NEW DELHI: In the new capitalist India, old-line communists are playing the spoiler, threatening to bring down the government over a nuclear energy deal with the US.

The deepening political crisis over the pact came into sharp focus this week with the chief of the UN atomic watchdog agency in India.

Mohamed ElBaradei, whose International Atomic Energy Agency must weigh in on the pact, said on Tuesday he was ready to discuss the agreement whenever Indian officials wished. But “the Indian government will have to take a decision” on when to start negotiations, he said.

It’s a decision on which India’s political future rests, and one that looks increasingly likely to lead to early elections.

The communists are key to the governing coalition’s majority. They say they don’t want an early vote but warn of “serious consequences” if the government, led by the Congress Party, takes the next steps in finalising the deal and opens talks with the IAEA.

The communists argue the agreement could undermine India’s cherished nuclear weapons program and give the US too much influence over Indian foreign policy. But their main objection seems to be simpler — they don’t want to see closer ties between New Delhi and Washington.

The deal reverses three decades of American anti-proliferation policy by allowing the US to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has refused to sign international non-proliferation accords and tested nuclear weapons. In exchange, India would separate its military and civilian reactors, and place the civilian ones under international inspections.Since the technical aspects of the accord were finalised in late July, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly touted its benefits for India’s booming but energy-starved economy, which would gain access to much-needed nuclear fuel and technologies.

But that is not the argument the communists are listening to. They are still hearing statements that Singh, President Bush and others have made repeatedly in the two years since the deal was first conceived, heralding it as the foundation of a new partnership between India and the United States after decades on opposite sides of the Cold War divide.

“We don’t want to be drawn into the American orbit,” said Basudeb Acharya, a top official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

How far they are willing to go to keep that from happening is a question the Congress Party is not waiting for them to answer. It has shifted into battle mode, with its leader, Sonia Gandhi, declaring opponents of the deal “enemies of peace and development.”

“We should join hands to give them an appropriate answer,” she said at a rally outside New Delhi on Sunday.

There are other signs Congress is preparing for early elections. The party recently named Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul, the fourth-generation of the powerful Gandhi-Nehru dynasty, one of its general secretaries. It has also reportedly prepared a pamphlet touting the benefits of the nuclear deal in a country where long power outages are a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people.

The communists, meanwhile, have had a tough year in their traditional strongholds, like West Bengal state. There, at least 26 people have been killed in clashes over plans by the communist-led government to raze farms and build an industrial park.

The communists also do not want to be seen as joining forces with the Hindu nationalist right, which also opposes the deal, and could have trouble selling themselves to voters after bringing down the government over foreign policy independence, analysts say.

That’s led to speculation they will wait to pull the plug until they can seize on a bread-and-butter issue, such as the budget, which is presented to parliament in February.

The political alliance with the Congress party has in many ways served the communists well. Lacking the electoral strength to govern, they have been able to stymie policies they oppose, such as privatising state-run companies and loosening India’s restrictive labour laws.

But they are willing to sacrifice that to take one last shot at stopping the nuclear deal, said Mujibir Rehman, a political science professor at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi.

The communists “want to keep India as one of the major anti-American voices in the world, the way India conducted itself during the Cold War,” he said.

In the meantime, Congress and the communists have set up a committee to examine the deal and possibly reach a compromise. But the effort is widely seen as a ploy by both sides to buy time to prepare for a vote, and Tuesday’s meeting was inconclusive, with both sides only promising to meet again later this month.

India officials have gone out of their way to downplay ElBaradei’s visit, perhaps not wishing to deepen the crisis.

“His visit has nothing to do with the Indo-US deal,” said S. K. Malhotra, spokesman of the Department of Atomic Energy. “It is a goodwill visit and is a long pending one.”

For now, with no talk of the deal on the agenda, the communists have made little noise about the trip, which began Monday in Mumbai. That could change if they believe ElBaradei is holding informal talks with Indian officials when he comes to New Delhi later in the week.—AP