Global Issues
POLITICS: Indo-US Nuclear Deal May Cost Congress Party Election
As the ruling Congress party casts about for allies, faced as it is with the distinct possibility of a splintered electoral verdict, its bosses may well be regretting the day it fell out with India’s communists over the contentious Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal.
It took more than three years of hard wrangling on several sides before the Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement was signed on Oct. 10, 2008 in the dying days of the Bush administration.
While the deal passed muster with U.S. Congress, it met with stiff opposition from India’s communist parties in the Left Front, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition government to seek alternate support from the regional Samajwadi Party (SP) in order to survive a vote in Indian parliament in July 2008.
Also opposed to the deal were non-proliferation activists, anti-nuclear organisations, and some countries within the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an export-control cartel formed mainly in response to a nuclear test carried out by India in 1974.
The Left Front - comprised mainly of the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPI-M) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) - currently rule the states of West Bengal and southern Kerala. They never forgave Singh for unilaterally signing the nuclear deal, ignoring the concerns of allies and others in parliament.
While the Congress party and the Left Front had come together on a ‘secular’ platform in the 2004 elections to defeat the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), this time the communists are sworn to try and defeat both the mainstream parties and push for the formation of a ‘Third Front.’
Most analysts believe that neither the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) nor the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) bloc can cobble together the 272 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha (law-making lower house of parliament) needed to form the next government.
Both the UPA and NDA have already suffered desertions by key allies and have begun brazen attempts to poach on each other. This has benefited the Third Front and may considerably increase the clout of the Left Front after the vote counting begins on May 16.
A major regional player, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) - that currently rules Uttar Pradesh and is slated to land as many as 80 parliamentary seats - is led by the doughty Mayawati who has already shown support of the Third Front rather than the UPA or NDA.
While the Left Front may not do too well in its bastions of Kerala and West Bengal and its seat tally may drop well below the current 61, it has taken care to nurture strong relationships with the BSP, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) which rules eastern Orissa, the AIADMK party of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayaraman Jayalalithaa, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh and several smaller parties.
On its side the Congress party has sent out feelers to the Left Front by suggesting the possibility of a rapprochement in forming a government after the polls. The party’s general secretary, Rahul Gandhi, told a press gathering that his party had a 'lot of meeting ground' with the Left Front and shared development goals with it.
Gandhi is the son, grandson and the great-grandson of former prime ministers of India and is favoured by the Congress party to eventually succeed to the job. His mother, the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, heads the Congress party and is the convenor of the UPA.
But, the Left Front is unlikely to offer support to the Congress party as it did in 2004 in the name of secularism. 'If the Congress thinks we will bail it out after the elections, they are living in a dream world,' CPI-M leader Prakash Karat declared at a Left Front election rally.
'The UPA government led by Manmohan Singh has virtually surrendered to U.S. imperialist pressures and committed India to ratify the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT),' the CPI-M said in a May 10 editorial in the ‘People’s Democracy,’ the party newspaper.
India has all along refused to endorse the NPT and the CTBT as discriminatory treaties that leave intact the monopoly of nuclear weapons with the P-5 (China, Britain, France, Russia and the U.S.) while barring all other countries from possessing or developing nuclear weapons.
Referring to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller’s recent comments at a press briefing that the nuclear deal had brought India closer to singing the NPT, the CPI-M weekly newspaper said India had all along refused to endorse the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as discriminatory. Gottemoeller was quoted as saying that bringing India into the NPT was 'an important goal of U.S. foreign policy.'
The People’s Democracy spelt out Karat’s plan for the formation of a non- Congress, non-BJP government at the centre for 'restoring and maintaining India’s place of pride in the international community by pursuing an independent foreign policy.'
As for Gandhi’s overtures 'speaking in terms of a possible post-electoral understanding with the Left parties,' the People’s Democracy said: 'This is nothing but an admission of the fact that the Congress has seen the writing on the wall that it cannot form the next government along with its existing allies.'
Much will depend on the parliamentary seat arithmetic that emerges after the vote counting on May 16.
On Monday, queried by reporters, Karat appeared to soften, saying, 'Let the elections be over. Let the results come... After May 16, we will see.'
India’s Election Commission has banned exit polls during the voting stages, and this has added to the uncertainties, though opinion polls in the past have proved notoriously unreliable.
A pre-election survey conducted on Apr. 9 by the Times of India newspaper saw the Congress party winning 152 seats on its own, with the UPA getting 195 seats. It gave the BJP 145 seats with the NDA bloc getting 187 seats. The Third Front was, according to the paper, likely to get 111 seats.
Gandhi has spoken of possible alliances with 'like-minded' parties, and sent out thinly disguised overtures to powerful regional parties like the Janata Dal (United), currently ruling Bihar state, and the TDP - though they are bitterly opposed to the Congress party at the provincial level.
Congress party bosses have also shown keenness to retain its current allies in the UPA such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) that now rules southern Tamil Nadu - while flirting with their provincial rivals, the JD(U), and the AIADMK of Jayalalithaa respectively.
But rank opportunism was visible in the Congress party in its choosing to favour an alliance with Mayawati's BSP while ditching the SP, which had bailed out Singh’s government in the July 2008 confidence vote over the nuclear deal. On Tuesday, the SP formally announced keenness in joining the Third Front.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service