By Vinay Kumar
NEW DELHI: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Sunday warned the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government that the country would revolt if it tried to push the India-U.S. nuclear deal in case it lost the trust vote in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.
Asserting that the government and the nuclear deal would be “doomed” on July 22, the day of the trust vote, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat said the UPA government had not only bypassed Parliament but had also gone back on its public pledge that it would go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) only after winning the trust vote.
“We wish to warn this government that in case you lose the trust vote, do not try and push the nuclear deal. The country will revolt,” Mr. Karat told journalists after a two-day meeting of the party’s Central Committee. The CC fully endorsed the decision of the party’s Polit Bureau to withdraw support to the UPA government on July 9.
Maintaining that the struggle against the nuclear deal would continue, he said that one phase of this struggle was the trust vote. He accused the government of “criminal neglect” in tackling price rise and runaway inflation.
Charging the government with public betrayal, Mr. Karat said it had promised that the next step on the safeguards agreement would be taken only after the trust vote. “Instead, we see the spectacle of our officers scurrying to Vienna to try and hustle through the safeguards agreement with the IAEA Board of Governors,” he said.
Attacking the UPA government for taking recourse to “desperate and unscrupulous steps to engineer defections,” Mr. Karat said the Congress and the Samajwadi Party were trying to mobilise the support of unaffiliated MPs using “money power and unscrupulous methods.”
“It is a shame on this government to use the votes of convicted criminals to sustain themselves in power. We had already named three such convicted MPs who are in jail,” he said.
Countering the criticism of the Left parties and the CPI(M) by Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh, he said the SP itself had betrayed the Left in the recent past — in 1999 when the SP facilitated the return of the BJP to power and, in 2002, when Mulayam Singh, as head of the People’s Front, did not support a second-term in office for the then President, K.R. Narayanan, and supported the NDA candidate.
“This time the SP has betrayed over nuclear deal after opposing it on the platform of United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) and speaking against the deal in both Houses of Parliament,” he said.
“Today, the Samajwadi Party, at the behest of the Congress party, is supporting American President Bush. There was a time when Mulayam Singh was giving direction to politics in U.P. Today, he has lost that position and he will have to be accountable to the people, why is he hurling accusations at us?”
Asserting that the nuclear deal was an issue of the Left parties which had put up a struggle against it for the past three years, Mr. Karat said it was not the issue of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which supported strategic relations with the U.S.
“We are fighting this government, it will be politically tackled as more and more democratic and secular forces are coming together with us. There is alignment of forces against the nuclear deal and we are rallying all of them. You have seen results today when at UNPA platform Bahujan Samaj Party, JD(S), Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Left have decided to work together. We will meet on July 23 after the trust vote and decide on our future strategy,” he said.
The party’s Central Committee also welcomed the efforts to bring various non-BJP, non-Congress parties together to fight against the nuclear deal and the UPA government. The Committee also censured Subhas Chakraborty, member of the State Secretariat of West Bengal, for making statements challenging the party line.
- The Hindu, July 21 2008
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