AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat at the news conference on the UPA report card in New Delhi on Friday. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

New Delhi, May 23: The Left has renewed its opposition to the nuclear deal just when the political temperature has started ticking up again, adding a reference to the finance ministry around the time Manmohan Singh was heading it.

“Our stand remains.… We are not for the operationalisation of the 123 Agreement,” CPM general secretary Prakash Karat told reporters after a 90-minute meeting of the four Left parties here today.

A Left statement issued after the meeting linked the shortage of nuclear reactor fuel — one of the reasons cited by the government to push for the US deal that will facilitate supply of such fuel — to insufficient funding by the finance ministry “since about 1990”.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had taken over as finance minister in 1991 in the P.V. Narasimha Rao cabinet.

“Knowledgeable experts feel that the current uranium shortage has been created through allocation of insufficient funds to the uranium mining sector by the Planning Commission and the finance ministry since about 1990,” the Left statement said.

“Added to this was the lacklustre management of the Uranium corporation in the past, working uranium mines having been closed down and actions taken to overcome environmental opposition to uranium mining being weak and ineffective,” the statement said.

The Left parties said the government should explain why “the plan expenditure of the Department of Atomic Energy has been reduced by Rs 188 crore between Budget Estimate 2007-08 and 2008-09”.

Replying to a question on the government’s contention that finalising the IAEA safeguard will help India enter into nuclear cooperation with other countries, Karat said he did not want to get into any details as the UPA-Left committee was still discussing the safeguards agreement.

But he added that “we are not buying anything that the government tells (us)”.

The next meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal will take place on May 28. By then, the Karnataka results will be out and political manoeuvres are expected to pick up. The Congress is also expected to keep in mind the blows suffered by the Left in the panchayat elections.

On the nuclear fuel shortage, Karat said: “We are unable to understand how the shortage has taken place.”

The Left statement opposed linking the fuel shortage with the Indo-US nuclear deal, saying the “temporary mismatch” between the national uranium demand and supply could not be a reason to “plunge” the country into the agreement that “has far-reaching adverse implications”.

“The current shortage of uranium is certainly not because the India-US deal has not come through, since the 10,000MW plan (the target for power production) was finalised purely on the basis of proven Indian uranium reserves, long before any deal with the US was in the horizon,” the statement said.