There is another, purely political and electoral factor. No party can afford to go to the polls with its prime minister bloody-nosed, punch-drunk and humiliated. India’s electoral history on this is unequivocal. Each time a prime minister has been diminished and humiliated, from Chandra Shekhar to Gowda-Gujral, the incumbent party, or political coalition, even its outside supporters, have been thrashed. Similarly Sitaram Kesri’s destruction of Gowda and Gujral (both supported by the Congress from outside) brought the BJP into power. In the fifth year of your government if you go to the voters and say you dumped your prime minister because he was “apolitical” and too unbending, you do not need any psephologists to predict the result. Incumbents have such a low probability of returning to power anyway, but none has ever won after humiliating and diminishing its own chief executive in an election year.

You do that, and you play straight into the hands of L.K. Advani’s charge of Manmohan Singh being India’s weakest prime minister ever. You do that and all the other stories and evidence will tumble out of the closet. Of how so many of his cabinet colleagues, from Arjun Singh to Ramadoss, from Antony now (behaving like the chairman of the confederation of the armed forces’ trade unions) to Ram Vilas Paswan have been allowed to walk all over him. His critics, mainly cynical Congressmen who cower at the thought of the next election, may call it his obsession. But every voter now knows that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has chosen to make this nuclear deal the cornerstone of his five-year legacy. If you allow short-term greed to thwart him, the voter will either conclude that the prime minister was our weakest ever, and that Advani is right, or that this party traded his head and reputation in exchange for a couple more months in power.

... contd.