The 19th party congress of the CPM began in Coimbatore on Saturday with clarion calls for a third alternative at the Centre. To be fair, the Left has never been less than straightforward about its first preference for a non-Congress, non-BJP government. But to the extent that a third alternative is a mechanism for meaningful political alliances to reflect the federal character of India’s polity, a question has to be asked. Is such theorising by the Left simply an exercise in obfuscation? Is it not a cover for the Left’s practice these past four years of rejecting the meaningful consensuses that an ideal third alternative coalition is expected to nurture?

This month, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that sixty-odd MPs of the Left had exercised a veto on national policy. He perhaps had the stalling of economic reform in mind. But on the opening day of the party congress, CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat gave a measure of the veto he wields by taking credit for stopping the Indo-US nuclear agreement. The Left has also tied the government’s hands — or the government has allowed its hands to be tied — on reacting to Beijing’s response to the Tibetan protests. That is not an independent foreign policy. On economic reform, it is arguable what the UPA government may have achieved without the Left’s aggressive reservations. But the fact of the Left’s opposition does give UPA leaders reason to argue that they were kept from doing enough to make economic growth faster and deeper. Pressure to non-action is, after all, itself a questionable action.

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