Amid the Left position that the government make a clear statement, whether the Indo-US nuclear deal is off or on hold, the CPM on Sunday said the UPA-Left joint committee, which would meet again on Monday, was expected to come out with its findings after Diwali.

On the eve of the crucial meeting of the Committee, CPM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury, who was in Bangalore, made it clear that a consensus on the issue was not possible, unless the Left parties’ concerns were met.

Last meet
Mr Yechury told reporters in Bangalore that the meeting would not be the last one. There  would be some more parleys.

“May be after Diwali..sometime,” Yech-ury told reporters when asked when the committee was expected to come out with its findings. Diwali falls on November 9. He added that more meetings would be held in the future. “Till the meetings are over and our concerns are taken on board, we expect the government not to proceed (in operationalising the deal),” he asserted.

The meeting is the first after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s latest remarks on the nuke deal. “There are some difficulties. We are working in a coalition. We have to find a way out and I have not given up hope,” Dr Singh had said on Thursday.

Yechury said that the Left parties were expecting the government’s final stand on the nuclear deal to be announced at Monday’s meeting.

Left expectation
“We do not know what exactly the UPA will tell us. But what we expect is that they should clearly say that the deal is off or that it has been put on hold. Only then, the controversy will end,” CPI General Secretary A B Bardhan told PTI.

Yechury said the Left parties were attending the meeting with the understanding that the findings of the committee would  be taken into account before the Government proceeded to operationalise the deal.
The Left parties expect the government to respond to issues raised by them regarding impact of the deal on India’s foreign policy and security concerns.

Singh had also said that the deal would not be the end of life and that the government was not a single-issue government. The Congress has  maintained that the deal was “alive” and was not on life-support systems.



ON THE N-PLATTER

* Parleys  to continue till Diwali
* Left urges consideration of joint panel views
* No consensus till Left concerns are addressed 
* Agreement  should not be signed  in haste