The messages were loud and clear from both the PM and Sonia Gandhi. There will be no snap polls in February-March, as speculated.
The bottomline is that Congress will not sacrifice its government for nuclear agreement with the US
NEW DELHI: The messages were loud and clear from both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. There will be no snap polls in February-March, as speculated. And the contentious Indo-US nuclear deal has been put on slow-burner in deference to the ``coalition dharma’’.
If these decisions lent themselves to interpretations of a climbdown by the Congress, Gandhi quipped that she was prepared for it because ``that’s the way you will sell your newspapers’’.
From their conciliatory remarks, it was clear that the Big Two of the ruling dispensation wanted to bring the curtains down on the two-month-long drama over the fate of their government. However, the process of reconciliation is not going to be easy after the rigid positions the Congress and the Left have taken on the nuclear deal.
The Congress leaders were answering questions at a leadership summit in the Capital on Friday morning.
Late in the evening, there were discordant notes again. Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi sought to clarify that there was no ``U-turn’’ on the deal. And CPI’s perennially angry leader AB Bardhan commented, ``We will have to see if the (Congress party’s) change of heart is real.’’
According to political analyst and psephologist Yogendra Yadav, what Gandhi and the Prime Minister have succeeded in doing is creating space for a patch-up. ``I don’t know how it will last, which is why I’m still not ruling out a general election in April-May next year,’’ he said.
A senior Congress leader, speaking on condition of anonymity, disclosed that the party needed breathing space to focus on the Gujarat assembly elections. This is the reason it wants to defuse the nuclear crisis, at least till December 23, when the election results will be known.
Although Gujarat is a small state with only 26 MPs in the Lok Sabha, the outcome will be crucial in terms of the impact on the morale of the BJP, which is the Congress party’s chief rival in the battle to lead the next government at the Centre.
The Gujarat polls, therefore, will be a sort of dipstick for the three main political groupings - the Congress-led UPA, the BJP-led NDA and the Left - to test the political climate for 2008 and decide on their next moves.
The Congress has paid the price for the three-month truce by backing off on the nuclear deal for the moment. Realising what it must have cost the PM to backtrack on an issue on which he had staked his personal prestige, Gandhi went out of her way to do confidence building for him. She heaped praises on his performance as PM and said that he was her ``sole’’ choice for the post when she declined to head the government in 2004.
And in a deft balancing act, she extended the proverbial olive branch to the Left, too, by refuting the suggestion that the Marxists were being ``unreasonable’’ in blocking the nuclear deal. ``The Left has a certain ideology. They were merely stating their views,’’ she said.
She said the Congress was not for a confrontation with the Left. ``The coalition dharma is to work together and accommodate each other,’’ she pointed out.
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