Commentary/Saisuresh Sivaswamy

The Day of Reckoning

As the rest of the nation went to bed on Thursday night oblivious of what Friday would bring, for those caught in the vortex of the political machinations in New Delhi, it must have been a very long night, a night without end. Faster than a supercomputer, their minds must have worked out the various parliamentary permutations and combinations that would enable them to achieve their respective goals.

For the embattled Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and his ragtail of political groupies, the battle is as good as having been lost. All that remains unfinished is the count later this evening in the Lok Sabha, which every political party hopes to convert into a pre-election pageantry. The best speakers on each side must be poring over their speeches at this moment, the drama heightened by the fact that the image is being beamed across to 900 million people live on television and via the Internet to the rest of the world.

So Deve Gowda gambled on the Congressman's paranoia for elections and lost. But will the Congress party actually vote against his government en bloc? To defy the three-line whip issued by the high command almost 50 MPs need to cross-vote; yes, that will result in their expulsion from the party, but not in their disqualification from the House.

And, although their intention may be noble, the UF will still be short of the magic figure needed to survive in office. And that figure will be unreachable even with the support of the maverick Shiv Sena, whose MP once before bailed out the P V Narasimha Rao government by the simple artifice of abstaining from the crucial vote.

But the most obvious denouement from Friday's parliamentary thrust and parry is another general election. Much is made of the fact that the electorate does not want another election so soon, which is a whole load of bunkum. What the electorate does not want for one is the current bunch of politicians, so will the entire lot please jump into the Arabian Sea or Bay of Bengal, whichever is closer? The people don't mind any number of polls, so long as it will bring in a government that genuinely cares for them, so don't be surprised that if there are elections this year, the voter turnout does not cross 40 per cent. Elections are not what the people don't want, it is the politicians in the fray.

And at the time of campaigning, the United Front leadership will be hard put to explain to its voters why it is fighting the very party with whose support it remained in office for 10 months. What will they attribute their mistake to, political naivete? But even a cursory look at the Congress party's record in the matter will have enlightened them of what the future held for them, and if they failed to see the writing on the wall, that too in Bodoni Bold font of 120 point size, how can they accuse the Congress of betrayal, the voter is bound to ask. And that will be a question no one is bound to have an answer to, not even that messiah, V P Singh.

For General Kesri, who is fighting both his and his party's last-ditch battle, having crossed the political Rubicon 11 days ago, will he be able to keep his flock together in Parliament when it is most needed? Already, a subterranean demand has been made for a conscience vote, and one needn't be a student of political science to know that Friday holds nightmares for the Congress MP. Having won his seat against great odds, he is not sure he can repeat the miracle this year.

One related thought is, what could Kesri have done in the circumstances, with Deve Gowda rubbing salt on his wounds? Talk, is the obvious answer, but that again could easily be mistaken for supplication. While the average Congressman may be comfortable in that position the party has also its public image to consider. The previous two times that the Congress propped up the Union government, there was no confusion that it was in the driver's seat. Approaching Deve Gowda with complaints will be a tacit admission that the party has forfeited that vantage position, and Kesri could have done so only at the risk of writing his own political obit.

Yes, the Congress is badly placed if elections are held tomorrow, but there is no indication that things will have improved two years down the line. For the longer the United Front continues in office, the more remote will become the Congress party's chances of staging a comeback, for the UF was slowly replacing this party, not the BJP, in the political arena. How ironic that in the fiftieth year of Indian Independence, the Congress party has to once again exhort its cadres to do or die, and under such dissimilar circumstances! If it is the nation that was to be saved yesterday, today it is the party whose existence is in danger.

If the United Front is banking on the Congress party not wanting to vote with the BJP and against its government, that is a forlorn hope. For in 1990, the party suffered no qualms in doing so and ejecting the V P Singh government from office.

As for the Bharatiya Janata Party, even its worst critics cannot deny that it is sitting pretty. One year ago, when the Congress and the UF joined hands to keep it out of South Block, professional obit-writers were working overtime; today, the party has proved the adage that he who laughs last laughs best. It knows that if elections are held at this juncture, it can only improve its parliamentary tally.

The first step in the current drama was taken by the BJP leadership last month, when they forged ties with the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. It was done in the hope, belief and knowledge that the repercussions will unsettle the fragile arrangement in New Delhi, and it did.

Tell us what you think of this column