Last week, the Communist Party of India’s stalwart, A.B, Bardhan, all but delivered a seemingly final ultimatum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to abort the civilian nuclear deal with the United States. It is far from clear that Prime Minister Singh and the Congress Party has the requisite intestinal fortitude to take on their fickle and feckless parliamentary allies. How did matters come to this tragic pass? The answer to this question is complex and worth tracing in some detail.

To begin with, the prime minister, a quintessential and decent technocrat, whose closest advisers are cut from the same cloth, failed to anticipate the duplicity of his parliamentary allies. As the deal was being negotiated over the past two years, the Left had chosen not to harass the prime minister and had contented themselves with their occasional rhetorical flourishes. Consequently, the prime minister had seen little reason to try and assuage their predictable misgivings about any agreement involving the United States. Little did he or his closest colleagues realise the trap that the members of the Left were carefully laying for him and his party. Consequently, the prime minister can be accused of political naivete but little else.

As the agreement was approaching consummation the Left immediately started firing their salvoes against it with much gusto. Even when the prime minister sought to call a truce to assuage their concerns, the Left showed its true colors. They could not really find fault with the terms of the deal: instead they fell back on their vicious, anachronistic and reflexive anti-American agenda. They shrouded their unreasoning hatred of the United States and all its works through a deft political ploy: the deal stood to compromise India’s “autonomy”. Alas, the Congress, long accustomed to trading in platitudes and legalisms, could not quickly fashion some language that would expose this base canard.

Far from compromising India’s much-vaunted autonomy, this deal actually would enhance India’s strategic options. After having laboured under US-led sanction since the 1974 “peaceful nuclear explosion”, India would have finally escaped their yoke. Sadly, none in Congress had the political skill or verbal adroitness to make this case with force and verve. Instead they allowed the Left ,which cravenly genuflects before Beijing (now that Moscow is mostly a spent force and no longer the fountainhead of Communist dogma), to hijack the issue of India’s national autonomy.

Similar political naivete had also led the Congress to assume that the principal opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would allow this agreement to go forward without demur. Since their electoral drubbing in 2002, the BJP has failed, on many an occasion, to adhere to one of the key tenets of parliamentary democracy, namely that of a loyal opposition party. Instead it has rarely lost an opportunity to behave in a petulant, churlish, myopic and obstreperous fashion in parliament.

Seeing the deal about to come to fruition the BJP spokespersons promptly tossed out as many red herrings that it could find. They claimed that the nuclear deal would halt India’s nuclear weapons program, that it would curtail India’s sovereignty and contribute little to addressing its energy needs. At one point, the BJP even sought to make common cause with their most reviled adversaries, the Communists! Once again, the failure of the Congress to anticipate these coarse and costly antics on the part of the BJP was nothing short of breathtaking.

It would be incorrect, however, to suggest that Indian domestic politics alone were responsible for single-handedly unraveling the deal. Three other constituencies in the United States also helped to undermine its movement. One group, ironically, was in the US State Department itself. At the most inopportune moment, at the beginning of a parliamentary debate this August, a spokesmen from within the bowels of Foggy Bottom abruptly chose to hector India about how the deal could be called off should the country test any nuclear weapons in the future. What prompted the State Department spokesman to make such a fatuous and ill-timed public statement must be considered as one of the great mysteries in the annals of Indo-US relations.

The damage that this ill-considered statement had is virtually incalculable. It even gave the staunchest supporters of the deal in New Delhi considerable pause. The ammunition that it provided to the adversaries of the government was boundless. As an Indian diplomat closely connected with the negotiating process lamented in the course of a personal conversation, “With friends like this, who needs enemies?”

A second constituency that hobbled the deal was certain key members of Congress, Tom Lantos and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Lantos’ objections to the deal stemmed from India’s ties to Iran. As Holocaust survivor, he has understandably intransigent sentiments toward the Ahmedinejad regime in Iran. However, the Congressman was obviously unaware of the complexity of India’s ties to Iran.

It is also far from clear that the Indian diplomatic community in the United States went the extra mile to help educate and thereby address Congressmen Lantos’ visceral hostility toward the deal which were based upon extraneous concerns. What drove, Ros-Lehtinen, who represents a conservative community in Florida, to abruptly emerge as a harsh critic of the deal, barring possible constituency pressures, remains unclear.

What is certain, however, is that her and Lantos’ strong denunciation of the deal, including an open letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh only provided easy and cheap fodder for the ever-present defenders of India’s national autonomy. Quite predictably, they seized upon the letter as further evidence of American perfidy and declared it to be yet another example of American bullying. The sheer maladroitness of this letter successfully united both the Left and the Right in the Indian parliament.

Finally, the nonproliferation community in the United States, must take some credit for also torpedoing the deal. Unable to restrain the modernisation of American and British nuclear forces, failing to stop the insalubrious regime of North Korea from carrying out a nuclear test and reduced to wringing its hands over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, this community lost no opportunity to take as many pot shots at an agreement that would have helped end India’s virtual nuclear pariah status.

Obsessed with the legal dimensions of the Nuclear Nonpoliferation Treaty (NPT), oblivious to the benefits of a strengthened Indo-US relationship and intent on punishing India for its nuclear tests of 1998, this group of scientists, activists and scholars maintained a steady drumbeat of criticism against the agreement, making common cause with any and all of their Indian counterparts. Their campaign, conducted with relentless vigour, helped the Left muster many a convoluted argument against the multiple benefits of the deal.

In the end, of course, the initial naivete and ultimate lack of resolve of the part of the Congress may prove to ring the death knell on what may have been the most significant agreement in the entire diplomatic history of Indo-US relations since 1947. Those who participated in bringing about its infelicitous end will eventually rue their choices.