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Indexing the gloom, the country’s sensex registered a three percent drop. Political niceties apart, the Left, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the newly formed United National Progressive Front are all against the Prime Minister’s plans and if there is a resolution in Parliament, the government will be voted out. To avert a showdown, Sonia Gandhi, who heads the ruling alliance, cut short her South Africa tour to move the political dice at home. Agencies report that the Congress has already switched to election mode because the time is most favorable for an electoral contest. The BJP is badly splintered and in the two big states it rules, the Left has become either unpopular as in Bengal or weak as in Kerala. In these two states, the Congress is a staunch rival to the Left.

The Left-government honeymoon started with a clear-cut understanding of provisions in a document called the common minimum program (CMP). The Left pretends ignorance of the Prime Minister’s free market initiatives in the early nineties. As all such documents, the CMP spelt out its economic program in general and broad terms aiming to achieve socialist goals with market economics. The CMP does not mention nuclear energy at all. Its civilian nuclear program also commits the country to nuclear disarmament without signing the NPT. If the Left had endorsed the CMP, the objectives were political and not national. A political analyst believed that the Left is impelled by its obeisance to China in opposing the deal.

But the BJP’s opposition has puzzled everyone because it is that party that took the initiative to get President Bush around to consider support for India’s nuclear program despite opposition from American media and Congress. It is during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s tenure that the distance between the US and India began shrinking.

But political and media pundits balked from looking at the crisis from an angle other than the one they had fixed for themselves. If they had even marginally tilted their lenses, they would have found that the confrontation between the government and the Left originates in an urgent need to retrieve credibility that both of them have lost. The truth is that they had agreed to living together not out of love but compulsion, the compulsion to prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition, from returning to power. That is the main adhesive that brought a score of unprincipled parties together in an unviable coalition. None of the smaller parties is conversant with the economics of nuclear power generation or the nuances of international negotiations.

For three years Manmohan Singh lived with taunts that he is not the prime minister but the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi. The best way to disprove this canard is to show he is not at the helm at the mercy of anyone. His readiness to demit office if the deal is not cleared is seen as helping him recover his authority as the head of the government. The Left weakened its position as a corrective by too often threatening to withdraw support but doing little about it. If the Left implements its threat to quit, the result will be a loss of power it exercises without being a part of the government. Therefore, it won’t be farfetched to surmise that both the Prime Minister and the Left are play-acting to make people believe that they matter in their respective areas.

Intimidated by the Left’s Damocles’ sword, the government put on hold several important economic reforms. The Left opposition lacks logic because while it opposes its own country’s nuclear goals, it endorses the Chinese support to Pakistani nuclear ambitions targeting India and does not disapprove of Iran’s nuclear plans.

People are asking if the nuclear energy expansion was the only option, or, even the best option at the moment. Critics of the Indo-US agreement maintain that nuclear power generation in 2005 was 3,310 MW or a mere 2.5 per cent of India’s total power generation capacity which was expected to increase to 10,000 MW by 2015, only 5 to 7 per cent of the projected capacity generation then. Yet, India’s Minister for Power Sushil Kumar Shinde promises to make the country self-sufficient in power by 2012.

Compared with gas, nuclear power would be twice as expensive and as compared to coal it would be one and a half times more expensive. “Therefore, by all counts, nuclear power is the most expensive. India has at least 50,000 MW of untapped hydro electric potential,” experts claim. Sonia Gandhi is back in the capital where her ministers have already prepared a plan to save face by prolonging meaningless parleys with the Left. The Left too has already agreed to the face-saver. The parameters suggest that the party would make conciliatory gestures but the nuclear deal would be treated as non-negotiable and the “prestige and honor” of the Prime Minister would not be “compromised.” In the end, it is neither the government of Manmohan Singh nor the Marxist Left that matters. Experts say the real issue for India is the US Congress. The entire package needs US Congress approval by the end of the year otherwise it could get delayed to 2008 and perhaps beyond.