Bardhan’s no to Karat’s deadline on N-deal

Insists that govt take ‘sense of the house’ into account and scrap the deal

NEW DELHI: CPI general secretary, AB Bardhan, on Friday contradicted his CPI(M) counterpart Prakash Karat on the December-end deadline for concluding talks with IAEA by saying, “We are not talking about any deadline, we are not talking about any month, day or week.” 

This statement comes a week after Karat said that the Left did not want to destabilise the UPA government due to the India-US civil nuclear deal and agreed to give it time till Gujarat elections. But the government was to halt talks with the IAEA by December end or face polls. “I don’t want to comment on Karat’s comments,” Bardhan said.

Earlier in the day, Karat also revived the bogey of the Third Front.  “We have not yet set any timeframe for the formulation of the Third Front, but efforts are on to forge an alternative based on a common programme and policies,”  the CPI(M) chief  told reporters.

Asked if any deadline was set for the IAEA talks, Bardhan reiterated the understanding between the UPA and the Left that before going to the IAEA board, the government should revert to the 15-member nuclear committee.

“We continue to oppose the nuclear deal. We don’t want the deal to go through. We allowed talks with IAEA. They will have to come back with the text of the agreement. We have agreed that the findings of the committee should be honoured.”

Even as the CPI(M) and CPI continue to just talk tough, smaller Left allies RSP and Forward Bloc are getting impatient. They even suspect that the CPI(M) and the CPI are soft peddling the issue.

Forward Bloc (FB) general secretary Debabrata Biswas told DNA on Thursday that his party would “go straight to Rashtrapati Bhavan and withdraw support to the UPA if it went ahead with talks beyond December.” The FB has only three Lok Sabha members.

Insisting that a majority of lawmakers were against the deal, the CPI supremo asked the government to take the ‘sense of the house’ into account and scrap the agreement. Bardhan said his party would raise this demand at the next meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal. “We do not want the deal. We do not want the deal to be operationalised... There is no doubt about it. Arithmetically, the ‘sense of the house’ (Parliament) is that a majority of members are opposed to the deal,” he said. 

“That being so, the honourable way for the government is to take the ‘sense of the house’ into account. We will emphasise in the seventh (next) meeting of the UPA-Left that this should be taken into account,” Bardhan said.

He added that even after a number of meetings in the last four months Left parties have “failed to convince the government and the government has failed to convince us”.