The future of India’s coalition government and a controversial nuclear deal with the US were hanging in the balance yesterday as parliament opened debate ahead of a key confidence vote.
The Indian government would collapse and early elections would be called if the coalition of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were to lose a vote today, and experts said the outcome was far too close to call.
Singh stirred up anger among his left-wing and communist allies by signing a nuclear accord with the US that his government insists was essential to meet the energy needs of India’s fast-growing economy and its 1 billion people.
PHOTO: EPA
Left-wingers, who sparked the vote by withdrawing their support, said the deal tied traditionally non-aligned India too close to the US, and would compromise the country’s nuclear weapons program.
After days of trying to woo even tiny parties with just a handful of votes, Singh voiced confidence that his government would survive and see through its last year in office.
“We will prove our majority on the floor of the House,” he told reporters outside the Lok Sabha, or parliament.
The government would need a simple majority of votes, but opposition parties — including the left and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — were equally confident they could push the world’s largest democracy into early elections.
If the government were to lose the vote, elections must be held within six months.
The race was so tight, and the stakes so high, that the government has let six MPs serving jail terms out to vote. Meanwhile the opposition has paid for charter flights to bring in ailing lawmakers, politicians said.
“The government is today like a patient in an intensive care unit. The first question naturally asked is, ‘is he going to survive or not?’” BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani said as the marathon debate opened.
The communists and BJP were also trying to widen the terms of the debate.
They have been speaking out against rising food and fuel prices — inflation has been up to about 12 percent lately — and arguing that hundreds of millions of poor have been left behind by India’s economic boom.
But the core issue was the nuclear deal — a topic spanning India’s energy security as well as its place in the world.
India, which tested nuclear weapons in 1974 and 1998 and refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has been barred from buying nuclear technology and fuel.
The deal would allow such purchases but subject India’s civilian nuclear sites to international controls — aimed at ensuring that any purchases are not diverted for military uses.
Opponents have said the deal would compromise India’s position as a beacon of neutrality, and that the requisite UN inspections would limit India’s ability to develop its weapons program to deter its main regional rival Pakistan.
They also argued that there were strings attached — and doing a deal with Washington would undermine its freedom to buy oil and gas from countries like Iran, or shop for armaments with traditional suppliers like Russia.
“We are not against nuclear energy. We are not against a very close relationship with America. But we would never like India to become party to an agreement which is unequal,” the BJP’s Advani told parliament.
“This deal makes us a subservient partner. It makes India a junior partner,” he said, adding the BJP wanted the deal to be renegotiated but not scrapped.
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