To less cluttered minds, the Marxists’ strategy sessions are all about going round in circles. The meetings of its politburo and central committee in Calcutta were supposed to indicate which way the Communist Party of India (Marxist) will go about the controversy over the India-US nuclear deal. After four days of hair-splitting on the choice between the ideological and the tactical line, the party has left the country no wiser on the issue. Instead, Prakash Karat, the party’s general secretary, only reiterated his earlier warning to the United Progressive Alliance government against going ahead with the deal. The previous meeting of the party’s central committee had done exactly this in August. Between the two sessions, a committee comprising leaders of the UPA and the Left discussed contentious issues relating to the deal. But even those parleys do not seem to have had any effect on the CPI(M)’s position. If the sessions in Calcutta prove anything, it is that the party continues to be as confused as ever over the deal in particular and the India-US relations in general. Its argument that the nuclear deal is an assault on India’s sovereignty is as specious as the objections it had once raised on the same ground to the country joining the World Trade Organization. The UPA government cannot afford to stall India’s progress and its integration into the international community by submitting to the Left’s blackmail.

Yet, the party conclave in Calcutta seems to have had one significant fallout. Unlike in the past, the party’s leaders in Bengal are reported to have put up a united resistance to Mr Karat’s adventurism. Between them, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee have ruled Bengal long enough to know that practical politics is more important than theoretical nitpicking in winning the people’s confidence. Also, the leaders in Bengal have a mandate that Mr Karat does not have. It is the mandate to govern the state. The CPI(M) may be in a dilemma to marry its strategic and tactical lines. But that means little to the people of Bengal who want the party to fulfil its commitment to revive the state’s economy. Mr Karat has not spelt out if the party would withdraw its support to Manmohan Singh’s government if New Delhi “operationalizes” the deal. A political party sometimes has a historic duty to rein in its overreaching leader.