The New Nation - Internet Edition

Praful Bidwai

ONLY weeks ago, members of India's Left parties would have said the United Progressive Alliance shouldn't be toppled on the issue of the United States-India nuclear deal.. Rising prices, India's strategic alliance with the US, and the UPA's poor record on fighting communalism, are far more important. The deal, on which less than a fifth of the public has clear views, shouldn't be the main determinant of Left-UPA relations.

Today, the Left has strange bedfellows, like the Bahujan Samaj Party and what's left of the United National Progressive Alliance minus the Samajwadi Party. It wants to vote the UPA out-just as the Bharatiya Janata Party does. The UPA in turn stands allied with the SP for super-opportunistic reasons.

This shift can only be explained by the obsessive zeal with which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pursued the deal.

The Left agreed in November to let the government go to the International Atomic Energy Agency secretariat to negotiate a safeguards agreement on condition that it wouldn't take the next step without the Left's approval.

The Left feels betrayed by Singh, who approached the IAEA Board of Governors for approving the agreement, thus directly contradicting Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's promise that this would happen only after securing a Parliamentary vote.

The UPA moved ahead even before the Left withdrew its support. It will brief the BoG on the deal on July 18, well before the confidence vote on the 22nd.

The UPA has stooped low to practise subterfuge, stealth and deception, and mocked at democratic decision-making based on transparency, political honesty and honouring promises made to Members of Parliament.

Singh never had a popular mandate for the deal, which has huge implications for India's foreign policy, nuclear and strategic stances. Such a mandate cannot be conjured up through wheeling-and-dealing. It's an elementary requirement of democracy that no paradigm shift in policy be executed without full public discussion and before a broad consensus is generated.

The UPA is guilty of devaluing and defiling democracy. It has resorted to sordid horse-trading, defection and bribery to fabricate a fragile majority. It has made the political process hostage to powerful corporate interests.

Even if the UPA wins the confidence vote, the new power-sharing arrangement will lack the programmatic basis that marked the Left's support for the UPA, negotiated through the National Common Minimum Programme.

At its centre is India's sleaziest and most criminalised party-the SP, with its links with shady businessmen, muscle power, and "sweetheart deals" with entrenched interests.

The SP is backing the UPA not to isolate the BJP, but to counter the BSP. The SP is deeply compromised with the Sangh Parivar, which propelled it to power in UP in 2005 through defections, with a nod from Governor and old RSS hand Vishnu Kant Shastri, and BJP-appointed Speaker Kesri Nath Tripathi. Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav covertly followed the Parivar's script. He retained Tripathi, appointed/continued Sangh nominees as government pleaders and heads of commissions, donated crores to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and ensured that LK Advani wouldn't be prosecuted for the Babri demolition.It's shameful that the UPA has chosen to ally with the SP and pander to the outrageously parochial demands advanced by Yadav's lieutenant Amar Singh on behalf of businessman Anil Ambani. The SP will extract a horrible price for its support, which might turn out unaffordable. Even if the UPA terminates this alliance, the damage caused by the SP through its betrayal of the CPM, its long-standing ally, and an undermining of the UNPA, will prove lasting.

The alliance will shift the centre of gravity of Indian politics to the Right, with damaging consequences for the interests of the masses. This shift can only facilitate the further rise of the BJP.

If the domestic costs of pushing the deal are high, the external costs will be onerous. The deal is inseparably linked to a close, unequal political-military partnership with the US, which will erode India's foreign policy independence and make it complicit in Washington's ill-conceived Global War on Terror, its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its New Middle East Initiative.

The IAEA safeguards agreement, which the government dishonestly claimed to be secret, but made public 10 hours after it was disclosed by arms-control groups, won't fly. The UPA has failed to convince independent critics that it meets Singh's commitments to Parliament regarding uninterrupted fuel supply, and India's right to build a "strategic fuel reserve" and take "corrective measures". These assurances are in the preamble, not in the agreement's operative part. Even if the preamble is charitably interpreted as setting its context and purpose, several clauses in the operative part mandate that the facilities put under inspections cannot be taken out even if the fuel supply is cut. "Corrective measures" are nowhere defined.