So Be It!

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[Karat announces the Left withdrawal in Delhi on Tuesday. (AFP) The Left out of the way, the Manmohan Singh government has jumpstarted preparations for a trust vote in Parliament aimed at fast-tracking the Indo-US nuclear deal. Long in the making, the dam broke this morning when Prakash Karat and the leaders of three other Left parties announced that they were withdrawing support to the government following the Prime Minister&rsquo;s comments on Monday that made clear the government was pressing ahead with the nuclear deal. As if on cue, the Congress activated a plan that had been finalised last Friday at a core committee meeting, under which the government will seek a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha &mdash; possibly on July 21 or 22 &mdash; and then approach the International Atomic Energy Agency&rsquo;s board in Vienna with a safeguards agreement. The loss of support of the 59 Left MPs technically robs the government of a majority. The support of the Samajwadi Party, in which some murmurs of dissent have surfaced, could still leave the UPA short of eight to 10 MPs. But Congress managers and ministers have started mopping-up operations among fencesitter MPs who total 64. In the run-up to the trust vote, the numbers could seesaw. The government is keen to go to Vienna via the Lok Sabha because it feels that a trust vote would signal to the world that the treaty carried the stamp of parliamentary sanction although constitutionally such a seal is not required. Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, the recipient of the Left letter announcing the withdrawal as he was the convener of the joint committee on the nuclear deal, said: &ldquo;We will seek a trust vote at the earliest because we want to go to the IAEA at the earliest.&rdquo; Long before the Left meets President Pratibha Patil on Wednesday to formally withdraw support, the Prime Minister would have breakfasted with President George W. Bush and handed over the responsibility of shepherding the deal to its logical end by using US influence with the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Back-channel talks have already taken place between the Prime Minister and Bush to complete these procedures before the deal was piloted in the US Congress in one of the last sittings presided over by the present dispensation. The slim timeline explained why Singh was so keen to get his party's go-ahead before getting the G8 on his side. Back home, shortly after the Left&rsquo;s announcement, the Samajwadi Party iterated that it would back the government in a trust vote. While Samajwadi leaders claimed their support had no strings attached, at least two of its 39 MPs &mdash; Chaudhury Munnawar Hasan and Jai Prakash Rawat &mdash; said they would defy the party&rsquo;s whip and vote against the deal. The reluctance of Samajwadi chief Mulayam Singh Yadav to take a head-count of his MPs in a meeting this morning fuelled speculation that his flock was not intact. Mulayam paraded his Muslim MPs before TV and kept himself and his lieutenant Amar Singh out of the frame. Congress president Sonia Gandhi called Amar to her residence this evening to be assured that things were on track and the shadow of 1999 &mdash; when Mulayam indicated he would back Sonia as Prime Minister and then recanted &mdash; would not revisit her. After meeting Sonia, Amar said he would give a fresh letter of support to the President on Wednesday with a precise count of his MPs. Although Hasan and Rawat are technically with Yadav, they claimed they had switched sides to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in lieu of a Lok Sabha ticket. The Congress is keeping a wary eye on the BSP, fearing a raid on disgruntled Samajwadis. The Congress&rsquo;s number-crunchers claimed that despite the split with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, its lone MP, Mehbooba Mufti, pledged her vote to the UPA. Numbers jigsaw Here&rsquo;s how the numbers stack up for the UPA. The halfway mark is 272 and minus the Left, the UPA has 225 votes. If 37 of the 39 Samajwadis vote for it, it has 262 MPs &mdash; 10 short of majority. Ajit Singh&rsquo;s three MPs could raise the number to 265. The government is counting on the three MPs of the Janata Dal (Secular), two of the National Conference and five Independents. Courtesy: The Telegraph &nbsp;