INDIA:A nuclear deal with the US is proving unpopular with 60 leftist MPs, writes Rahul Bediin New Delhi
Communists may be an anachronism in several parts of the world but in India they remain a significant political force influencing the future of the world's largest democracy.
They have played a large role in India's polity since independence six decades ago, ironically at variance with their political muscle, principally because of their relative probity and disciplined cadres amid successive venal, nepotistic and disorganised administrations.
The current political crisis threatening prime minister Manmohan Singh's three-year-old coalition (over a controversial deal it recently concluded with the US) is also spearheaded by 60 communist MPs whose support remains vital to the government's survival.
Some leftist MPs have threatened to withdraw support for the coalition if it insists on pursuing the deal, raising the unwelcome spectre of general elections due in 2009.
The communist allies claim the deal, which aims to lift a three-decade ban on nuclear sales to India to help meet its soaring energy needs, has compromised India's nuclear and foreign policy sovereignty.
The government states it has gained significant advantages from the pact allowing it to retain its atomic arsenal, not sign the non-proliferation treaty and recycle imported nuclear fuel.
After their best-ever performance in the 2004 general elections, the communists with 60 MPs emerged as the principal architects behind Singh's 19-party Congress-led coalition.
Parliament also appointed a Marxist, Somnath Chatterjee, as speaker for the first time.
The communists, however, declined to join the government, choosing instead to support it from the outside.
This renunciation of direct power led to widespread and increasing criticism of the communists for exercising power without shouldering the responsibility of governance and public accountability.
Ruling coalition MPs claimed the communists could easily bring down the government, whenever they choose to do so. But, conversely, staying out of office in a country where political power is supreme and sought after gave the communists the higher moral ground.
"It emerged as a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, with the leftists forcing their will upon the government whenever they wanted their political ends to be vindicated," political analyst Dorab Sopariwala said.
India's communists have ruled the eastern Bengal state for more than 30 years, and sporadically in southern Kerala province and the small northeastern Tripura region bordering Bangladesh, by duplicating Chinese-style reforms, with minor concessions to modernity and free market principles. But they have opposed badly needed labour reform, crucial for India to attract overseas investment to sustain its high economic growth rate, second only to China's.
Leftist labour unions remain powerful across India, especially in the vast public sector.
In Bengal Marxist-backed unions have almost paralysed the state's industrial growth, forcing its once-booming businesses and manufacturing units to either close down or shift elsewhere. Militant unions have also ensured the closure of numerous tea gardens across the province, rendering tens of thousands of people destitute and on the verge of starvation.
But over the past decade, communist administrations have initiated some free market concessions but with a "human face". Claiming no state can "quarantine" itself from the globalised economy, they have selectively welcomed foreign investment provided it augments existing domestic productive capacities, upgrades technology and generates jobs.
On foreign policy, the communists make no secret of their dislike for the US and its capitalist policies which they claim are hegemonic and "self-aggrandising".
They support the Palestinian cause for an independent homeland and disapprove of India's burgeoning security and military ties with Israel which have quietly proliferated despite leftist opposition.
India's Communist party - before it split in 1964 into the Marxists supported by Beijing and the Communist Party of India backed by Moscow - was the world's first to be democratically elected, in Kerala in the late 1950s.
This astonishing event caused widespread alarm worldwide, resulting in the US stepping up its covert, albeit obsessive, anti-communist drive in India. And the communists also supported prime minister Indira Gandhi's Congress Party in the late 1960s, providing credibility to its tottering image.