Edit: CPM and CMP

It sort of predicted what’s happening

Prakash Karat’s unyielding words at the close of the CPM central committee meeting make it yet more clear that general elections are now probably inevitable. His caution to the government on proceeding with the civilian nuclear agreement with the US has been turned that much more into an ultimatum, with the Central Committee authorising the Politburo to do anything it deems necessary to stop “operationalisation” of the agreement. The meeting also adopted a plan for a nationwide agitation in the fortnight leading up to the mid-September IAEA meet in Vienna. For all the quibbling over the implications of the Hyde Act and the detail in the 123 Agreement, this stand-off between the Left and the government is not about nuclear diplomacy.

It is about the rapidly decreasing scope of reconciling two very different world views.This is why if the Left cites the absence in the common minimum programme any reference to a nuclear agreement with the US, it is being disingenuous. That CMP was simply the fig leaf over the very evident contradictions in the political arrangement the two entities agreed upon after the results of the 2004 general elections came in. The Left and the Congress needed to vote together in Lok Sabha if the BJP was to be kept out.

Therefore, UPA-Left coordination was predicated not on any common agenda, but on the negation of an alternative. It is therefore interesting that the Left’s ultimatum to the government implies a readiness to ultimately vote with the BJP, in the event of a confidence or no-confidence motion. The Left-Congress partnership could nonetheless have been a brave one. Even though the faultlines were visible, it could have been a courageous experiment to come to terms with India’s political diversity in ways tangible to good governance. But the Left saw the arrangement only as a way to voice its veto to impart to the government its own ideological inclinations.

It is to the prime minister’s credit that he consistently tried to insist on a forward-looking agenda for governance — even if he was stopped from operationalising most of it, he took it upon himself to articulate where his head and heart were. And now, with the Left’s bluff having been called, he has created the space to concretise some of those things. He has actually gained valuable freedom: to decide precisely when to go to elections, elections which