The impasse between the UPA Government and its Left allies over the Nuke Deal seems to have come to a sudden end with an apparent climb-down by the Congress; for the time being the Government seems safe and the prospect of mid-term polls seems to have receded. The US-led nuclear establishment, the Congress and the UPA Government – all have made a dramatic turn-about in their stance. Will they ever come clear on this sudden nuclear somersault?

Last month, the US Ambassador was admonishing India saying “Time is of essence.” Now, we have IAEA chief El Baradei telling India to take its time, since there is no timeframe to operationalise the deal. The PMO had said time and again that Manmohan Singh was willing to stake his credibility and the life of his government on the deal –but now the PM himself has said with philosophical resignation that there are issues beyond the nuke deal, that if the deal falls through he will be disappointed but “one has to live with disappointments and move on.” Just a few days before this change of stance, Sonia Gandhi had declared that opponents of the Deal were enemies of development. But now she has said that the Left must not be castigated as anti-national; they had their ideology which must be respected in the interests of “coalition dharma.”

What lies behind this dizzying volte-face? As far as the UPA partners are concerned, the decision to halt the operationalisation of the deal seems to have been prompted by the fear of early elections. From Lalu Prasad to Karunanidhi to Sharad Pawar, all UPA partners who had been loudly advocating the deal appear to have developed cold feet over the prospect of facing a poll in the next few months. Despite optimistic projections regarding the outcome of early elections, the Congress too has perhaps developed second thought. But how can the fear of elections sink in so suddenly prompting a go-slow approach on the deal? If from a fast forward mode the government now seems to be prepared to press the pause button for some time, this is surely happening not against the wishes of the Bush administration and the American nuclear establishment. Indeed the White House and leading US Administrators like Nicholas Burns have said that they respect India’s coalition democracy and are confident that the deal will go through eventually. Why did the American side become ready to change its timetable?

Instead of being taken in by the rediscovered rhetoric of coalition dharma and victory of Parliament, the democratic opinion in India must keep a close watch on the American version of the story and reckon with the threat of a sudden revival of the deal at an opportune political moment. Negotiations leading to nuclear deals and strategic agreements usually remain shrouded in mystery and we must not believe simplistically that the deal has been dumped. The strategic pause in the public eye will be accompanied in all likelihood by “track-II” negotiations behind the scenes, and a fait accompli will be presented at a more opportune political moment. In fact, it is not even the process of pursuing the Deal that has been “paused”; it is rather the intensified debate over India’s strategic autonomy and energy and foreign policies that the rapprochement between the CPI(M) and the Congress seeks to “pause.”

It is interesting to note how some representatives of the UPA-Left partnership have now begun to liken the UPA experiment to the NDA model. It is being argued by some that if the BJP was willing to shelve its key Hindutva agenda in the interests of running the NDA coalition government, Congress should surely be willing to put its pet Nuke Deal on the shelf in order to accommodate the Left and keep the UPA Government afloat. The fact is that during the NDA regime, the Hindutva agenda of saffronisation and communal violence were both aggressively pursued; the BJP’s lip service of not foregrounding Hindutva was merely a fiction to allow its partners to make the alliance palatable to their constituencies. In this instance too, the “climb-down” by the Congress on the Nuke Deal will only serve to camouflage the fact that the Nuke Deal as well as other anti-people, pro-imperialist foreign and economic policies will continue unhindered.

Pressure must therefore be intensified for a complete scrapping of the deal, dismantling of the entire architecture of India’s strategic partnership with the US and reversal of the very course of pro-imperialist foreign and economic policies. The UPA and its Left partners must be feeling happy and relieved with their new-found face-saving formula, the country must insist on clear and consistent democratic answers to all the questions that have been thrown up by the nuke deal debate.