In Karat’s fervid political imagination, India is a helpless object, incapable of standing up to its own interests. History, however, informs us the Congress party has read the world situation right more often than the communists. When India invented non-alignment at the very beginning of the Cold War, our communists said there could be no third way between the East and the West and criticised Jawaharlal Nehru for being a “running dog of the imperialists”. When China invaded India in 1962, the CPM leaders said it was Nehru who was the aggressor. When Pakistan attacked Kashmir in 1965, the CPM said the Indian “bourgeois landlord state” had gone to war to divert attention from domestic crises. It is a pity that India’s new self-confidence as one of the world’s largest economies has not influenced CPM’s carefully cultivated paranoia at all. Karat’s internationalist inanities would have been inconsequential, but for the fact that the Congress has allowed him a veto over the pursuit of national interest.