Take a trip back to August 2004. That was a time when the red star twinkled in eyes other than the comrades'. The communists were the "outside supporters" to the Congress-led coalition. Armed by useful numerology and redundant ideology, they wanted a joint policy making forum. The UPA-Left Coordination Committee was thus born. The unwritten guideline was that the blueprint of governance till 2009 would be vetted by the communists, who by then had already undertaken the responsibility as the unofficial conscience-keepers of the UPA quite seriously. The comrades began to enjoy the easy access to 10 Janpath and 7 Race Course Road-and the power without being in power. Oh, they enjoyed the pastas and idlis-that is culinary capitalism with a proletarian flavour-at breakfasts and working lunches and exclusive dinners. Neither UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi nor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tired of indulging the comrades. Even Finance Minister P, Chidambaram, who cleared one foreign direct investment (FDI) proposal after another while earning the Left's wrath, could walk in an out of the meetings flashing just a smile. Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee was a friend who spoke in Bengali-one of the two languages the communists mostly used. So, despite numerous fuel price hikes, FDI liberalisation in civil aviation, telecom and banking and over a dozen joint panel meetings, the Congress and the Left managed to maintain a fine balance.

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WIDENING GAP: Karat says the UPA Government is not going by the NCMP; Sonia

That was before BHEL. In July 2005, exactly a month short of the Coordination Committee's first anniversary, neither partner is in the mood for celebrations. The panel is on the verge of collapse with the CPI, CPI(M), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the All-India Forward Bloc deciding a fortnight earlier to suspend their participation. According to CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat, attending the panel meetings have become "useless" since the Government "anyway takes its own decisions without consulting the Left". This he said in reference to the Union Cabinet clearing the offloading of 10 per cent public equity in BHEL.

Interestingly, Karat's predecessor H.S. Surjeet's exit from the panel has made things look a little different. Surjeet was considered the key peace-maker between the Congress and the Left, and Karat's image as a hardliner may have deterred the Congress from trying to cajole the communists into compromising on BHEL. That may be the reason why Karat's Politburo colleague Sitaram Yechury says, "The Left does not always bark, it sometimes bites."

Sonia had to call the Left leaders over to her residence on July 10 and tell them that she might be unable to persuade the Government to reverse the divestment plan. While Karat and his CPI counterpart A.B. Bardhan tried hard to convince Sonia that the UPA Government should live by the National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP) which rules out disinvestment in profit-making PSUs, Sonia did not relent. "We don't believe in any loss of face for the Congress," says Bardhan. "From time to time, cabinet decisions have been rolled back under pressure from different lobbies." But Left leaders still wonder why-and how-Sonia, who allowed them to take credit for scripting the NCMP, could be so rigid.

A new suspicion seems to have gripped the Left especially with next year's assembly elections scheduled for West Bengal and Kerala, where its main rival is the Congress. Is the UPA chairperson, who also heads the National Advisory Council, trying to hijack the Reds' social welfare agenda which it plans to use in the coming polls? And, is this the real reason for the communist parties loss of interest in the UPA-Left Coordination Committee? Although unwilling to go on record, sections in the leftist camp believe that while the NAC was set up to monitor implementation of the NCMP, these days, the council's growing influence in shaping legislations either on rural employment guarantee or tribal welfare, is giving the Left nightmares.

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SEEING RED: A CPI demonstration in Delhi against PSU disinvestment

With the need to distance itself from the Congress on the eve of the two state elections and also for the 2006 polls in Tamil Nadu, the leftists may have reconciled to an undignified death for the joint panel. For the Congress, a dismantled Coordination Committee could presumably mean lesser interference of the Left in its economic reforms. As for building social infrastructure, the Congress is likely to strengthen the NAC.

But for the Government, the going may get tougher especially if the Left again chooses to take the Opposition's space during the monsoon session of Parliament which opens on July 25. With the BJP fighting its internal problems, it may not be difficult for the leftists to replace it inside and outside Parliament. "The Government has time till July 25 to resolve the BHEL deadlock," says RSP Secretary Abani Roy, adding, "If it does not review its divestment plan, our relationship with the Government will become bitter."

The Left's worries, however, do not end with the UPA's neo-liberal policies. After the signing of the Indo-US defence cooperation agreement on June 27, Mukherjee has become its newest bogeyman. "Before signing the new framework, the defence minister should have consulted the Left leaders. He had the draft and we met on several occasions before he went to the US. Obviously, he did not have the courage to bring it up at the coordination panel," says CPI leader D. Raja.

The Left's objection to the new framework is also on account of the agreement reached between India and the US to intervene in a third nation even without a UN mandate. But it is quite strange that the leftist stalwarts who condemn the Centre for signing the third nation intervention proposal-and also consider Rajiv Gandhi's "interference" in Sri Lanka in 1987 as a glaring example of the nation's failed diplomacy-choose to view his mother Indira Gandhi's initiative to liberate Bangladesh in 1971 as a great strategy. "If India had not helped Bangladesh win the war against Pakistan, our country would have been filled with Bangladeshi refugees," says Bardhan. On foreign policy, the Left still harkens back to that irrelevance called non-alignment.

The alignment of the leftists and the Congress, though, is still relevant to the survival of the Government. The Left draws it power from this reality. The problem is: whenever the comrades exercise this power, governance-and India-suffers a little.

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