The CPI(M) on Tuesday chose to play down the ultimatum its general secretary Prakash Karat had set the UPA government on the Indo-US nuclear deal
NEW DELHI: The CPI(M) on Tuesday chose to play down the ultimatum its general secretary Prakash Karat had set the UPA government on the Indo-US nuclear deal, saying what he had spoken at a closed-door party meeting was not for public consumption.
On Monday, Karat had told the CPI(M)’s Delhi committee that the party had set a December-end deadline to conclude India-specific safeguards talks with the IAEA or “face mid-term polls”.
“Reports about the ultimatum are not correct. We are waiting for the government to return to the nuclear [UPA-Left coordination] committee,” said politburo member S. Ramachandran Pillai. A national TV channel also reported that Karat has denied issuing any ultimatum.
The meeting (off limits to the media) was covered by CPI(M) channel Kairali and national television channel accessed the footage from Kerala on Sunday.
Even as the Karat’s threats were played on television channels on Sunday night, politburo member Sitaram Yechury, considered a moderator in the party, away in Bhvanagar ( Gujarat) for election campaign, reacted saying the party’s agenda was not to destabilise the government but to stop the nuclear deal.
“We have been opposed to the nuclear deal because it has increased India’s vulnerability to US pressures in various fields, particularly independent foreign policy.
Our agenda is to stop that and not to destabilise the government,” he reiterated.
Party sources said they completely reject the government’s contention that the “sense of Parliament” was not against the deal and external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee’s take that the sense of the House should be taken only after completion of the process.
Meanwhile, minister of state for external affairs Anand Sharma said “there is no deal between the UPA and Left before the Gujarat election as part of which it allowed the Centre to go to the IAEA on talks on India specific safeguards ... Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi can never think of making any compromise on any political expediency.”
“He(Karat) has his own opinion, we have our own,” Sharma told reporters in Shimla.
Government sources said when the Left (last month) allowed the Centre to go to Vienna for talks the understanding was that the government would come back and brief the UPA-Left committee at every stage and the final draft “will not be signed or not even initialed” without the Left concurrence. But there was no mention of any December-end deadline for the exercise.
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