PRAGOTI

We are in for challenging days ahead. The struggle has to be three-pronged-against subordination to the empire, against the effects of such policies which result in economic distress of the people like inflation and against communal attempts to divide our people. But as history has shown -- Left-- articulating those concerns--- can never be isolated.

In a dramatic fortnight, the parliamentary arithmetic in India has been manipulated in a manner that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by prime minister Manmohan Singh is now able to muster enough support more or less to push through its pet project: the Indo-US nuclear deal. What has changed between now and a fortnight ago is merely one factor — the sudden volte face of the Samajwadi Party which boasts of 39 members of parliament on the issue of the nuclear deal. From having excoriated the government for having betrayed the nation's independent foreign policy on the nuclear deal, today, the SP has come out in support of the deal. What explains this shift?

THE clamping down of internal emergency on June 26, 1975 and its operation over the next 19 months represents one of the darkest periods in the political history of India. For all practical purposes, the Indian Constitution was kept in suspense, parliamentary democracy was trodden brutally underfoot, and an authoritarian rule proclaimed. Three decades onward to that malevolent episode, the importance of carrying forward the struggle to safeguard democracy has to be realised in the proper perspective of what had happened thirty years ago.

This article was written by Anil Biswas in People's Democracy on June 26, 2005.

Srinivasan Ramani observes that on the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal, the ruling coalition seems stuck in a cleft between honouring ego- after all, the government had considered the nuclear deal to be a grand achievement and a prestige issue- and remaining pragmatic. Cartoon, courtesy, The Hindu newspaper