The immediate provocation is the cosying up of Mamata with Samajwadi Party chief Amar Singh. The wheeler dealer had a ’heart to heart’ meeting with her this week and promised all help for the reinvigorated agitations over Singur and Nandigram to begin on August 20.

The strange bedfellow of Trinamool angel declared, “My heart has always been with Mamata. My head (only was) with the Left!” When did he start courting his heart, rather than his Machiavellian head? Amar was quick to justify: “When I found that people like Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen, who have been traditional Left supporters, have shifted allegiance and have started supporting Mamata, I thought I should listen to my heart!”

Amar’s stock has gone up tremendously in the Indian politics after the dramatic ’help’ he rendered to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in securing a confidence vote in the Parliament. He extracted the first installment of the price for the SP support last week. Reliance Capital – the company of his friend and patron Anil Ambani – staged a coup of sorts. It got access to thousands of crore rupees of Provident Fund contributions, supposed to be held in trust by the government. Relcap was selected at the eleventh hour as one of the fund managers, even as the Marxists cried foul.

Terming the Left’s opposition ’trivial’, India’s undisputed ’deal king’ gave some lessons on morality to his ex-allies: “The Communist Party of India (CPI-M) said that the reported late selection of Reliance Capital as one of the fund managers was an indication of the cost of support to this tainted government. But if Anil Ambani or Mukesh Ambani or the Tatas come to Bengal, they get red carpet welcome. They cannot be good in Bengal and bad elsewhere. Morality should not be selective!”

Not to be outdone, Amar’s new-found old heart-mate warned that she plans to mount a grand agitation against the entry of big players in large format retailing in Bengal. She is confident that her friend would extract a piece of the pie from the PM on her behalf.

Perhaps, Mukesh Ambani, whom the duo indirectly targetted, is capable of tackling his younger brother and his tormentors to counter the threat. But, the Tatas are simply incapable of securing such ’goodwill’, to be eventually paid for from stakeholder funds.

This does put Tata’s Nano, expected by optimists to be dream product that could stun the world with its class, at risk. The project will suffer an overrun of a couple of years and millions of dollars and may become non-viable before its launch. But then, Indians need not be too concerned. There is no world class product yet from India, anyway!