A new Parliament session has begun amid a political impasse stretched precariously thin. According to the Indian Constitution, the nuclear deal is not subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval. Yet, as the nation’s highest forum of debate, Parliament could initiate a breakthrough. If MPs across the political divide can bring themselves to talk to each other again instead of talking at each other, perhaps it may be possible for them to put aside their stated positions and a way out of the current crisis could suggest itself. This is also the hope that runs through the initiative by 23 members of the country’s strategic and scientific community who had written an open letter to MPs on the eve of the winter session of Parliament.It is extremely significant that the top brass of the strategic and security establishment, cutting across political regimes, has endorsed the Indo-US nuclear deal. In this moment, it is also significant that they have said so. Given the nature of their support — unequivocally non-partisan and non-ideological — their intervention has the possibility of guiding the public debate on the deal out of the political and ideological traps in which it is so completely mired. The letter does not just make a strong case for the deal which, according to them, is the best that India can get. It also calls upon the people’s representatives to assess it in the one perspective that “transcends all others: that of India’s evolution as one of the principal powers in the community of nations”. It does not deny that there will be differences of opinion in a democracy, but only urges that “opinion be shaped by facts and reality”. It is a commentary on the discussion so far that such an exhortation sounds so refreshing. Members of Parliament must heed these voices from outside their tight and increasingly frozen political circles.There have been some indications of a thaw in the political polarisation. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s meeting with leader of opposition L.K. Advani and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was preceded by the one between National SecurityAdvisor M.K. Narayanan and Department of Atomic Energy chief Anil Kakodkar and Advani and Rajnath Singh. The government’s attempts to reach out to the main opposition party may have been belated but they are welcome. They can restore the political dialogue at the top that is so much a necessity in matters of national interest.
