The Manmohan Singh government must consider itself lucky to have managed to shield its landmark foreign policy initiative on the Indo-US civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement from its face-off with the Left partners.

The deal would have effectively collapsed if the Left parties had gone to the extent of bringing down the government to assert their stiff opposition to the deal with the US. Such a threat to the government’s stability was implicit in the Left parties’ talk of making the Manmohan Singh government pay a heavy political price if it went ahead with the operationalisation of the deal.

The CPM-led Left parties may not be in a position to rock the deal any more. The Left parties have staged a quiet retreat. The committee mechanism settled between the UPA and the Left parties ends their raging standoff over the deal and can be expected to examine the Left’s reservations on various aspects of the  deal.

But the committee appears to be more an exit route offered by the Congress to its Left partners to get out of the political crisis. More than examining various questions raised by the Left over the deal, the committee actually buys times for both the parties.

Nothing substantial may, therefore, come out of its work to help sort out the differences. It is unrealistic to expect that the Congress would allow the Left to dominate committee’s proceedings. Thus, the mechanism may not bring much comfort to the Left.

There is nothing in the agreed statement issued on the setting up of the committee that requires the government to put on hold negotiations with IAEA or Nuclear Suppliers Group on operationalising the deal.

Those negotiations would go on in formal and informal ways, though the CPM has asked for suspension of all deal-related negotiations. Therefore, the committee mechanism might have only suspended the UPA-Left crisis over the deal but would not end it. Probably, both sides have found it convenient to settle for the interim measure.

The moot question is: will the Left be in a position to face an election in not so distant a future if it is least ready at present?  The Congress leadership may be hoping to push through the deal taking advantage of the Left’s reluctance about forcing early elections.