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.

Many of the parties the Left would see as part of a third alternative are political parties currently in the UPA. By keeping — and being allowed to keep — the centre of gravity in policy-making outside the alliance, the Left has been extraordinarily impatient with coalition consensuses. This is why the yearning for a third alternative as a way of distancing the communist parties from the UPA’s record of governance is extremely unconvincing.