A Red Scare In Delhi

Since then, Karat has made the most of his leverage. He has pushed Singh and Gandhi to better help India's poor—the many millions left out of the BJP's business-friendly "India Shining" campaign—through generous aid programs. Chief among them: the Congress Party and the communists jointly sponsored a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005 that promises one member of each poor rural family 100 days of work per year, at a minimum wage of about $1.50 a day. The program has targeted some 350 million impoverished Indians, one third of whom must be women.

Karat and Singh share a real sympathy for India's unfortunates, stemming from both men's humble upbringings. Both leaders are also known for their honesty, integrity and intelligence. The two were top students growing up, and both went to university in the United Kingdom (Karat to the University of Edinburgh; Singh, to Cambridge and then Oxford).?But the similarities end there. Above all, Karat is known for his ideological purity. He "is dogmatic and puritan and Stalinist in approach," says Ramesh Dikshit, who was a student leader with Karat after he returned to New Delhi.

Such dogmatism has given the government fits. Karat has managed to block Singh's attempt to privatize inefficient state-owned industries, has killed labor-market reforms and has prevented the opening of the banking and insurance sectors, as well as the booming and lucrative retail market, to foreign investment. Still, the real focus of Karat's ire has been the nuclear agreement with the United States, which New Delhi painstakingly negotiated over three years.

The prime minister sees the deal as vital to India's emergence as a world power. It is also key to sustaining its economic progress. As the nation has boomed, electricity production has lagged, leading to frequent power cuts in homes and industry; nearly half of rural India still lacks access to a reliable power supply. Nuclear energy is not a magic bullet, but Singh thinks it can help, and aims to increase India's nuclear power production from 3 percent to 10 percent of total energy production by 2020. For that to happen, however, he has to end America's 33-year-old embargo on access to nuclear fuel and technology, in place since Delhi first tested a nuclear device in 1974.

In this pursuit, Singh found an understanding and willing partner in George W. Bush, with whom he's worked closely since first explaining his vision at a meeting at the United Nations in September 2004. Bush was immediately enthusiastic and promised to see what he could do. When the two men met again, less than a year later in Moscow, Bush, according to a senior Indian government official, asked Singh how specifically he could help. Singh asked him to end the sanctions, and Bush agreed to try. In several short weeks, Indian and U.S. negotiators hammered out a deal under which Washington would lift the sanctions and recognize India as a nuclear-weapons state and supply it with nuclear fuel and technology—including reactors.

India, in return, pledges to separate its military and civilian nuclear facilities and put the latter under international oversight. But "it's a win-win for us," says Kapil Sibal, the minister of Science and Technology. "I don't see any downside." Indeed, India gets to keep its nuclear-weapons program free of international inspection. Once India negotiates a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, gets approval from the international Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the package is ratified by the U.S. Congress, India will be able to ramp up nuclear-power production dramatically.