This summer the UPA government staked its future on the Indo-US nuclear deal by submitting itself to a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha. Given the deft political manoeuvring this required and the audacity of the gambit, one would think it would have made it an election issue in the recent assembly elections. It did not. Neither did the opposition, for reasons that are obvious. The argument for the deal has been so decisively won that there is seen to be little purchase in running a campaign around it. It was more than mildly surprising, therefore, when the CPM chose to revert to the deal and connect it to India’s increased vulnerability to terrorist attack. In a parliamentary debate on Thursday given in most part to engaging, if not always consensual, submissions on the Mumbai terror attack, the party struck a ludicrous chord by suggesting that India’s strategic alliance with the US has brought upon this country greater threat from the

Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

The CPM has often tripped on its ideological obsessions. But this time it does so, presumably to its embarrassment, in the glare of strong contrary facts. Even as the party was invoking the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, India’s diplomatic efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice were bearing results. The UN Security Council declared the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a fraternal organisation of the already banned Lashkar-e-Toiba, a terrorist group. Pakistan, in turn, acted upon this and banned the JuD, and put the LeT chief under house arrest. Details of the Pakistani origins of the ten Mumbai terrorists had already been released by Indian agencies, in part corroborated on Friday when Dawn, a prominent Pakistani newspaper, printed an interview with one terrorist’s parents in their village in Pakistani Punjab.

... contd.