Author: Virendra Kapoor
Publication: Afternoon Dispatch & Courier
Date: November 10, 2014
URL: http://www.afternoondc.in/editorial/rather-than-being-anti-congress-they-are-obsessed-with-the-bjp/article_123945
In the 70s, with Mrs Indira Gandhi at the peak of her popularity, the small and splintered Opposition would often unite under a single name and flag to try and challenge her, only to fall apart soon after. Barring the Jana Sangh, the precursor to the present-day BJP, no other anti-Congress group counted for much anyway. Disgusted with the tendency of the fragmented and egomaniac Socialists, a cabal of leaders with hardly a follower, to call the shots, a chastened Jana Sangh finally wearied of supping with the minor anti-Congress groups and decided to carve its own separate identity. That it did well to chart its own independent course after the break-up of the Janata Party and formed the BJP in 1980 ought to be obvious to all.
But this is not about the state of the Opposition during the heyday of the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi when it ruled at the Centre and in a large majority of the States as well. It is about her dismissive reaction every time the anti-Congress forces tried to cobble together an alliance. Haughtily she would remark, ‘Well, if all the zeros get together the result would still be zero.’ Till her Emergency-inducted rejection in the 1977 election, Indira Gandhi could afford to be contemptuous of these parties which tried to dislodge her from power, but in vain.
We were reminded of the biting comment of Indira Gandhi when, on Friday, the media flashed photographs of various leaders of what was once the Janata Parivar. Messrs Mulayam Singh Yadav, H.D. Deve Gowda, Sharad Yadav, Lalu Prasad, and, above all, Nitish Kumar, met over lunch to explore the likelihood of unity yet again. All these gentlemen, you would recall, were once together under a single banner, but their clashing ambitions had forced them to part ways. Hungry for power, each one of them separated to form his own small group.
It is again ambition of another kind that has egged them on to sink their differences, at least for the present, and forge some kind of a common front. Fearing marginalization by an ascendant Modi-led BJP, Laloo and Nitish, Laloo and Mulayam are desperate to hold hands and repulse the common enemy who now threatens to demolish them in their own home States. Again, the motivation for unity is negative. And, therefore, the bond might not prove durable, but since most politicians are prone to live in the present, you can bet that a new version of the old and failed Janata Party is set to emerge sooner than later.
Though they all pay lip service to Ram Manohar Lohia, independent India’s rare thinking politician, they have all singly and together failed the great socialist’s legacy. Lohia was an uncompromising opponent of the Congress Party. Whether it is Mulayam or Laloo, Gowda or Nitish, they have all compromised with the Congress for the sake of power. Lohia in his time had allied with the Jana Sangh, without in anyway being defensive about that alliance because it stemmed from an ideological and intellectual affinity. As for his followers, well, they divorced ideology a long time ago and now hanker after power for its own sake.
It is most likely that following Friday’s luncheon meeting of these veterans of countless permutations and combinations in the political firmament, there will be further progress in putting together the Humpty Dumpties of the erstwhile Janata Parivar. No-one seems to be more desperate in this lot of Janata oldies than Nitish Kumar. Because his gamble in challenging the rise of Modi had badly misfired, forcing him out of chief ministry, and humiliating his party in the Lok Sabha poll, Nitish is looking for vindication, nay, revenge. Ironically, the man he nominated to succeed him as chief minister has landed the State in a further mess.
Indeed, Kumar feels personally wounded by the rise of Modi and the latter’s sterling performance as prime minister. Therefore, he is ready to do his worst to stop Modi from stomping all over him when the time comes for the voters in Bihar to elect a new Assembly. Though one has no concrete evidence, it is quite likely that there was a tacit understanding between Kumar and L.K. Advani to prevent the anointment of Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. The pincer approach, which envisaged that Advani would try and stop Modi from within while Kumar would do from outside, came a cropper when the BJP leadership recognized the groundswell in favour of the Gujarat CM.
As a result, Advani lost an opportunity to play the elder statesman to the Modi dispensation, never mind that pretence about the so-called group of Margdarshaks. And Kumar found himself stranded. His personal ambition punctured, he was forced to beg, cap in hand, for a compromise with his sworn foe, Laloo Yadav, and the wicked Congress for seat-sharing. Since then he has been desperately going around marshalling rag-tag troops in order to do battle against Modi. On the basis of available evidence, Kumar is again set to come to grief. Now, what did Indira Gandhi say about zero-plus-zero equals.
Anything to retain bungalow
And you thought Lalu Prasad Yadav was bed-ridden after undergoing a heart procedure in a Mumbai hospital and, therefore, needed to be in Delhi for his doctors to visit him multiple times daily to watch over his delicate state of health? Well, we did not make that claim. Lalu Prasad’s wife, Rabri Devi, did. In a letter to the Urban Development Ministry, while seeking yet another extension for staying put in the huge mansion on Tughlak Road, she said that doctors from the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences are required to check on her husband’s health at regular intervals daily and, therefore, his staying in the Type VIII bungalow was an absolute must.
In that case, you might want to know what was Lalu doing at Mulayam Singh Yadav’s house on Friday, helping himself to his favourite eats while mulling over the possibility of an anti-BJP front for hours on end.
Meanwhile, the claim that Lalu is paying market rent of Rs.1 lakh per month for the spacious bungalow is neither here nor there. Tens of thousands of Delhiites would be more than glad to pay twice or even thrice that amount for renting that bungalow which comes with modern fittings, multiple bedrooms, attached toilets, an office block, security guards’ rooms, servants’ quarters, etc., and, above all, acres and acres of lawns on one of the more central roads in Lutyens’ Delhi. Even your columnist with a modest income might consider renting it for Rs.1 lakh a month if the Ministry of Urban Welfare is game.
It is the domestic economy, stupid
We per force return to the black money debate. From the media reports it would seem that there is very little material before the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team examining this seemingly humongous problem. It is suggested that aside from the 600-odd names in the HSBC list, no other lists are with the two former SC judges who constitute the SIT. Yes, the German list of accounts in a Liechtenstein bank is also with the SIT. Of course, we may be wrong. And there may well be more substantive material with the SIT.
But how reliable, how authentic is it? is a question that the SIT will have to keep in mind. Internet can mislead you into believing that the money stashed abroad even exceeds all the currency notes ever printed in the Indian mints. So, care needs to be taken to sort out the wheat of real money from the chaff of mere innuendo and imaginary figures.
But the question is this: is it enough to undertake to pronounce on the problem of mountains of black money allegedly stashed away in secret accounts in foreign lands in the absence of a reasonably sound evidence? Even at the pain of repetition we will like to assert that the whole direction and tenor of the debate was hijacked by those who harped incessantly almost exclusively on black money in secret accounts abroad. Had the proponents of the debate also emphasized the humongous presence of black money in the domestic economy it would have been far more fruitful for all of us Indians.
Despite the increasing digitization of the economy, computerization of various branches of taxation, there has been no noticeable fall in the circulation of black money. You can buy a Rs.1-crore-plus limousine, an expensive mansion in a tony part of Lutyens’ Delhi with only token cheque payments with the remainder coming though benami entries bolstered by plain cash. The battle against black money must necessarily begin at home. Nowhere else.
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