Sense of the House

With the BJP and CPM signalling they will not let facts come in the way of their posturing, no substance was expected from the parliamentary debate on India’s civil nuclear initiative with the United States. No other external negotiation in independent India had been conducted in such a transparent manner and in the full gaze of the public eye. Experts have debated the technical issues for more than two years, and concluded that the deal is a rare strategic opportunity for India and that New Delhi must seize the moment. Yet the leader of opposition, L.K. Advani — we have lost count of his flip-flops on the issue — feigned concerns about India’s future options on testing nuclear weapons; Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pretended to answer them by thundering about India’s sovereign right to test.

Silly questions — after all no one can stop a rising India from testing if it wants to — are an invitation to soaring rhetoric from across the aisle. If nuclear opportunism has become BJP’s pathological condition, all the interesting political questions are about the communist allies of the UPA. To wit, how contorted might CPM’s verbal calisthenics be after the political fiasco in Nandigram? That the CPM leader Prakash Karat had morphed from a roaring lion into a grumbling pussy cat has been evident since he let the government begin the safeguards negotiations with the IAEA earlier this month. In Parliament, the CPM MPs made all the usual noises, but the spirit has evaporated from the CPM’s attacks and it was quite evident that it has no option but to pull its nuclear punches.

The biggest outcome from the nuclear debate this week is the falsification of the Karat-Advani thesis that the majority opinion in the Parliament is against the nuclear deal. Once the comrades from Kolkata revealed their fear of general elections, other regional parties are in no doubt that the Congress has finally called the communists’ bluff on pulling down the government. No wonder, then, many of UPA allies, including the DMK and RJD, and many of its adversaries, including the Samajwadi Party, have switched from opposition to either neutrality or support on the deal. It is about time the UPA stopped looking over its shoulder and started acting on the deal. That the Congress chose to field some of its younger MPs in Lok Sabha on Wednesday is a welcome sign that the somnambulant party is waking up to discover that it indeed might have a political spine.