End of the road?

The UPA and Congress leadership stand isolated. It may save the government for a while but this entire debate, acrimony and all political factors mark the beginning of the end of the UPA-Left accord. Things will never quite be the same again

Raghav Sharma Delhi

The present denouement with the Congress-Left relationship floundering on the rocks and shoals of the emerging strategic relationship between India and the US is a far cry from the heyday of the equation. It is often forgotten that the foundations of the rapprochement of the CPI(M) and Congress, long adversaries, lay in the rise of the BJP to prominence and power. Paradoxically, the allergy of the Hindutva forces to the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi from around the time she took control of the party in 1998, only refurbished her pluralist credentials for the Left. The bonhomie never extended to an electoral accord and as many as 57 of the 61 Left bloc MPs in the Lok Sabha entered the House by trouncing Congress or its allies.

The cleavage was evident the most in matters of economic policy. As was the case of the United Front governments of 1996-97, the Left played the role of spoiler on a host of issues, such as the divestment of shares in public sector units (PSUs). On occasion, as with the case of Neyveli Lignite, a company with a historic role in industrialising Tamil Nadu, it got strong support from a powerful regional satrap, DMK chief M Karunananidhi. More seriously, it joined forces with Sonia Gandhi to push a reluctant administration to enact and implement the far-reaching National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

Yet, the issue on which the glue began to come undone was the texture and tenor of Indo-US relationship. Go back a few steps in time: the Left's close equation with the Congress was reinforced for decades by the willingness of the Congress to engage with the Soviet Union — from Nehru's time. It is difficult today to appreciate how important the opening to Asia meant for a USSR that had been ravaged by war and was isolated from the West during the Cold War. No wonder, in November 1967, among the many foreign dignitaries who stood on the ramparts of Moscow's Red Square was one non-communist: Indira Gandhi. Such ties were renewed afresh even in the Gorbachev period. Rajiv Gandhi struck a special rapport with the reforming leader, with things changing once the USSR dissolved from the pages of history and vanished into the past.

The Indo-Soviet equation complimented the close equation of the pro-Moscow CPI which stuck by Indira Gandhi through the Emergency, an act from which it never quite recovered. The CPM, having maintained 'equi-distance' form both Moscow and Beijing, was always much more wary of the Congress, its principal, even deadly adversary, till the Left took over the ruling space in Kolkata in 1977.

What made all out anti-Congressism more difficult for the Left parties was the equivocal stand of the Congress on the East-West divide through the years of the Cold War. There was never any doubt about the Congress's close links with Indian big business. But it is a measure of how broadminded and open the Left camp is that GD Birla's death brought no less than Fidel Castro to the Indian embassy in Havana on a condolence call. India cultivated close ties with Vietnam even as that country's partisans and soldiers fought US troops to a halt in a bruising land war in Asia. Given such a track record, the Left's anti-imperialism was more than matched by the Congress' own suspicion of the former colonial powers and of their post World War II ally, the US.