations tomorrow.

But CPI’s statement today was extraordinarily strong. It suggested that the Left was toughening its stand to drive home a good bargain, now that the UPA think-tank has indicated that it would be easier to implement pro-poor CMP schemes if an FDI hike was allowed in telecom and insurance. Bardhan said that several policies adopted by the UPA were ‘‘flawed’’ and its priorities ‘‘had not been right at all’’. The performance of the government so far has been ‘‘mixed’’, he said.

Coming from the CPI, which has often tried to be less adversarial in its UPA stand than other Left constituents, this was a strong outburst against the Congress-led coalition.

The party also issued a statement, which warned workers and sympathisers not to hope for major pro-people policies from the government. ‘‘There should not be any illusion that this arrangement of coordination between UPA-Left is the guarantee for the implementation of CMP,’’ it said.

In effect, the party was trying to stress how little faith it had in the coordination mechanism. The CPI has been the first Left constituent to protest against Minister of State for Heavy Industries Santosh Mohan Deb’s aid package for PSUs. Already, there has been correspondence between Bardhan and Deb on this issue with the CPI leader saying that a one-time injection of a sum of Rs 500 crore may not be the final solution. Deb hit back, saying the government could not go on bailing out industries that would never recover.

What has also upset the CPI is the reported move to ‘‘allow foreign banks to take over Indian private banks’’. More so, as the party’s All India Bank Employees’ Association is a huge organisation and the party has to bear its interests in mind.

Besides, the CPI has listed a number of policies they want the government to take up on a priority basis, including strengthening of PDS, employment generation, reforms in education, poverty alleviation and relief to farmers. Following CPM general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet’s warning about a BJP threat in People’s Democracy yesterday, the CPI too warned of the dangers posed by L K Advani taking over the party.