The Hindu Business Line : Is the Govt skilfully cornering the Left?

“All that I want”, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, is reported to have said on the sidelines of a book release function on June 30, “is the authority to proceed with the process of negotiations through all stages like the IAEA and NSG that will not tie down the hands of the country…you allow us to complete the process … I will bring it before Parliament and abide by the House.” The CPI(M) Polit Bureau Member, Mr Sitaram Yechury, has reacted to this by saying that “there is nothing new in his (the PM’s) stand...”

One wonders how Mr Yechury could say this with a straight face. Can it be that even a person as alert as Mr Yechury has missed out the deeper significance of the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘offer’? If so, full marks for the Prime Minister for his notable success in passing off a brand new proposition in an apparently casual manner on the sidelines of a function, as if in a reluctant response to media queries so that few notice its full implications.

Once all the stages of negotiations over IAEA safeguards and the modalities of getting the fuel, technology and equipment from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) are completed, the deal is as good as through, except for the US Congressional approval for the 123 Agreement, which can be assumed to be a mere formality.

In other words, the Prime Minister’s seemingly bland ‘offer’ is nothing short of a final push towards the operationalisation of the deal.

Ever since the UPA-Left parleys were set in motion a year or more ago, the Government, in retrospect, appears to have cleverly settled on the tactics of ‘incremental progression’, helping it to describe a circle which at every point looked like a straight line.

Mark the cleverly and methodically calibrated technique adopted by the Government vis-À-vis the Left. The first few UPA-Left coordination meetings were devoted to the fears of the latter over the Hyde Act and its bearing on the 123 Agreement. The exchange of notes as well as the medley of statements from political and diplomatic establishments of both India and the US resulted in a lot of heat and very little light.

Dialogues of the deaf

Somewhere along the way, the Left was persuaded to let the Government discuss India-specific safeguards in principle at the level of the IAEA secretariat and place them before the Left for coming to ‘findings’, presumably about their acceptability from the point of view of the country’s interest.

The Government went ahead and finalised with the IAEA the scheme of safeguards ready to be taken before the Board of Governors. The Left claims that the Government is committed to giving it an opportunity to have a say on the appropriateness of the safeguards, and that the Government has gone back on it.

In short, the Government could not have done better if its purpose was to kindle the sympathies of the people for a government being painfully squeezed by a political combine exploiting its strength in the Lok Sabha.

It has successfully reduced the series of meetings to dialogues of the deaf, and in the bargain, bought enough time to take the parleys as near the end of its term as possible, with sufficient margin to sew up the technical part of the deal and get the 123 Agreement through the US Congress.

The political climate also in the meantime has changed in its favour, what with the overture of Messrs Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh.

The Prime Minister’s is, therefore, not an ‘offer’ but a notice on where things are heading in the next couple of weeks, regardless of the stand of the Left.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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