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This is an archive article published on May 17, 2004

Left defers decision, likely to avoid any compromise

Even as the Left parties deferred the decision on joining a Congress-led coalition till tomorrow, there were clear indications that the CPI(...

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Even as the Left parties deferred the decision on joining a Congress-led coalition till tomorrow, there were clear indications that the CPI(M) would not join such a government and that the CPI will toe the line to keep Left unity intact.

‘‘We will make the announcement by tomorrow morning. The CPI(M) has decided against joining (the government), we are consulting them tomorrow. We will also not join to keep the Left united,’’ said a senior CPI leader, late in the evening.

This was even after the Left parties, including the Forward Bloc and the RSP, extended their letters of support to the Congress and chose Sonia Gandhi as the coalition’s prime ministerial candidate at meeting at 10 Janpath.

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The issue of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) of the new coalition too seems to have been amicably resolved. The Congress’ key economic policy experts Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee will draw up the first draft of the CMP, which will be circulated among the allies and the Left parties.

‘‘We will give our inputs on the Congress draft, before it is finalised. We have agreed to that,’’ CPI leader D. Raja said.

Earlier in the day, the pros and cons of joining a Congress-led government was hotly debated at the CPI(M)’s Central committee and the CPI national executive meetings. The majority opinion in the CPI(M) CC seemed to have drifted away from participating in the government from within.

Even on bread-and-butter issues, the remote possibility that a pure Left agenda can be maintained is what goaded them to veer to a convenient perch outside the government. ‘‘This way we can influence the policies and not be party to compromises,’’ a senior CPI-M leader admitted.

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According to this view, a position outside government would leave the Left enough moral leverage to lapse into maximal positions on contentious issues. This would also help keep the cadres in battle-readiness in ‘frontline’ states like Kerala and Bengal, where Congress is the rival.

This orthodox view was being pushed in the CC by Kerala leaders S. Ramachandran Pillai, V.S. Achuthanandan, Pinarayi Vijayan, supported by a hardliners in the West Bengal and central units.

It became clear today that the Left Parties would prefer to retain their ideological stances on issues like disinvestment, labour reform, strengthening of public and private sector, revival of PDS system, education, and, finally the scrapping of the ‘‘unscientific and irrational’’ interlinking of rivers.

‘‘There is no urgency on drawing up a common minimum programme, if we are not participating in the government,’’ a senior CPI-M leader had said, earlier the day. A line that was reiterated by CITU and women leaders before they entered the arena of debate — the CC meeting.

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However, such posturings will only be to the extent that can be resolved in a sustainable framework — there is no question of them pushing the Left agenda at the cost of the government’s survival.

A compromising tone was visible in the CPI’s foreign policy formulation which called for ‘‘friendliness to all countries’’ rather than out-an-out anti-Americanism.

A unorthodox view — voiced mainly by Harkishen Singh Surjeet, Jyoti Basu and Somnath Chatterjee — is still holding out. They are in favour of participating in the government for influencing policy and chiefly to lend stability to this experiment and thus keep the BJP out.

Basu was, however, non-committal saying, ‘‘We are discussing the issues.’’ Chatterjee merely said the party has its own way of arriving at an opinion.

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