Even before the UPA-Left committee on the Indo-US nuclear deal starts work, the Left parties have struck a sour note by criticising Sonia Gandhi.
NEW DELHI: Even before the UPA-Left committee on the Indo-US nuclear deal starts work, the Left parties have struck a sour note by criticising Sonia Gandhi.
The Left parties have not taken kindly to the UPA chairperson’s comments that the nuclear deal is in “India’s long-term interest”. Though senior CPI(M) leaders have refrained from reacting to her statement, parties like the CPI, Forward Bloc and RSP have said the statements of both Gandhi and Manmohan Singh were not in the right spirit.
In a signed letter published in the Congress journal Sandesh, Gandhi had asserted that the Left parties and the Opposition were apprised of developments throughout the negotiations with the US. Gandhi congratulated the Prime Minister and his team of “able negotiators” for hammering out the “historic” 123 agreement to operationalise the deal.
A day earlier, the Prime Minister, speaking at a function in Tarapur, had made a strong pitch for the nuke deal, saying India could not afford to miss out on a “nuclear renaissance”. He said the “India-US deal will help double nuclear power to 40,000 mw by 2020.”
The CPI leader in the Lok Sabha, Gurudas Dasgupta, said on Sunday that when a mechanism was being set up to study the merits of the deal, the comments of the Prime Minister and the Congress president were uncalled for. “We don’t appreciate either the Prime Minister’s or Sonia Gandhi’s remarks. We consider them unreasonable,” he said, adding, “this is not in good spirit when the talks are on and when we have decided to set up a committee to study the implications of the deal.” The committee is expected to be constituted on Monday.
Dasgupta also disputed the UPA chairperson’s assertion that the Left was consulted before the deal was finalised. The Forward Bloc general secretary, Debabrata Biswas, cautioned the Congress president against “misrepresenting the agreement”. He added: “We are not surprised. We are aware of the Congress regime’s policy of the last three-and-a-half years.”
RSP leader Abani Roy said he had had his “apprehensions about the Congress’ intentions from the very beginning and that’s why we were not keen on the mechanism to solve the dispute.” The Forward Bloc chief said his party was not “very hopeful” of a breakthrough in the dispute with the UPA despite the formation of a committee to consider the Left’s objections.
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