NEW DELHI, 17 September 2006 — The Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government can breathe easy. Communist veteran Prakash Karat says his party has no intention of toppling it and a third alternative is not in sight.

Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), admitted that the Left had influenced the government’s functioning but it would not do “a veto on everything and pull down the government.”

“Then the government would not have lasted six months,” he told Karan Thapar in an interview with CNN-IBN. “We went into supporting the government knowing fully well there are basic differences between the Congress and us, but the Common Minimum Program (CMP) should be attempted to be worked and implemented.” The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has had several tiffs, big and small, with its Left allies since taking office in May 2004. Karat said there was no alternative, for now, to the Congress government.

“There’s no better alternative and the alternative which my party wants, a third alternative, is not doable or see-able in the near future,” he said. “So we will work for the third alternative but that is a much more long-term process.” The CPM leader admitted that the Marxists had come to wield a certain influence on the government.

“At no time has the CPM and the Left been able to influence policies at the national level to the extent that is happening today,” he said. “We have shifted the whole terrain of political debate in the country and the issues that have come up to the bread and butter issues, the real issues of the people, and we have shown that on every question we give no quarter. “We play a role of opposition to policies,” Karat said.

“Our job is to act as the sentinel of what we consider people’s interests and whenever there is a policy measure which we consider is not in the interest of the people of the country we oppose it and in some cases we are able to stop but in some cases they went ahead and we continue to mobilize people to oppose it. It’s a political process,” Karat said.

NCP Seeks Berth in UPACoordination Committee

The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) yesterday urged the UPA to include it in the UPA-Left Coordination Committee.

A resolution to this effect was passed at the NCP National Working Committee meeting held under the chairmanship of party chief and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar in Dehradoon. As many as 190 of the 195 members of the national working committee attended the meeting. These include 10 members of the Lok Sabha (lower house), six of the Rajya Sabha (upper house) and legislators from different states.

“We resolved here today to appeal to the UPA to include our party as well as other smaller constituents of the alliance in the coordination committee it had formed with the Left parties,’ party’s chief spokesman and national General Secretary D.P. Tripathi told reporters. He said, “Our party feels that without the participation of smaller parties, the UPA-Left coordination committee remains dominated by the Congress alone. There is need to make it more broad-based and democratic and that would not be possible without involving the non-Congress smaller parties, including NCP.”