NEW DELHI, Feb 5: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was mulling on Sunday whether to hold crisis talks with leftwing allies that are angry at his government’s vote against Iran over its nuclear programme and its airport privatisation plans.
“Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is considering calling a meeting of the coordination committee before the parliament session to discuss issues like Iran and privatisation,” a spokesman for Singh’s Congress party, Rajiv Shukla, was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency.
The coordination committee is an interface between the ruling Congress Party and its political allies aimed at helping defuse differences over policy.
Leftwing parties on Sunday called an emergency meeting after which they demanded a parliamentary debate on India’s vote against Iran at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
India, along with the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, was among 26 countries that voted on Saturday to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for its controversial nuclear weapons programme.
India’s vote came despite a meeting between the communists and Singh last week in which the leftists, who are bitterly opposed to India siding with the US against Iran, had urged the government to abstain from voting.
The communists, with 61 MPs, extend crucial outside support to the Singh government.
After their meeting on Sunday, Prakash Karat, chief of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), described India’s vote as “regrettable”.
“The stand taken by India at the IAEA meeting is not in conformity with the pursuit of an independent foreign policy and maintenance of good relations with Iran which is in our national interests,” Mr Karat told reporters.
“We are demanding a full debate in the forthcoming session of parliament ahead of the next meeting of the IAEA in March on what stand India should take in the meeting.
“The (Indian) government should remember that there is no consensus on the issue in the country,” Mr Karat said.
An Indian foreign ministry statement on Saturday said New Delhi had cast its vote in favour of reporting Iran because the IAEA resolution was “well-balanced”.
The resolution put off any UN action against Iran for at least a month, to give time for diplomacy to work before the next IAEA meeting in March.
The Times of India on Sunday said Washington was likely to support New Delhi’s bid to get civilian nuclear technology after India’s vote, which came on a day when a strike by airport employees against the privatisation of airports in Delhi and Mumbai collapsed.
The strike, backed by the communists who are strongly opposed to privatisation, was called off on Saturday after the federal civil aviation minister Praful Patel gave a written assurance that workers would not lose jobs.
The strike left the airports in New Delhi and Mumbai strewn with garbage and battling to operate, although no flights were affected.
Singh met the workers on Friday and asked them to end the action which they had begun two days earlier in the wake of the announcement of successful bids made by private Indian and foreign consortia to upgrade the two airports.
Singh said no jobs would be lost but also made it clear that there would be no going back on the decision to privatise the airports.
Political analyst Rashid Kidwai said despite the government’s snub, the communists were unlikely to bring down Singh’s Congress-led coalition.
The statements by the communists and the government action, Mr Kidwai said, “were part of well orchestrated moves and countermoves”.
“I don’t see any danger of the government collapsing.”—AFP
