It used to be that whenever annual rains failed in India, the country’s leftists would cite the Central Intelligence Agency for malevolently steering away monsoon clouds toward the thirsty wheat fields of America’s long-standing Asian ally – and India’s bitter enemy – Pakistan.

Yesterday, the leftists and their fellow travelers were in high dudgeon again as the death toll from an unexpectedly violent monsoon in India pushed past 1,000. The storm created havoc in India’s premier commercial city, Bombay, which is also known as Mumbai.

This time the CIA was charged with choreographing a rain dance. And capitalist sympathizers in the West were accused of sabotaging India’s strenuous efforts to become an economic superpower and an Asian counterweight to another giant, neighboring China.

The absurd allegations almost smothered the thunderclap. India’s left, in fact, was more vociferous about alleged American plots than about the human tragedy that’s still unfolding. Bombay has already been hit by record rainfall – nearly 40 inches in five days – and tens of thousands of people have been made homeless, especially in the sprawling slums whose very existence is testimony to another kind of havoc, that of six decades of the socialist Raj that Indians suffered under.

That intricate system of permits, licenses, and garroting of the private sector, and the corruption and encouragement of the huge state-run enterprises that it spawned, also resulted in something else, a woefully inadequate infrastructure.

The fact that Bombay’s roads buckled under the monsoon force, that century-old drains choked, that poorly laid power lines snapped, that the fragile grid of electronic communications virtually collapsed, and that airport runways were converted into canals – all of this was also testimony to the fact that the socialist Raj valued bureaucratic perquisites and white-elephant projects such as steel mills far more than good governance and all the infrastructure building that it entails, especially in a largely poor society.

All of this could also be viewed as history, however disheartening, were it not for the fact that the left is still enormously influential in India. It is stymieing systemic change. It is refloating the old canards about American plots to destabilize developing countries. It is pushing populist shibboleths at a time when much of the rest of the world has embraced invigorating globalization. It is resurrecting Karl Marx when he’s been rejected almost everywhere in favor of Adam Smith’s free market.

Even though Prime Minister Singh has expressly embraced a free-market philosophy and somewhat loosened the state’s grip on economic activity, his every move seems to be undercut by the left’s cozy relationship with Mr. Singh’s boss, Sonia Gandhi. She’s the president of the Indian National Congress, the 14-party ruling coalition’s main grouping.

Her rationale for such a relationship? That the support of 71 Communists in the 545 Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, helps her coalition survive.

Mrs. Gandhi humiliated Prime Minister Singh while he was in Washington not long ago. While President Bush was signaling America’s acceptance of India as a nuclear power and pledging to assist in its ambition to become an economic dynamo, Mrs. Gandhi vetoed a Singh Cabinet decision to privatize partially a state-run heavy-electrical manufacturing company.

The left argued that privatization would invite unemployment, and Mrs. Gandhi concurred. Earlier, they had argued opening up airport construction to foreign investment would be bad for the economy – and Mrs. Gandhi concurred. The Communists had also argued that India’s archaic labor laws must be left intact, and Mrs. Gandhi concurred.

Her actions and those of her leftist comrades raise three troubling questions.

One, can Prime Minister Singh effectively govern when it is his party chief who’s calling the shots? Cabinet ministers these days make a beeline for Mrs. Gandhi’s home before drafting proposals for their portfolios. Mr. Singh’s role seems to be confined to that of an ambassador hopping from one capital to another for photo-ops.

Two, what does the uncertain federal governance suggest to foreign investors whose support India badly needs and who are already confused by the mixed signals they’ve been receiving?

And third, if the private sector is discouraged from accelerating involvement in strengthening India’s infrastructure, can India’s economic trajectory toward superpowerdom be anything other than fitful?

However much goodwill America and other developed countries demonstrate toward India’s ambitions, the sad reality is that the country’s entrenched left shows little receptivity to such support or to free-market ideas that can drive the economy faster. Equally sad is the fact that India’s leaders – and Sonia Gandhi in particular – may be privately persuaded about the efficiency of markets, but publicly they must continually pay obeisance to the exigencies of leftist politics.

The devastation of the monsoon is bad enough, but a longer-term problem is the Indian left’s recidivism.

Mr. Gupte is a contributing editor at The New York Sun.