CPM general secretary Prakash Karat on Friday joined issue with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen for accusing the Left of neglecting matters of social justice and focusing more on the Indo-US nuclear deal. The CPM top boss said Sen’s observations are “simply not true” and cited the various interventions made by the Left on such issues during the time it supported the UPA government and later.

While Karat sought to prove Sen’s observations wrong in an article in the latest issue of People’s Democracy, the tone was friendly as he made it clear that the Left was “indebted” to the noted economist for his “insights into the nature of inequality and injustice in the society and the system” and valued his analysis and prescriptions to deal with these basic problems.

He contested Sen’s observations that the Left parties neglected issues of hunger, malnutrition and illiteracy and focused more on the nuclear deal and the defence of national sovereignty. “This is simply not true,” he said, adding that a look at the record of the Left would confirm that it consistently took up issues of food security, PDS, NREGA, impact of WTO rules on agriculture, land rights for tribal people and the need for greater allocations for health and education in Union budgets.

Karat also referred to the UPA-Left Coordination Committee meetings, which he said were “dominated by economic policy issues and the question of implementation of the pro-people measures in the common minimum programme”, and mentioned the 20 notes submitted by the Left to the committee on various matters of social justice to back his argument.

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