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HALFWAY through the morning of Easter Sunday, my phone started
ringing. It hasn't stopped since. It is a wonderful thing to have
a reputation as a latter-day Delphic oracle. Wonderful, but
exhausting, especially when I don't know what the Congress is
planning. I doubt if the Congress Working Committee (CWC) know!
But, there is a beautiful symbolism about the Congress withdrawing
support on Easter Sunday. After all, the festival celebrates
resurrection. Will the dying Congress be rejuvenated? I am sure
the CWC would love to believe that. But I was actually thinking of
the symbol of Easter itself the egg. Which is famously slang for
'nothing'. That is all that the Congress has achieved by its grand
attempt at a fait accompli. In the end it will come to absolutely
nothing.
It is farcical of Ghulam Nabi Azad and other Kesri acolytes to
speak so glibly of putting forward Congress claims to making a
ministry. Where do they propose to find the votes when it becomes
an issue in the Lok Sabha?
Why did the Congress withdraw support? As far as I can tell,
Congressmen acted out of pure funk. And of course they had good
reason to be. To go back nine months, the Congress offered
'support from outside' for two reasons. First, the party could not
form a government on its own, and nobody was willing to ally with
it openly. Second, the continued existence of the Vajpayee
ministry was a one-way ticket to sharing room-space with Kalpanath
Rai!
The Congress thought it could manage Deve Gowda. But the humble
farmer proved tougher than expected. For a man in his position he
was unusually willing to let the 'law take its course'. Which led
to second thoughts on the doctrine of support from outside. One
CWC member was frank. "At this rate", he told me grimly, "most of
us shall soon be outside Parliament and inside Tihar!" He was not
joking.
Let us take the mighty CWC as a paradigm of the party. According
to my information there are only two members of the CWC who are not
subjects of an investigation today. In the current confusion,
investigators may well prudently draw into their shells. So the
Congress's immediate objective is fulfilled. But what happens
next? There are several possibilities.
First, the Congress forms a ministry of its own. And asks the UF
to prove its secular credentials by supporting it. This is what
the Congress was saying on Sunday. Given the ambitions of men such
as Mulayam Singh Yadav, this is asking for the moon. Come to that,
I don't see even more mature parties such as the DMK agreeing.
Second, the Congress and elements of the UF take a leaf from the
BJP-BSP book, and form an honest coalition. The prime minister
could be from either group. This explains why the Congress is
flying kites with GK Moopanar's name displayed on them.
Sensible politicians blanch at the thought of serving under Sitaram
Kesri as PM. The Punjab Assembly polls showed what happens to men
who fight under his banner. In the Lok Sabha byelectionis in
Chhindwara and Nagaur, constituencies loyal in the anti-Congress
waves of 1977, 1989, and 1996 swung from Kesri's party!
On the face of it, Moopanar is an attractive alternative. He is
relatively clean and a fairly good administrator. Equally
important to the Congress, his credentials are impeccable as far as
Sonia Gandhi is concerned. There are two things wrong with this
scenario. First, Moopanar has already once refused the office
after VP Singh and Jyoti Basu did so. If he accepts now, he must
live with the ignominy of breaking the UF. And probably for no
good reason. Moopanar has just seen how reliable promises of
Congress support are. I hope voters in Gujarat understand that
before they elect Vaghela, another man supported by the party.
There are objections to Moopanar within the UF from the communists.
The CPI(M)'s objection is straight from the textbook on class
warfare. The prime minister harps on his humble farmer roots.
Moopanar is a class enemy: a landlord. And the comrades shudder at
the blasphemy of replacing a 'krishak' with a 'kulak'!
This gets the Congress right back to where it started from. It
again needs to find a non-Congress PM who is acceptable to the
Left, the regional parties, and the Congress rank and file. But is
not all the talk of prime ministers and coalitions just a bit
premature? HD Deve Gowda is still the prime minister of India,
Somehow, I don't think he is a man who will surrender without
putting up a fight.
Deve Gowda has every right to point that he draws his authority
from the Lok Sabha. Until he is voted out on the floor of the
House, all the fancy letters to the President are meaningless.
President Sharma, as he proved in May last year, is a stickler for
rules and proper procedures. True to his own precedents, he will
probably grant Deve Gowda about two weeks to prove his majority in
the Lok Sabha. A fortnight is ample time to prepare a
counter-attack. Especially against a Congress whose leader in the
Lok Sabha, Sharad Pawar, is so reluctant to move. And I have
reason to believe that the PM has been preparing for a showdown.
In fact, it was not the fact of the coup that took him by surprise,
but only its date. He was expecting it about 24 hours later.
The PM has already marshalled his troops. Defence minister Mulayam
Singh Yadav, Telugu Desam boss and UF convenor Chandrababu Naidu,
CPI(M) general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet, Janata Dal
president Laloo Prasad Yadav have already been wheeled out,
proclaiming unity to the nation.
Promises from politicians may be a feeble defence. But they do
make it that much tougher for the avowers to back down. Not
surprisingly, the canny Moopanar was the only one who refused to be
drawn out.
Where does that leave the Congress? The party can definitely pull
down the Deve Gowda government. But it cannot lay claim to the
central secretariat.
The Congress has neither principles nor programmes to offer. All
it promises is to instal Sitaram Kesri in Deve Gowda's chair. But
the Congress move has underlined the primacy of the BJP. Today,
the BJP has the right to choose which of its erstwhile foes shall
be the caretaker PM before the inevitable polls. So the Congress'
score in this three-way game is a big, fat, egg!
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