HVK Archives: Politics in Gujarat plummets to all-time now
Politics in Gujarat plummets to all-time now - The Pioneer
Sudheendra Kulkarni
()
10 September 1996
Title : Politics in Gujarat plummets to all-time low
Author : Sudheendra Kulkarni
Publication : The Pioneer
Date : September 10, 1996
Gujarat, the birth place of Mahatma Gandhi, has not been
unfamiliar with criminalisation of politics. Not long
ago, when the late Chimanbhai Patel was the Chief
Minister, it was difficult to distinguish between
ministers and the mafiosi. Government was a byword for
loot and political assassinations were by no mean
uncommon. But no political murder in Chimanbhai's
infamous years ever had the finesse or the chilling
suddenness as the murder of democracy committed by the
Deputy Speaker of the Gujarat Assembly, Mr Chandubhai
Dhabi, on September 3.
In a tearing hurry that lasted all of thirty-odd seconds,
Mr Dhabi granted recognition to a breakaway BJP group of
doubtful size and devious origins and thereby pierced a
knife into the heart of constitutional democracy. With
blood still dripping from the knife, the Deputy Speaker
adjourned the Assembly sine die and walked back into his
chamber, exuding the kind of cool confidence that comes
only when the conspiracy behind the act is flawless. The
Chief Minister, Mr Suresh Mehta, who was all set to prove
his Ministry's majority in the House, did not know what
hit him. Nor did the BJP leaders hi Gandhinagar and New
Delhi. At long last, they had begun to heave a sigh of
hard-earned relief that they had managed to ensure the
survival of their badly bruised Government in Gujarat,
what with 95 out of the party's original tally of 120
MLAs remaining loyal. But Mr Dhabi's arbitrary action
suddenly turned their sigh of relief into shouts of
panicky protest.
Thus, in one fell swoop, the legislative support for a
democratically elected Government has, on paper at least,
been reduced to a minority by the machinations of a ring
of political conspirators. In reality, Mr Mehta's
Ministry may still command the majority, but will it get
an opportunity to prove it in the Assembly? With the
Speaker lying in the hospital bed, will the Deputy
Speaker play fair the next time around, after having
played dirty and precipitated the crisis hi the first
place? What happens if, under one pretext or the other,
pandemonium is organised inside the House and disturbance
engineered outside in order to build up a supportive
situation for the dissolution of the Assembly itself.?
And will the Gujarat pot be kept boiling until the
Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and brought under
President's rule immediately thereafter?
These are no doubt hypothetical questions but by no means
beyond the pale of possibility. After all, there is a
decisive external focus, besides an undeniable internal
focus, to what has been happening in Gujarat. The ugly
developments in the State can be understood only by
examining both foci of the problem. Of the two, however,
the internal dimension of the problem must receive far
more serious attention than the external forces seeking
to exploit it to their advantage.
The debilitating crisis gripping the BJP in Gujarat
originates mainly out of the party's failure to make a
decisive departure from what can be called the Chimanbhai
Patel brand of politics, which itself is a subset of the
venal, manipulative and power obsessed politics of the
Congress in the declining years. Chimanbhai Patel was
the target of the haloed, JP-inspired Navnirman movement
in the early 1970s. But a political chameleon of
extraordinary dexterity, he went on to become the main
leader in Gujarat of the JP-inspired Janata Party and
later the Janata Dal. If the Congress was his adversary
in his Janata days, it became his ally in the early '90s
to help him realise his ambition of ruling Gujarat once
again. He presided over one of the most corrupt State
governments ever. Yet he managed to remain ahead by a
combination of cooptive tactics of silencing his
adversaries and creating a constituency for himself among
get-rich-quick businessmen.
Paying for the mess
The BJP won power on the strength of the popular
revulsion against the Chimanbhai brand of politics, but
it failed to realise that the disease had infected many
of its own leaders at all levels in the State. And even
when in-discipline and power lust manifested themselves
in the most egregious manner at the time of the Khajuraho
episode last September, the party's central leadership
chose in action and dithering. The rationalisation it
offered then-that its overriding concern was to protect
the Government in Gujarat in view of the approaching
parliamentary elections-is proved by subsequent
developments to have been costly mistake. Neither the
BJP's stated ideology nor its popular constituency
condones political promiscuity born out of power lust.
Yet, the central leadership condoned it in the case the
Mr Vaghela after the Khajuraho incident. The result was
predictable; not only did the malaise of dissidence
worsen in Gujarat, but it has also spread of other State
units of the BJP.
The BJP's failure has been manifest on another important
count. Although Mr Keshubhai Patel, the previous Chief
Minister and now the party's vice president in charge of
Gujarat affairs, commands support of the largest
factions's within the party and its mass base, he does
not appear to have developed the art of taking all
sections of the party and the population along with him.
His supporters in the RSS and the VHP also seem to lack
this ability. Too often, politicians in power either
ignore the imperative out of their own bloated sense of
self-importance or practice it merely as an art of
manipulation. Rarely is it seen as a principled,
democratic requirement for a politician functioning in a
maddeningly plural society like India. In the process of
rapidly emerging as a big, mass party embracing diverse
sections of the population and interest groups, the BJP's
State-level leaders forgot this fundamental principle of
democratic governance. The party is now paying in the
form of growing factionalism and dissidence.
With the BJP not managing its affairs in Gujarat well. it
was only to be expected that its adversaries would fish
in troubled waters. And this the Congress and the United
Front have been doing with increasing brazenness. It is
hardly surprising that not a single constituent of the
UF-including the two communist parties who have always
been vocal in protesting against destabilisation of State
governments with the help of Article 356-has so far
condemned the Deputy Speaker's arbitrary act of hurriedly
recognising the splinter BJP group in the Gujarat
Assembly and then adjourning the House sine die. How can
they, when their single most important objective right
now is to prevent the BJP from coming to power in UP and,
therefore, to keep its leaders embroiled in Gujarat? It
is ironical that the tricks the Congress rulers at the
Centre used to play in the past, in order to destabilise
State governments of the UF constituents, are now being
employed jointly by the UF and the Congress the BJP with
no one protesting.
No party is free of blemish in Gujarat and it does not
really matter which party's narrow political interests
are served or subverted by the current sordid
developments in the State. But so long as our political
parties and their factional leaders are guided solely by
their narrow and petty interests, there are bound to be
more and more manifestations of political Promiscuity
born out of naked power lust. And that sure calls for
some protesting.
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