Manmohan146;s long winter

The Left first expressed satisfaction on the prime minister8217;s August 17, 2006 assurances and then subsequently invoked their anti-American reservations to scuttle the deal. The BJP decided to distance itself from the Left8217;s position by asking for a domestic legislation to counter the Hyde Act, but then backtracked to harp on renegotiation of the 123 agreement singularly at the behest of one leader who had no qualms in calling his pro-deal party colleagues American stooges. As for UPA allies, their new-found opposition to the operationalisation of the deal comes from a fear of early general elections. One can safely wager that if the allies were told that elections were to be held only in 2009, they would all come on board.

But it is the Congress party that is to be blamed, as it buckled under pressure from the Left and UPA allies. As a result, the PM now stands virtually isolated within his own government on this critical issue. The reasons being cited for the Congress relegating the deal to the back burner are that it would have an adverse impact on its minority vote bank, that post-election the party would again have to go to the Left parties if it runs short of numbers, and that the party cannot go to elections on an agenda that essentially does not belong to Nehru-Gandhi family. However, one question all Congress leaders are posing is, would the Left let the UPA government continue to function smoothly even if the deal is put into deep freeze? Of course, the Left parties have shown no inclination to make any such guarantee 8212; apart of course from CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat8217;s reassuring statements on the continuity of the UPA government, and his character certificate to the PM. His words carry the arrogance of the victor.

The Congress would not have come to such a humiliating state of affairs had it kept its own cabinet ministers in the picture on the state of the play and kept its chin up on the deal. A telling example: on October 9, the day the Congress gave in to Left pressure, at an election rally in central India, a senior minister of the government, oblivious of the latest political developments, was equating Karat and comrades with nuclear deal opposers China and Pakistan. He, of course, had not read the Jhajjer clarification, which was dished out in the wee hours of the previous day. Ask any Congress minister except Pranab Mukherjee, whose mandate is to ensure the continuation of the present coalition, on the future of the deal, and chances are he or she would be as lost on the next steps as his or her other party colleagues.

With confused signals coming from all quarters, the Congress 8212; like the Left and the BJP 8212; is looking ahead to the proposed nuclear debate in the winter session of Parliament that begins this month. Here, too, there appears to be miscommunication between the government and the party. It seems that the government was for a sense of the House resolution, after which the former would approach the IAEA for a safeguards agreement. But what has apparently been communicated to the Left and the BJP is that the government wants to take the sense of the House through a debate and not through a vote.

In the midst of all this there are murmurs that the BJP may provide relief to the government by siding with the Congress on the deal in the national interest. If this were to happen, it would open a new and a welcome chapter in Indian politics 8212; but the fact is that this is just wishful thinking. BJP President Rajnath Singh was clearly given the party line by Opposition leader L.K. Advani after the latter appeared to give a signal of flexibility on the deal. The party line was underscored at a meeting between Advani and Henry Kissinger, who expressed his apprehensions on Indo-US relations taking a downturn if the deal was to be junked.

To make matters more complicated, those in the government who wanted to approach the BJP for a broad consensus did not get the political go-ahead from the Congress. For the BJP, the debate only provides them with an opportunity to distance their position from the Left oppositional stance, lampoon the PM and the Congress president on statement rollbacks, and clarify their stand to middle India.

Under the circumstances, the prime minister is left with only two options. Either the party backs him fully and he announces his government8217;s intentions to go to the IAEA to operationalise the deal in December after exhaustively addressing concerns of all the political parties in the debate in Parliament 8212; or he and his government become objects of ridicule for the remaining tenure of the current Lok Sabha. There is no point in the PM and the party getting hit from Left and Right in a debate that does not resolve the issue once and for all. One only hopes that the UPA government is not developing a tolerance for masochism.