United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi spoke with Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary Prakash Karat on Tuesday morning even as the Left planned nationwide protests over UPA government's economic policies.
The immediate issues are the recent fuel price hike and the BHEL divestment.
"Sonia called up Prakash Karat in the morning," All India Congress Committee general secretary Ambika Soni said.
Sources in the Left parties said Gandhi assured Karat that she would discuss the BHEL divestment issue with her party colleagues on returning from Shimla in a day or two and the concern of the Left would be addressed.
The Left parties created a flutter in the Congress-led UPA on Sunday by announcing that they would stay away from the UPA-Left coordination committee meetings.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, after receiving a call from Gandhi, talked to Karat to defuse the situation.
Congress sources said Gandhi was likely to return to Delhi after visiting flood-affected areas in Himachal Pradesh and inclement weather conditions there were delaying the same.
The sources said a meeting of the party's core group would be held after Gandhi's return to the national capital to find a solution.
Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee, who is one of the members of the high-level group, is also abroad.
Meanwhile, demanding that the UPA goverment be rational and realistic in its efforts to raise revenue, Left parties took to the streets all over the nation to press for immediate rollback in hike of prices of petrol and diesel.
In Delhi, hundreds of CPM, Communist Party of India and Forward Bloc activists, many of them women, held protest demonstrations as part of Action Day.
The protest threatened to get out of hand as the activists broke through barricades and took on police personnel, but the situation was brought under control by senior officials and leaders of the Left parties who were present at the demonstration.
Addressing the protestors, CPI national secretary D Raja said, "If sales tax, customs duty and excise duty are reduced in Delhi, a litre of petrol will cost only about Rs 17 and not at around Rs 40 at present."
"If you think that oil is a revenue-generating product, you are wrong Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram," he said.
He said, if if the suggestion given by Left parties had been carried out, the hike in prices of petrol and diesel would not have been necessary.
Launching a direct attack against Petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, who reportedly said that there could be no rollback in prices, Raja said, "This is not the voice of democracy but that of authoritarian rule."
