Mark his words: Karat says Left won't back Cong again

Thiruvananthapuram: The CPI-M will not have any alliance with the Congress-led UPA after elections next year, party general secretary Prakash Karat has said.

“We cannot have any understanding or alliance with the Congress party—we are in no way bound to support the Congress-led coalition,” he said in an interview to Malayalam TV channel Kairali TV on Thursday.

Karat said Congress leaders and the Prime Minister had assured the Left that they would not go ahead with the India-US civil nuclear deal even if they were allowed to carry forward negotiations on an India specific safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"Because they said they will talk and come back... if you object we will not proceed further. Now when the prime minister, the Congress president (Sonia Gandhi) and the Congress leadership give such an assurance, we thought yes, let them go, talk and come back. They are bringing this to the (UPA-Left nuclear) committee. When we object in the committee, they will not proceed. This is the assurance they gave us in November."

He said that the meeting in which the assurance was given was also attended by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Asked if the CPI-M had overestimated the trustworthiness of the Congress party he said: "It seems like that."

Reacting to Manmohan Singh's remarks that the CPI-M general secretary has "miscalculated" the developments, Karat said: "The bourgeois party leaders look at their (party) practices in which the leader decides everything. They do not understand how the Communist party functions."

"We have not decided yet," Karat said when asked if UP Chief Minister Mayawati was their candidate for the top post.

Karat said the Left would enter into an electoral alliance, though he did not want it to be named the 'third front'.

"I never talked about third alternative. Our party's understanding of the third alternative is not some combination to fight elections. The third alternative should be in terms of policies and programmes. We don't consider the UNPA as the third alternative. We told them that this is the alternative we were thinking about."