N-deal: All eyes on farmers' rally

With tension between the Left parties and the Congress running high afresh on the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement, all eyes are now fixed on the 9 March rally of farmers organised by the Congress in Delhi.

With the Congress having held a core committee meeting late on Friday and discussed the agreement, the farmers' rally has assumed a dimension of a kind of referendum on whether the current round of shadowboxing between the government and the Left will culminate in jettisoning the government or the nuclear deal.

Although the Left parties may find it hard to build a case against the budget "" with its farm debt waiver and social sector package "" the government falls if the Left parties vote against the budget.

The rally is not expected to be extraordinary. What will be of import will be the speeches made there.

In an interview to NDTV, Foreign Minister and crisis manager Pranab Mukherjee ruled out early elections saying the allies were not in favour of it. But managers said the situation was not quite so simple: India's sovereign obligations could not be denied.

When asked if the elections could be held ahead of their scheduled date of Summer 2009, Mukherjee said, "I do not think so. We want the polls in due time. I do not visualise anyone thinking of an early election... Our coalition partners or coalition supporters are not talking of an early election."

When asked if there was a debate in the Congress party about whether the nuclear deal is worth sacrificing the government for, Mukherjee said, "Nobody is talking of holding elections now. There is no talk of sacrificing the government for something."

Soon after the farmers' rally, a meeting of the cabinet is likely to discuss the draft of the India-specific nuclear safeguards that the Indian side has negotiated. It is only after this that a UPA-Left meeting will be held.

With the US repeatedly reminding India about a May deadline for the deal, the government is working on finalising the IAEA pact by the end of this month, preferably before Mukherjee goes to Washington on a visit March 23-25.

The Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) that also has to clear the draft convenes a plenary meeting on May 19 in Johannesburg.

Mukherjee's argument to the Left will be that in order to do a deal with other countries "" Russia and France "" and dilute India's dependence on the US, the IAEA and the NSG hurdles have to be cleared.

The next week will be decisive in settling the fate of the deal one way or another with the Left giving an unequivocal warning to the government not to go ahead.