Seeking to move on the nuke issue

The last act of the political drama between the Congress-led government in India and the Left parties which support it in power has begun to unfold. Slowly and definitely, the Congress leadership is beginning to attack the Left, some even taking the fight into the Left bastion in Kerala.

All the signs are that once the current budget session in Parliament is passed in May, the Congress could make its last stand. After months of frustrated straining at the Left's leash, it seems as if the Congress can hardly wait any longer to announce that it will go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Of course, all the current protestations by senior Congress leaders, led by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, are to the contrary. In the last week itself, Mukherjee has told several journalists that the government will continue to persuade the Left over the need to go ahead with the nuclear deal. Mukherjee has stressed that no minority government can ever undertake any major policy initiative and expect to survive, indicating that if the Congress intends to go through with the deal, it cannot expect to stay in power for another day.

Still, if you carefully look through the smokescreens that are carefully being planned by the Congress over the next few weeks, the party's strategy becomes as clear as day. By May 9, when the current budget session ends in Parliament, it is clear that the government will not do anything that will even remotely destabilise itself. It needs the Left to help pass the Finance Bill - all the monies that must be spent by the government over the next year - and without their support, the government is as good as gone anyway.

Cruellest month

It is after May 9, that the possibilities become completely delicious. For a start, May is the cruellest month in India, the heat competing with the Olympic code to touch ever higher, stronger and faster heights. By now, the dust-laden winds, locally called the "loo", have also begun to blow in from the nearby Thar desert in Rajasthan.

Anybody who lives in and around the desert will testify to the debilitating effects of heat and dust over the physical and spiritual morale of the population. That is precisely why, it is said, the scientists and the politicians decided to conduct India's nuclear tests in May, exactly ten years ago, in the depth of the Pokharan desert.

The shifting winds and the imprecise effect these winds have on the waxing and waning moon are capable of throwing entire battle formations out of gear. You can argue that this isn't 326 BC when Alexander invaded India and through a combination of guile and might overthrew the much larger, but much more corpulent forces of the Indian king Porus.

You could argue that this is the 21st century, and there are enough satellites in the sky to see through the machinations of both mice and men.

And still, in the depth of the Indian Thar desert on May 11 and 13, 1998, the Indian scientists waited, biding their time and dates with history. The American satellites were said to have just finished swinging away from their pre-determined path over the Indian subcontinent and moved into another section of the orbit. In fact, they had picked up the increased activity around the Pokharan nuclear test site, including the fact that an unusually black hole was being dug.

But by the time, the satellite information had been examined and concluded by American engineers lower down the food chain, that is at home-grown earth stations, Buddha had already smiled again (a reference to the fact that the nuclear tests had been conducted on the day of his birth in 1974 and in 1998), the desert had been stirred and the world, shaken.

And so it could be this year in May 2008. Whether or not the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government is going to challenge the Left parties with pulling down his government by going ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal, is a question that is best answered either by the astrologists or by Manmohan Singh himself.

Populist budget

As of now, let the facts speak for themselves. For the first time in the past four budgets, the Congress-led budget has allocated a whopping Rs600 billion (Dh58 billion) towards waiving farm loans for small and marginal farmers. Many have dubbed this a populist move, others have argued that the newfound adoption of governance-with-a-human-face announces a tolling of election bells.

Both arguments are probably true. Congress leaders as well as political analysts agree that whether the party goes to the polls this year or by May 2009, when its mandate officially runs out, is immaterial. Imagine, if the Congress grabs the political initiative from under the Left's nose and goes to the people, arguing that the Indo-US deal is actually in favour of the country and that it will not let the Left parties hold the nation to ideological ransom?

So what does one make of Mukherjee's public denials of this exact, same question? Fact is, Mukherjee's statements are bald statements of fact and cannot interpreted for or against the government's determination to go ahead with the deal. If it wants to go ahead, it can always argue that Mukherjee's statements only reflected the government's thinking at the time.

If, however, the UPA government intends to stick by the Left and has decided to junk the nuclear deal, then Mukherjee can be hailed as a remarkably prescient man of our times.

Either way, over the last few days, the UPA government seems to have shaken off the air of miserable resignation, and seems to be going about its work like someone with a sense of mission.

Waiting and watching this space is something both journalists and readers have now been condemned to.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph newspaper, India.