New Delhi, Aug. 27: L.K. Advani has gifted the Congress the “climbdown” it had been waiting for.

Expecting no major retreat in the Left’s stand, Congress sources admitted that the party’s greatest fear was “total isolation” in Parliament if the BJP took a strident stand.

“It would have underlined the Congress’s isolation before the country, all the more because the Left’s principal contention is that ‘if a majority of the MPs are opposed to the deal, what legitimacy does it have?’” said a Congress minister.

Advani’s declaration that the BJP had no objection to a strategic partnership with the US so long as it served India’s interest took care of the Congress’s problem to an extent.

The BJP carried the views enunciated by Advani in Hyderabad forward in a discussion at the Indo-US Forum of Parliamentarians in the capital.

When Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi pleaded that the Indo-US relationship should not be pegged to the deal, his BJP counterpart agreed.

“There is a whole big world in the Indo-US relationship which we should not overlook. Indo-US amity was initiated by the NDA government and if the Congress takes it forward, we are sure to support it,” the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

However, when the debate takes place in Parliament, there is an unstated understanding in the UPA that its attack should target the BJP, not the Left.

The Congress’s “star” speakers such as Kapil Sibal and Singhvi have already mustered their arguments against the BJP.

A principal point the Congress has been stressing was how the NDA government had clinched a series of “agreements” with the US but Parliament was never taken into confidence.

“The spadework for the deal was carried out by the NDA government but we got a much better bargain from the US than they had hoped for,” Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh said.

The other cause for some cheer in the Congress was the fact that the BJP’s Maharashtra ally, the Shiv Sena, openly backed the deal.

So did the Biju Janata Dal. Its Rajya Sabha member, B.J. Panda, spoke glowingly of the deal at the forum and said it marked a “complete change of paradigm” by making available energy that had been “denied to us”.

Parliament apart, the Congress feels that the BJP’s anti-deal postures had not gone down well with the Opposition party’s urban middle and upper class constituencies. The worldly aspiration of these classes are inspired by the US, a source said.

Industry, too, has been “flummoxed” by the BJP’s opposition to the deal, according to Congress sources.