If the BJP was unprepared to put the national interest above the egotism of its leaders, who were sour that the Congress was taking credit for an initiative they had launched, the CPM’s very definition of national interest has always been out of sync with that of the national mainstream.

Unlike the Congress, which laid the foundation for a nuclear weapons programme and exercised the option in the late 1980s and the BJP which conducted the tests in May 1998 and declared India a nuclear weapon power, the CPM has consistently opposed India’s nuclear weapons programme. For the party, the communist nukes in Russia and China were ideologically kosher, but the Indian nukes were “impure”. The communists were the only major national political formation that denounced India’s nuclear tests in May 1998.

Only the very naive in the Congress can assume that the communists can be brought around to accepting the nuclear initiative through the charade of a committee process. Insofar as CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat is concerned, the safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency is dead on arrival. His concerns are ideological; he has no time for the technical trivia that have so transfixed the textualists in India.

Ever since the CPM rejected the carefully crafted 123 agreement last August, the choice before the Congress was simple: should it risk the withdrawal of communist support to the government or celebrate a rare diplomatic triumph? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh answered this question one way, when he told the Left to “take it or leave it”. A few weeks later, Congress President Sonia Gandhi changed the answer.

... contd.