Striking back at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [Images], the Communist Party of India � Marxist on Thursday said that it was strange that after four years of Left support, he has alleged that they wanted him to behave like a 'bonded slave'.

"The Prime Minister has accused the Left parties as wanting to treat him as a bonded slave. Strange that it took him over four years of being the PM, on the strength of the support of the Left parties, to hurl such accusations," Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of People Democracy.

The Prime Minister and the United Progressive Alliance government, he said, should have been a bonded slave to the Common Minimum Programme and not to anybody.

He said the PM has charged the Left parties with not allowing him to complete all the negotiations on the ground that he would come back to the Parliament before finally operationalising the India-US nuclear deal.

                                                                     Coverage: The Nuclear Deal

"The Left parties could not agree with this proposal for the obvious reason that once the deal is approved by the US Congress, the Indian Parliament would find itself in a completely untenable situation to strike down the deal."

"Once the safeguards agreement is approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors, then the deal is on an auto-pilot course of implementation', Yechury said.

"Stopping the deal, thus, required that it be stopped before the completion of the IAEA round," he said, contending that the Left has openly argued that the deal was against India's national interests.

Asserting that the government had no moral authority to carry forward the deal, the CPI-M leader said, "A rigged majority in the Lok Sabha through brazen horse-trading can, in no way, be considered an endorsement for the nuclear deal."

Alleging that many promises made in the CMP had not been implemented, he said, "Those that have been initiated, happened with great reluctance. Only because of the pressure of the Left did the rural employment guarantee, forest rights for tribals, the right to information found a legal status."

"On each of these, the Manmohan Singh government showed a great deal of reluctance and their implementation is tardy, inadequate and mired in large-scale corruption," Yechury said.

He asked if this was the state of affairs with the promises made in the CMP, "What explains the desperate eagerness to rush the India-US nuclear deal, particularly when this deal does not even figure in the CMP."

"There can be only one explanation. Since he has chosen to describe himself as a bonded slave, he appears to have chosen his master as well," the CPI-M leader said.

Noting that a large number of Bharatiya Janata Party and National Democratic Alliance MPs have voted in favour of the government or abstained, he said "as the brazen horse-trading is utterly contemptible, so is the eager display of 'availability' of the BJP-NDA MPs".

"Or is there something more than that meets the eye," he asked pointing towards the 'pro-US imperialist stand' of the BJP with its opposition seen "more as posturing than real opposition. Did the BJP-NDA turn a blind eye to allow the government to win the vote? And, in the bargain, allow some of its MPs to make money," he asked.

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