Bark And Bite

It's one of those curious paradoxes of the Left's relations with the Manmohan Singh government: a day before CPI(M) politburo member Sitaram Yechury issued his dire public warning—that the Left could soon "stop barking and start biting"—he was in fact closeted with one of the PM's aides. Manmohan, anticipating the Left's reaction to his finance minister's budget proposals on hiking foreign investment in key sectors like insurance, telecom and civil aviation, sent an emissary to the CPI(M) headquarters in Delhi to try and gauge their mood. Yechury reportedly assured the official that the Left parties would make no trouble if the government managed to pass the bill without their support. And having allayed the prime minister's fears, Yechury then went to town about what the Left parties could do if the government dared take them for granted.

The warning, reiterated by other senior Left leaders, was serious enough for Manmohan to step in personally. He held a 45-minute meeting with CPI(M) general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet, launching on a war footing what PMO sources call his new "economic diplomacy". No more telephone consultations with Left leaders, were the new orders from the PMO. On Manmohan's urging, finance minister P. Chidambaram held his first personal meeting with Yechury and another senior CPI(M) leader, Prakash Karat. Then both Manmohan and Chidambaram met CPI national secretary D. Raja. Another key aide, deputy chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, was dispatched to West Bengal to meet chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Even Left intellectuals began to be aggressively wooed: both Chidambaram and Ahluwalia held meetings with Left economists Prabhat Patnaik and Abhijit Sen.

"Left management" boiled down, according to PMO sources, to "ego management". As one PMO aide said, "The Left parties not only need to be consulted, but they need to be seen to be consulted." A need, some say, that Chidambaram has been too slow to perceive. Instead of heading, for instance, to the Left leaders to seek their approval after presenting his budget, the finance minister declared that he was confident of "convincing the Left". He appealed instead to the cii and ficci "to address some of our friends in the Left parties to convince them". Points out one PMO official: "It's only the prime minister who is trying to build bridges between his ministers and the Left parties. He is trying to convince his colleagues that you can go a long way with dialogue as far as the Left is concerned."

But the Left parties seem hardly mollified. "Who is Montek Singh Ahluwalia to meet the West Bengal chief minister?" asks an irate Raja. "Does he think the chief minister will fold his hands and bow before him because he thinks he is the distributor of funds? We will redefine the role of the Planning Commission if necessary." Interestingly, the Left on its part is also trying some "UPA management". According to Raja, the only reason Left leaders agreed to meet Chidambaram was to make their stand clear. "We understand where he stands and now he understands where we stand, but he can't decide by himself. After all, ministers don't just fall from the skies, they belong to political parties," says Raja. "And the only dialogue possible is what we suggested: to set up a steering committee where all policy changes, especially those that deviate from the CMP (common minimum programme), can be regularly thrashed out at the highest level." Seizing the present crisis as a pretext, the Left is pushing for a deadline on setting up the committee. It has already submitted its list of members: CPI(M)'s Surjeet and Yechury, CPI's A.B. Bardhan and Raja, RSP's Abani Roy and Forward Bloc's Debabrata Biswas. "Who they choose on their side is up to them, all we are asking is that it should be at an apex level," says Raja.Biswas spells out what exactly "apex level" means: "It must include both Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh".

The government is none too eager to implement a mechanism which augurs nothing but trouble from an ally who refuses responsibility but insists on power. But as Biswas explains, "It's not as if we are going to be knocking on ministers' doors everyday. Every file won't be coming up to the steering committee." Agrees Raja: "It's only for policy matters. The Congress will have to be realistic. In a coalition dependent on Left support, it has to adhere to the CMP."

As for influencing government policy from the outside, he asks: "Why shouldn't we?" The Left, as he points out, "is part of the political system. With 62 MPs, it represents a considerable chunk of it. We have a right to protest when the government takes major policy decisions without consulting us. We are not hankering for power or acting out of self-interest."

It's precisely for these reasons that the UPA government finds its Left ally so hard to manage. "The nature of Left pressure is different from other political parties," admits a PMO aide. "They can neither be won over with perks or packages, if it is about serious issues." Left management, in other words, consists in passing only those laws which have their prior approval. But luckily for the government, of the three issues that have raised the Left's ire, only the insurance sector requires legislation. The others may never come up in Parliament, needing only an executive order. Moreover, as the PMO source explains, "Most of the macro reforms are already in place. What remains is reforms at the state level, reforms in education, power, health, rural development, roads, water—all these are state subjects in which the Centre can't do much." Nor, of course, can the Left do much to block them.

Matters may look—and sound—grim between the two allies. But like Yechury, Biswas hastens to reassure the UPA that it has no reason to fear trouble from the Left. "We are the easiest ally to deal with. The Congress is in a coalition government for the first time but they will slowly realise it." It's a realisation that is beginning to dawn upon Manmohan and his ministers: that the Left's bark, despite its menace, is worse than its bite.