The Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement was the fulcrum on which the relationship of the Congress with the Samajwadi Party see-sawed. But it was Mayawati, more than the Left, that forced UPA to change its partner

Although Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh’s “friendship” with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes back over a decade and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav had been playing peacemaker between the Congress and the SP for months, it was only on June 24 that Congress President Sonia Gandhi finally decided to forget the past.

On that day, say highly placed Congress sources, she called Digvijay Singh, AICC General Secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh, and state unit president Rita Bahuguna Joshi to her residence, asking them what they felt about the Congress tying up with the SP. She told them that this was necessary in the face of the Left’s intransigence on the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had already withdrawn support from the UPA Government.

A week earlier, on June 18, when the PM decided to postpone the ninth meeting of the UPA-Left mechanism on the deal, scheduled for June 25, he had called up the Congress President to explain why the Government was compelled to defy the Left and go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to confirm the India-specific safeguards agreement.

On the eve of that meeting, therefore, Sonia was already bracing up for the inevitable break with the Left. Digvijay Singh and Joshi backed their president’s plan. While Digvijay Singh flew to Mali the next day to attend a conference, Joshi went to Lucknow to elicit the views of state Congress leaders; she reported back to the high command in the affirmative a few days later.

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