Sonia could steer govt to safety on the N-deal

NEW DELHI: The focus is now firmly on Congress president Sonia Gandhi who is slated to resume talks with the CPM after her return from South Africa on Friday. The CPM central committee meeting has not brought any qualitative improvement on the crisis front, but the Congress camp sees in Prakash Karat’s remarks his party’s willingness to provide the government more time and space for negotiations.

While Ms Gandhi will meet CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury, there are indications that some senior leaders of the Congress and its allies could also be part of the next round of negotiations. After the CPM central committee meeting, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi reiterated his party’s readiness to address all “genuine concerns” of the Left, but indicated that it should be done with an open mind from both sides. “There is no reason to assume that the legitimate concerns (of the Left) will not be addressed. Let us not look at the issues in binary win-lose terms,” he suggested.

Till now, there is no formal signal of either the AICC or the PMO backing out from their no-going-back-on-deal stand. But like many in the CPM, there are influential players in the Congress too, who are still exploring “an honourable way out” for both sides even though there is still no clarity on the contours of a peace formula.

“We can’t say what shape the negotiations will finally take place. But if both the sides agree to give each other more time and space, then don’t underestimate the capacity of the system — both the political and government establishments — to provide entirely new openings,” said a member of the Congress core committee, who has also been part of many recent negotiations with the Left leaders. An equally important Congress leader said, “On delicate situations like this, the negotiations will and can rise above narrow considerations of individual prestige and egos.”

It is no secret that there is widespread feeling both in the Congress and the Left that one of the factors that has made the crisis all the more complicated is the perception that Mr Singh, Mr Karat and AB Bardhan have willingly or unwillingly made it an issue of their personal prestige. While many in the Congress maintained that Mr Singh’s combative interview to a newspaper could have been better avoided, the recent CPM politburo meeting had also witnessed some of its members disproving Mr Karat’s tit-for-tat public reply to Mr Singh.

Apart from the mutual discomfort for facing the uncertainty of an early poll, many senior leaders of both the sides also share one more common concern — the possibility of a mid-term poll producing a much-polarised party line-ups in the Lok Sabha with the possibility of “regional parties holding all major political blocks to ransom”. But if the last-ditch effort also fails to break the deadlock, both the Congress and the Left will strike combative posture with an eye on the elections.