Left was right in dumping UPA govt: Karat

New Delhi:

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) on Monday said it had no option but to withdraw support to the United Progressive Alliance government over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat said the Left-led Third Front "failed to be a viable and credible alternative" in the Lok Sabha polls to the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
"In the absence of a country-wide alliance and no policy platform being presented, the call for an alternative government was unrealistic," said Karat after the party's two-day central committee meeting that concluded on Sunday.
He, however, maintained that the attempt to rustle up a non-Congress, non-BJP government "was a correct tactic".
"This effort resulted in the electoral understanding forged by some regional and Left parties in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Karnataka. However, such an electoral understanding could not be extended beyond these four states and the three Left-led states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura."
He said this was why it "failed to be a viable and credible alternative".
Karat maintained that the decision of the Left parties to pull out support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in July last year was "correct".
"This was consistent with the Left stance against forging of strategic alliance with the United States.

The left never intended to dump UPA. It expected the Congress to return with a vastly reduced number of seats and itself to return with a vastly increased number of seats. Thereafter it calculated that the Left could do greater back-seat driving till its dream of 3rd front became powerful enough to become the ruling coalition in 2014, where it calculated it would be as good as a Left government. All calculations went awry and the rest is history. It also hoped that the BJP would be nowhere in the picture. As it turned out, it is only the BJP which is somewhat in the picture, which is largely a picture of the Congress. Now the Left is trying to say that its tactics were based on ideology!