With confused signals coming from all quarters, the Congress — like the Left and the BJP — is looking ahead to the proposed nuclear debate in the winter session of Parliament that begins this month. Here, too, there appears to be miscommunication between the government and the party. It seems that the government was for a sense of the House resolution, after which the former would approach the IAEA for a safeguards agreement. But what has apparently been communicated to the Left and the BJP is that the government wants to take the sense of the House through a debate and not through a vote.

In the midst of all this there are murmurs that the BJP may provide relief to the government by siding with the Congress on the deal in the national interest. If this were to happen, it would open a new and a welcome chapter in Indian politics — but the fact is that this is just wishful thinking. BJP President Rajnath Singh was clearly given the party line by Opposition leader L.K. Advani after the latter appeared to give a signal of flexibility on the deal. The party line was underscored at a meeting between Advani and Henry Kissinger, who expressed his apprehensions on Indo-US relations taking a downturn if the deal was to be junked.

To make matters more complicated, those in the government who wanted to approach the BJP for a broad consensus did not get the political go-ahead from the Congress. For the BJP, the debate only provides them with an opportunity to distance their position from the Left oppositional stance, lampoon the PM and the Congress president on statement rollbacks, and clarify their stand to middle India.

... contd.