Rightward turn

The UPAs decision to get the nuclear deal through by embracing the S.P. marks a strategic rightward shift in Indian politics, with many long-term consequences.

THE United Progressive Alliance governments decision to send the safeguards agreement with the Secretariat of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to its Board of Governors for its approval marks a triumph for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a tragedy for India and for the causes of peace, sustainable energy development and consensual democratic policymaking.

Manmohan Singh single-handedly orchestrated the campaign that made the Congress renege on its commitment to the UPA-Left nuclear deal committee, to take its findings into account before taking this critical step, and resulted in the severing of the UPAs link with the Left parties, which sustained it in power for more than four years.

Manmohan Singh mobilised all the resources he could and drummed up arguments of varying dubiousness for the deal as vital to the national interest and as the last chance to push through an extraordinary arrangement to normalise Indias nuclear weapons and build a strategic alliance with the United States before the George W. Bush administration completes its term. In reality, the deal, as this column has repeatedly argued for three years, is a bad bargain.

Manmohan Singh created a phalanx of hard-core neoliberals who added one more rationale for pushing this bargain in the teeth of the Lefts opposition: breaking with the Left would enable the UPA to rush through a number of free-market measures the government was forced to put on hold, including privatisation and equity sell-offs of public sector companies, dismantlement of labour rights and protections, raising foreign direct investment caps in many sectors, and moves towards capital account convertibility.

Manmohan Singh staked not only his personal reputation but Indias credibility and prestige on pushing the deal through. His obstinacy presented the Congress leadership with a difficult choice: risk losing the Lefts support and face an early election in adverse conditions, including raging inflation, or give up on the deal and save the government. The only way out of this would be to seek support from another source, however shady and unreliable, and ensure the UPAs survival at least for a few months.

The Congress and the UPA opted for this third course in reality, a gamble both because the Samajwadi Party (S.P.) is notoriously undependable and will extract a huge political price for lending its support and because there is no guarantee that the next external steps, including the deals approval by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the ratification of the 123 Agreement by the U.S. Congress, will be completed by the end of 2008.

Sonia Gandhi played a crucial role in making this decision after initially demonstrating a fair amount of opposition to snapping the UPAs vital link with the Left. One can only speculate on the reasons for her doing so, including aversion to any step that might precipitate a crisis in the UPA, excessive defensiveness on foreign and security policy matters, anxiety to keep the Congress election-wary partners such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on board, and the fear of being seen as an obstacle to the promotion of the national interest.

However, the political consequences of the decision should be abundantly clear. The UPAs power-sharing alliance with the S.P. does not represent a mere tactical change. It is a strategic shift from a political alignment with the Left, a bulwark against communalism and a political force which has functioned, in P. Chidambarams words, as the UPAs conscience and influenced its policies in a progressive direction.

Under the shift, the UPA will gravitate towards the S.P., which despite its record of opposing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially in the 1990s, has flirted with or helped the Sangh Parivar in various ways in recent years. If this sounds hard to believe, it bears recalling that during its last spell in power in Uttar Pradesh the S.P. failed to issue the legal notification necessary to prosecute L.K. Advani in the Babri Masjid demolition case, appointed several Sangh Parivar sympathisers and supporters to State commissions and other high offices, made donations to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad for holding a convention, and showered lavish state hospitality upon BJP national council members who met in Lucknow in late 2006.

The S.P. has close connections with all manner of business groups known for sailing close to the wind as well as musclemen. Many of its leaders have skeletons in their cupboards and are vulnerable to pressure. The S.P. makes no secret of its intention to lobby for narrow agendas of certain companies and business groups. It has long been a partisan player in the rivalry between the Ambani brothers and is now promoting the interests of one of them on oil refining, telecom and taxation issues.

Going by its Uttar Pradesh record, the S.P. is likely to push for right-wing economic policies and be largely indifferent to progressive social programmes geared towards employment generation, health care, education, public housing (as distinct from the elite townships promoted by the Sahara Group in that State) and social security. It will demand that the womens reservation Bill be shelved. This orientation may hurt the UPA; it will certainly not help it.

Unlike in the case of the squeaky-clean Left, association with the S.P. might bring the UPA, in particular the Congress, a good deal of embarrassment on issues of probity and integrity in public life. The S.P. has a record of turning against its friends and allies. In 1999, it let down the Congress by refusing to join a broad non-BJP coalition after the first National Democratic Alliance government lost its vote of confidence. Earlier, it very nearly wrecked the Communist Party of India in Uttar Pradesh by raiding its top leadership. In the last week of June, it turned against the Left on the nuclear deal after opposing the deal and a strategic relationship with the U.S. for three years.

Eventually, courting the S.P. could extract a price that may be unbearably high for the UPA and it might consider terminating the arrangement. But then, it might be too late to rescue the UPA certainly so when it comes to entering into a less-than-adversarial arrangement with the Left at least in the short run. With the defection of the S.P. from the ranks of the United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA), this non-Congress non-BJP grouping stands badly weakened to the point of becoming irrelevant unless the Telugu Desam Party performs dramatically well in the next general elections.

True, the UNPA was never a sizeable force with a distinctive political agenda and profile. But the fact cannot be ignored that there existed another pole of attraction besides the Congress, the BJP and the Left, which at least had the potential to evolve into the embryo of a third force or front. That potential has now been greatly weakened, if not undermined.

This represents a setback both for the Left and the Indian polity as a whole. A more bipolar party system is not in the interests of a healthy secular democracy, especially when the Congress itself faces an uncertain prospect. The sad reality is that the Left has lost much of its influence over the UPA. If, as seems likely, the Left suffers an erosion of its parliamentary representation, it will be more isolated than ever before in the past one and a half decades, when it commanded political authority, respect and influence far in excess of the number of its Members of Parliament.

With the shrinking of the Centre-Left space within the political spectrum, the actual centre of gravity will tend to shift rightwards, away from its natural centre. This could lead to a major erosion of the gains made by progressive social and political movements in the recent past and shift the balance of class forces in favour of the privileged classes. This is bad news for Indian democracy, whose mainstay is the underprivileged working people, who have a massive stake in empowering themselves by defending and expanding their rights through participatory processes.

It is far from clear if the nuclear deal will overcome the obstacles it is likely to face in the IAEA, the NSG and the U.S. Congress and be completed by the end of this year. But the domestic losses from the deplorably manipulative processes employed to push it through are likely to prove onerous and durable.