New Delhi, July 5: The Congress is disinclined to set up a special consultative mechanism to deal with contentious issues, unfazed by murmurs of protests from the DMK and the Trinamul Congress over the latest round of oil price increase.

A Congress-UPA co-ordination system, supposed to have come into being shortly after the government was formed in May, has yet to see the light of day. Nor has the Congress constituted a panel meant to revisit the UPA’s last National Common Minimum Programme and “finetune” issues to “suit” the prevailing political and economic circumstances.

When Trinamul, the DMK and other partners first met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi after the 2009 verdict, they were assured that a “small” committee would look into the common minimum programme and examine if it needed to be tweaked.

It appears the proposed exercise has been put off. The President’s joint address to Parliament on June 4 is expected to double as the programme, for the moment.

Congress sources said as and when contentious matters arose, the Prime Minister and/or the finance minister and the government’s principal trouble-shooter, Pranab Mukherjee, would address the allies’ concerns either in separate bilateral meetings or in the cabinet.

When the cabinet met on July 2 — a day after oil prices were raised — Singh, Mukherjee and home minister P. Chidambaram explained in detail why the government was “forced” to push up prices. They backed their arguments with facts and figures and added that nothing stopped the state governments from scaling down the sales tax on the enhanced price to mitigate the burden on the people.

They explained that with the international crude prices spiralling, the government had no choice. Further delay might have “irreparably” harmed the oil companies because they were finding it difficult to sustain themselves, the cabinet was told.

Chidambaram reminded the allies that as the finance minister, he had to resort to hard choices but when global prices fell, the government brought prices down by Rs 10.

Sources said Sonia too relied on the “Singh-Mukherjee-Chidambaram” trio to convince the allies whenever they expressed misgivings. The sources said they expected her interventions to become “fewer”, except on political disagreements.

In 2004, the Left Front, which had more MPs than Trinamul and the DMK, insisted on the common minimum programme and a co-ordination panel and asked Sonia to step in whenever its differences with Singh looked irreconcilable. But this time, the sources said, matters of policies and governance would be dealt with largely by Singh, aided by Mukherjee and Chidambaram.