Frankly, you can’t even blame so many leaders of the Left for having become such puffed-up bullies. A B Bardhan and Gurudas Dasgupta, whose party can never even get in the double figures — unless at the sufferance of the CPM — have been holding out threats of withdrawing support to their government once a week. My friend Karan Thapar, in fact, can conjure up national headlines at will — all he has to do is invite a Left leader to the studio. Next day’s front pages are guaranteed with one more threat to pull down this government, to graduate from barking to biting. There was never one word of protest from the Congress. Not even a whimper. Its leaders felt throttled by the NCMP, that self-inflicted Treaty of Versailles.

But, because the Left leadership still thinks their politics through more thoroughly, at least in a tactical sense, the Congressmen were also psyched into believing many myths. One, that the bully hated them so much, and was so reckless, he was going to pull the plug any day. Second, they bought a most cleverly spread canard — supported by the capital’s sizeable Left liberal rent-a-quote intellectual elite — that there was such a wide schism between the Prime Minister and 10, Janpath. That this distance was not just of detail and style, but that of basic ideology. That sometimes Sonia Gandhi — like Indira Gandhi in her street-fighting years — was naturally inclined to the Left and getting as impatient with Dr Singh as M K Pandhe or Gurudas Dasgupta.

... contd.