When the BJP-led government finds itself in a spot of bother, as it did over the issue of Chinese incursions into Arunachal Pradesh during the Prime Minister's Beijing visit, the CPI-M is always first off the block. Ready with written and verbal condemnations. But three days after the Arunachal controversy, and even after the foreign minister has given a statement in Parliament, the Marxists are being as inscrutably silent as the wiliest Chinese mandarin.
Inquiries at the CPI-M headquarters, AKG Bhavan, in Delhi whether the party has any statement on the issue produced a list of absent leaders. Mr Harkishan Singh Surjeet is in Canada, Mr Prakash Karat in London, "other senior leaders are not available" and, perhaps most interestingly, Mr Sitaram Yechury and two other leaders are visiting China.
But globe trotting politburo members are not a new phenomena in the workers' party. That has never stopped the CPI,-M from reacting earlier when the party sensed that the government is in trouble.
Observers here have started wondering whether the silence a part of the CPI-M's warm relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. The undivided Communist Party of India split, among other reasons, over the pro-China faction's stand on the 1962 Indo-China conflict. That faction formed the CPI-M and it refused to recognise that China had actually attacked India.
The CPI, on the other hand, had criticised China then and it is doing so now. The party's national executive member, Mr Atul Kumar Anjan, today rejected the Chinese claim that Arunachal Pradesh was not part of India. "There can't be any dispute on this count. Both Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim are integral parts of India". He also said the party wants "the PM to make a statement on the issue of Chinese incursion across the IAC since it happened during what the NDA and BJP claimed was a 'path-breaking' visit by Mr Vajpayee".
Arunachal CM: Arunachal Pradesh
chief minister Mr Mukut Mithi today said the Vajpayee government
should be 'more assertive" with Beijing with regard to Indian territory,
PTI adds.