By IANS,
New Delhi : A day after the Manmohan Singh government won the crucial floor test, the four Left parties Wednesday said the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had “subverted parliamentary democracy” and did not have a “mandate to go ahead” with the India-US civil nuclear deal.
The communists, which withdrew their support to the UPA government July 9, leaving it in minority, said the “Congress leadership is mistaken if it considers this vote as one that has provided legitimacy to the government”.
“The moral authority of the government has been compromised,” said a statement signed by Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat, Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary A.B. Bardhan, All-India Forward Bloc (AIFB) general secretary Debabrata Biswas and Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) general secretary T.J. Chandrachoodan.
“The Manmohan Singh government has won the vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha but the entire country has witnessed how parliamentary democracy has been subverted,” they said in the statement issued after their meeting.
“Reports of bribery, intimidation and horse-trading have been proved true by the cross-voting and abstentions engineered by the Congress and the Samajwadi Party. It is by such means that they got a majority,” it said.
The Left leaders said: “The Congress leadership is mistaken if it considers this vote as one that has provided legitimacy to the government. The moral authority of the government has been compromised.”
“The debate in the Lok Sabha has shown up the sharp division on the nuclear deal. This is no mandate for going ahead with the deal,” they said.
The four parties said they will continue the struggle against the India-US nuclear deal and would step up their opposition to the “anti-people policies of the Congress-led government and strive to build the widest movement against the failure of the government to tackle price rise, the problems of the farmers and the rural poor due to the agrarian crisis”.
They also said they would “join hands with other like-minded parties to take up these issues”.
The leaders also asked that the tape submitted by a television channel about three Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs alleged receiving bribes to support the government should be made public.
The Left parties also extended support to the call of the central trade unions for a general strike on Aug 20.