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Sharad Pawar’s lighthearted advice to Sitaram Yechury in London before last week’s make-or-break nuclear committee meeting was rather telling. Don’t bother rushing back for the meeting, Pawar said when Yechury telephoned him for the news on the crisis gripping the ruling coalition. Nothing is going to happen. Stay back and join the (World Cup victory silver anniversary) celebrations at Lord’s instead, he joked. Pawar’s seemingly facetious remark was actually a hard-nosed assessment of the political mood in the Capital.

On the face of it, the Congress and the UPA were headed for a showdown. But under their tough posturing, both were desperate to buy time. In the end, they pulled back from the brink and postponed the inevitable falling out, exactly as Pawar had predicted.

No one can say how this round of brinkmanship will end. Personality issues have distorted the picture. There’s so much mutual suspicion around that one wonders how the leaders involved sit across the table and talk in a civilised manner. Till the other day, Pranab Mukherjee was the government’s main interlocutor with the Left. But now, AK Antony has emerged as the second string.

He was present at the breakfast discussions Mukherjee had with Prakash Karat on the morning of the crucial June 25 nuclear committee meeting. If Congress circles are to be believed, Antony was brought into the game at the behest of Manmohan Singh to “keep an eye” on Mukherjee.

The government’s worst kept secret is the simmering tension between the PM and his external affairs minister, with camp followers of the former suspecting the latter of trying to usurp the top job with the help of the Left. Yes, it’s that ugly.

The root of the nuclear trouble is really the clash between Manmohan Singh and Prakash Karat. There is obviously no chemistry between them. They provoke each other to fly off the handle and it becomes the unenviable task of those around them to clean up the mess.

You would have thought that as leading lights of the ruling arrangement, they would sit together occasionally to try and work their way around their differing world views. But Karat rarely meets the PM, preferring to leave the unpleasant task of negotiating to Yechury. In fact, they have not met for nearly a year.

Their last interaction was over lunch in November 2007 when the nuclear truce was struck and Karat agreed to let the government start talking to the International Atomic Energy Agency for a safeguards agreement. No-one can quite understand why they set each other off so violently.

True, Karat is ideologically driven but he has mellowed several shades after taking over as general secretary of the CPM. And the PM is essentially a mild-mannered person who has shown admirable flexibility through his journey to the top.

After all, he survived as a bureaucrat through different governments and then successfully made the transition from Narasimha Rao’s valued finance minister to Sonia Gandhi’s most trusted Congressman.

The intransigence they show with each other is, therefore, quite inexplicable. No wonder crisis managers on both sides are on the verge of throwing in the towel.

TAILPIECE
While the government is waging war on Blackberry for its refusal to allow intelligence agencies the right to intercept e-mails, PMO officials are apparently queuing up to exchange their regular mobile phones for the more sophisticated gizmo. Much to the chagrin of intelligence bosses, several officers in the PMO have recently acquired Blackberry phones and are happily shooting off e-mails all over the place. It looks like Big Brother will have to beat a hasty retreat in the face of the new fad that is overtaking the babus.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net