With the Left parties deciding to focus on political issues along with economic, Home Minister Shivraj Patil is likely to be on target at the next UPA-Left coordination meeting.Though the four Left partners haven’t insisted so, they want Patil to be at the meeting when they raise the issues of Manipur and Kashmir after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returns from the US.For some time now, the Left has been critical of what they believe is the government’s ‘‘mishandling’’ of the Manipur situation. It is worried that the BJP might try to exploit the UPA Government’s inability to give direction to the Kashmir dialogue process. The CPI(M) has already explained that it wants to play a constructive role and would like to put forward its views on some crucial political issues.As the four parties met this afternoon, the issue of airports’ FDI caps made a comeback on the Left’s list of priorities. Earlier, differences with the CPI on the airports privatisation issue had prevented the other three Left constituents from including it in its agenda. Last time, the Left parties had agreed that they had not been able to come to a consensus on the airports FDI caps issue. Now it seems the hesitant CPI has fallen in line with the CPI(M) that the hike in FDI caps in the two airports of Delhi and Mumbai needed to be resisted.
