The next 18 months

The "spin" in the capital on the government's humiliating about-turn on the Indo-US nuclear deal is that this is only a tactical withdrawal before a fresh attempt is made to get the deal through. Perhaps that is indeed the case, but then again perhaps it is not. What has become clearer over the week-end is that it was the Congress's allies in the UPA rather than the Left who forced Sonia Gandhi's and Manmohan Singh's decision to dump the deal in the interest of saving the government. Thus, it was already known that Lalu Prasad's primary concern in the meetings of the committee set up to discuss the nuclear deal with the Left was that fresh elections should be avoided at all costs "" presumably because he feared that his party would get decimated in Bihar, where rival Nitish Kumar is said to be doing a decent job as chief minister. Similarly, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party has a good number of seats in the Lok Sabha, and was anxious to avoid mid-term elections, in which he and his party may not do quite as well. And now M Karunanidhi, the DMK chief, has told the Indian Express that he too had weighed in strongly against sacrificing the government over the nuclear agreement "" almost certainly because the DMK-Congress sweep of Tamil Nadu in 2004 cannot possibly be repeated.

Those three happen to be the Congress's most important allies in the UPA, and if all three were opposed to fresh elections, then it must be assumed that the Congress had no choice other than to fall in line "" for the simple reason that people it annoys before an election are unlikely to be willing coalition partners afterwards. Quite apart from which, there was no shortage of Congress MPs who preferred to enjoy their parliamentary status for a fifth year, instead of risking all in fresh elections in 2008. It is of course true that the Left parties too would have been losers, certainly in Kerala, where they won all 20 seats in 2004 and where the CPI(M) is now a deeply divided house, and also possibly in West Bengal in the wake of the Nandigram episode. But Prakash Karat is in effective control of his party and thereby of the entire Left bloc, which is more than can be said of the Congress duo. In effect, he was able to play a better game of poker.

But having saved the government and bought an extra year of life, what does the UPA government propose to do with it? The Prime Minister said on Friday that his is not a one-issue government; so what-issue government is it? All that is known to be on the cards just now is a series of spending initiatives, like extending the rural employment guarantee programme to all districts and a pay hike for government employees in the wake of a Pay Commission report. If Parliament manages to function, there could also be new legislation, such as passage of the Bill to give benefits to unorganised workers. The 2008 Budget will almost certainly contain sundry populist measures, and the freeze on petroleum product prices will continue. All this is par for the course in a pre-election year; every government since the early 1970s has tried it "" usually to no effect. And it goes without saying that, although the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said in its first report on India that this country's labour laws are the most restrictive in the world, we can be sure that nothing will be done to set this right. The last thing the Prime Minister must want is another run-in with Mr Karat.