By the time the Congress goes into the election, growth will have dropped to five per cent and its claim to success, of over nine per cent growth rate for four years, will have been discredited.  It is too late to repair the first two, there is still time to rectify the mess of the nuclear deal, says Prem Shankar Jha.

Two weeks ago, when former President Abdul Kalam unreservedly endorsed the Indo-US nuclear treaty, he brought about a qualitative change in the political alignments that had developed around  this vexed issue. Within hours of his statement the Samajwadi Party announced that it would reconsider its  opposition to the treaty.

The shift in the SPs position has already had an impact on the Left: veteran CPI leader Mr. AB Bardhan remarked last week that the Left would continue to oppose the nuclear deal but would not allow the government to fall, should it go ahead without its concurrence. This means that it will not vote with the BJP, should the latter introduce a no confidence motion in parliament. Dr Kalam has therefore  opened the way for Dr Manmohan Singh's government to sign the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

This does not ensure that the government would seize the opportunity. There is no certainty  that the Left will not change its mind again. And the  SP may still demand too high a  price for its support. But  the developments of the past week have shown that the government need not have waited so long and endangered the deal. For  it was not the prisoner of the Left that it made itself out to be. Latent support for the deal had always been there among other parties in the Lok Sabha. What the Congress failed to do was mobilise it.

If the SP's statement is to be accepted at face value, the Congress did not even try. For throughout  the  nine months since July last year, when the Congress (UPA) suffered one  humiliation after the other at the hands of  the Left ,  it never once reached out to it for support  by explaining the importance of the treaty, and allaying its doubts. Instead, throughout these months the Congress' leaders  talked only to the Left.

The SP's complaint could have been taken with a pinch of salt had it been  the only party to make it. But the BJP's leaders  too have hinted more than once that they might not have opposed the UPA on the nuclear deal  if they had been kept informed, and their views had been ascertained, when the decisions were being made. One is therefore forced to conclude that the deal has been endangered not only by the Left's obduracy but  by the Congress party's neglect of consensus building within the political system.

The Congress party showed its disdain for consensus-building within hours of its victory at the polls in 2004, when some of Ms Sonia Gandhi's advisers  showed Amar Singh of the SP the door when he invited himself to her victory dinner. They did so in a tit for tat for Mulayam  Singh Yadav's high-handed behaviour with them when they had sought to make a pre-election arrangement with him in UP. But through this petty score-settling they delivered the UPA, bound hand and foot, to the Left.

Four years later, it is paying the price of this basic error of judgement in virtually every field of governance. While the media has focussed its attention on the way that the Left has foiled  reforms like the amendment of labour laws and the privatisation of loss-making public enterprises, the first  and most serious consequence of dependence on the Left  was a loss of control over the framing of the National Common Minimum Programme.

Dr  Manmohan Singh, and Mrs Gandhi, were committed to making economic growth inclusive. But they also knew that  most of the money assigned in 10 previous plans for education, health, shelter and rural development programmes had been swallowed up in graft , and in creating gargantuan state bureaucracies. In the NCMP, therefore the Congress had wanted to insert a clause that additional monies for these programmes would go directly to the village panchayats.

This is where they met their first road block, for the Left adamantly insisted that the money had to be given, like all previous Plan allocations for these sectors, to the state governments. Eventually the two parties struck a compromise in which the resources  would go to the panchayats, but through the state governments.

This verbal sleight of hand restored the old system and doomed the UPA's bid for inclusive growth even before it had been launched.  In the last four years the UPA government has increased the outlays for these programmes fourfold, from an average of Rs34,000 crores a year under the NDA to Rs120,000 crores for 2008-9, but in the UNDP's human development index India's rank has slippd from 126 in 2003 to 128 in 2007.  

The growing awareness in Congress that its bid for inclusive growth has yielded very few political dividends  is pushing it into making more and more mistakes. One of these is its panic-stricken attempt to control an inflation created by shortages in the global supply of food and  industrial raw materials, and by rising international oil prices, by crushing domestic demand, industrial,  and employment growth.  The 7.8-per cent inflation rate today shows how completely this policy has failed.

But a  cabinet full of economists has allowed the RBI to continue with a tight money, high interest rate policy for seven long months after every shred of justification for it had disappeared last October, because the centre of decision-making had shifted from South block to 10, Janpath.  As a result by the time the Congress goes into the next election, industrial growth will have dropped to five per cent and its only claim to success, of having presided over a nine per cent growth rate for four years, will have been discredited.

The mess it has made of the nuclear deal is only the third of its errors. It is too late to repair the first two, but it still has time to rectify the third.