The Indian Express

: It is now up to Congress President Sonia Gandhi to choose between securing India’s nuclear future and surviving in power for a few more humiliating months as an abject subaltern of her communist partners. Once India’s scientific community satisfied itself on the technical aspects of the civil nuclear initiative, the outstanding questions have been entirely political. Yet, the Congress leadership, unwilling to bite the political bullet, has persisted with the charade of negotiations get the communists to support the culmination of a national effort, undertaken by all governments over the last three and a half decades, to end India’s extended nuclear isolation.

Anyone slightly familiar with the political record of our communists, who have never been part of mainstream Indian thinking on foreign policy, or with the ideological blinkers of CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat, would have known that the negotiations with the Left were a fool’s errand. Although the civil nuclear initiative was about resuming cooperation with all the major countries in the world, including the United States, Russia, France and Japan, the CPM had convinced itself that the nuclear deal is about “surrendering India’s foreign policy autonomy” to Washington. It is symptomatic of the Left’s inability to understand national interest in a non-polar world. If the communists have unerringly misread India’s foreign policy interests, it is refreshing to see Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal own up forcefully to the UPA’s most significant foreign policy initiative. It is a sign of the deepening of federalism. Regional parties are not meant to keep their place in coalitions at the Centre just to win endorsement of their local political agendas.

The good news from the cancellation of the talks on Wednesday is that the Congress now has to face up to the fact that the comrades cannot be persuaded. The bad news, however, is that there may be yet another round of consultations next week. This only suggests that Sonia Gandhi is not ready to call the communists’ bluff. Having wasted months of valuable time amidst rapidly shrinking international deadlines for the implementation of the nuclear deal, she has no more room to temporise. She can either condemn the Congress to a permanent political bondage to the Left or reinforce the Congress’s claim to being the real custodian of India’s national interest. The time for pleading incremental concessions from the Left is long past. There is no scope for ambiguity. Now on, the Congress either stays with the civil nuclear initiative or ditches it.

editor@expressindia.com