NEW DELHI: Communist parties and some others have charged the Manmohan Singh Government with abandoning non-alignment and acting under pressure from the United States when it voted with the West at the board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to refer to the United Nations Security Council issues related to Iran's nuclear programme.

The Left pointed out that not only did India not abstain (Russia and China abstained), it went along with the European Union's resolution "virtually converting India into an ally of the United States" and doing "immense damage to India's standing among the non-aligned and developing countries."

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) in a statement by its Polit Bureau here on Sunday condemned the stand of the Government and gave notice that it would call for a countrywide campaign against the Government's stand. The Communist Party of India urged that "even now" there was time for India to stand with Iran during the "dialogue" promised in the Vienna resolution.

Sinha's charge

Separately, the former External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha, said "the United Progressive Alliance Government had succumbed to U.S. pressure." Talking to The Hindu over telephone, Mr. Sinha, who made it plain that he was speaking on his own behalf and not for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), alleged that the Government had surrendered its independent foreign policy to the U.S.; that it had made India a "client state of America"; and it had gone against its "consistent position" that "issues related to Iran's nuclear programme should be resolved through dialogue and consensus, not confrontation."

The BJP would formally react to the Iran-related development on Monday, party general secretary Arun Jaitley said.

The strong reaction of the Left is a signal that it is bound to take up these issues with the Government in the coming days.

The CPI pointed out that the "suspicions" of the West about Iran's military nuclear programme were not as much substantiated as about finding "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. The CPI(M) warned that the Government should know that its pro-U.S. stance on the Iranian issue "will not be acceptable to the people of India." It said that when in November the Iran nuclear question again came up before the IAEA "India has to take a stand in consonance with an independent foreign policy and national interests." The Government must "oppose any discriminatory treatment to Iran."

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