New Delhi, June 22: The Congress’s last and best bet to avoid a political crisis, leading to an early election, had been the UPA allies.

It hoped M. Karunanidhi, Sharad Pawar and Lalu Prasad would achieve what it could not: reconcile the Left-Manmohan Singh contradictions and strike a transient truce that could buy the government and the party time to extricate themselves from the economic mess they had waded into.

Its political “managers” withdrew strategically after Pranab Mukherjee did the spadework and allowed the allies to play the field.

The withdrawal served another purpose. The Congress hoped it would not have to make a public statement on what it would choose: its Prime Minister and the deal or power.

For the Congress, which took to coalition politics with a heavy heart, yielding space to its allies at such a critical moment was not a magnanimous gesture.

In a sense, it was an admission of its failure to manage the Indo-US nuclear deal from the day Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed the treaty and staked his prestige and that of the government on it.

The intent to do the deal was not mentioned in the UPA-Left common minimum programme and was touched on tangentially in the Congress’s 2004 election manifesto.

That is if one were to interpret the line that the Congress will “engage the US in scientific, technological, strategic and commercial cooperation” as suggesting such an intent.

At one point, the party’s pro-deal champions distributed photocopies of this passage to tell the Left that the deal was part of their agenda and the government was not being duplicitous when it went for it.

But the campaign was not pursued seriously. The Congress never fully accepted the deal as its child because its equation with the Prime Minister was a bit nebulous and the treaty got identified with him.

The numerous Congress working committee resolutions endorsed the deal and Sonia Gandhi lauded it on occasions. The perception was such responses were in order with the protocol that demanded the party should appear to be “nice” to its Prime Minister.

The Congress had no doubt that Singh was no vote-catcher, but this wasn’t the only cause of its failed strategy. It botched up things with a flawed reading of the Left.

Senior leaders concluded the setback in the Bengal panchayat polls would make the CPM “vulnerable” to pressures and, therefore, it was an opportune moment to push the deal because it wouldn’t want to “risk” an election. Apparently, this “assessment” convinced the government that the Left would give its go-ahead without ado to wrap up the next stage at the IAEA.

Having exhausted the arrows in its quiver, the Congress vainly looked to Chennai and Karunanidhi to spare it from exercising hard options.