No early elections: PM, Sonia

There will be no early elections to the Lok Sabha, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said today setting to rest speculation generated by the sharp differences with the Left on the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Singh, the architect of the controversial deal, went a step further,  and said that failure to carry it through would not be "the end of life."

In the clearest indication yet that the Congress was unwilling to sacrifice the government for the deal, Gandhi said that the Left parties, which were opposing the deal, were not being "unreasonable", and that the government was not looking for a confrontation with them because that was not the "coalition dharma."

"Elections are still far away. The government has still got one-and-half years to complete its term. I hope and expect we will stay the course," the Prime Minister said at an interaction at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit here.

Speaking at the same forum a little later, Sonai emphatically stated, "No, we are not in favour of early elections. As the Prime Minister has said, the deadline is 2009. We are going to do all that we can to see that we implement our programmes till 2009."