Congress' Epic Mistake

FOR more than a year the Congress party had not made a single wrong move. Ever since Sonia Gandhi became its president it had taken principled stands on a wide range of issues, refused to enter into opportunistic alliances with smaller parties, and resisted the temptation to bring down the Vajpayee government by wooing away one or more of the bjp's coalition partners. The logic behind its reticence was simple: the Congress had nothing to gain and everything to lose from forming a coalition government. As the experience of the United Front and the bjp-led coalition had demonstrated, coalitions are inherently impotent and unstable. They are impotent because their internal contradictions make it impossible for the government to take any bold decisions; they are unstable because the smaller parties in the coalition feel as threatened by the success of the government as by its failure. Sonia therefore wisely decided that her party would make a bid for power only when it had a good chance of coming back on its own, or at worst with the support of one or two of its traditional allies.

The voters have been quick to notice the change. In the Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh elections last November, and in a bye-election in Uttar Pradesh, they showed that they equate the change with a return to responsible government. The right course of action for the party would have been to allow this feeling to build, and reveal itself in the Andhra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Maharashtra state elections at the end of this year and early next year. With victories in five and possibly six out of seven states under its belt, the Congress would have been ready to make its bid for power at the Centre.

That road to power has been all but closed by its decision to oppose President's rule in Bihar. It is not easy to understand why the Congress did this. The explanation given by Arjun Singh-reportedly the prime mover of the working committee's abrupt reversal of its earlier stand-that the question of the (secular) Congress siding with the (Hindu chauvinist) bjp simply did not arise is disingenuous, for it has done this times without number in the past. A more plausible explanation is that having received a faint foretaste of power, many Congress leaders, including the insatiable Singh, could not wait to taste some more. The hunger for power may also have been fed by growing nervousness that with the price of onions and other vegetables having collapsed, inflation having dropped to four per cent, and the government having begun to tackle national problems like Indo-US and Indo-Pak relations, the reduction of subsidies and economic reform in earnest, the worst was over for the bjp. Whatever the reasoning, the move was an epic mistake. The party's managers had obviously calculated that if the government was not able to get the ordinance declaring President's rule in Bihar passed by the Rajya Sabha, the humiliation it suffered would either force Vajpayee to resign or further weaken the coalition and hasten its demise. But Vajpayee curbed his first impulse to do precisely that and quietly withdrew the proclamation. What's more, by calling on Sonia to ask her to reconsider her party's decision, he has cleverly made the Congress responsible for whatever happens next in Bihar.

The first casualty of the Congress' decision is its attempt to persuade voters that it has turned a new leaf. This claim now sounds hollow, for just whom is it supporting? It is a neta who has misgoverned his state with a truly unmatched disregard for its peoples' needs; who has preferred, year after year, to return Plan grants to the Centre unused if he is not allowed to siphon them off into revenue spending or, worse, into his and his cronies' pockets; who is personally indicted in a Rs 900 crore scam but has cocked a snook at the law and continued to rule through his wife; under whom law and order has completely collapsed and who, if state police intelligence reports are to be believed, is the patron and protector of a third of the 120 or so dacoit gangs that now effectively rule Bihar.

The decision has also shown that the Congress doesn't believe its own boast that it is capable of returning to power on its own. Why else would it stab its state unit to death in Bihar, and court the Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha instead? And after what it has done in Bihar, can any UP Congressman be sure that it will not sacrifice the party at the altar of alliance with Mulayam Singh for a third time? That is what Rajiv Gandhi and then Narasimha Rao did in 1991 and 1996. The end result was the complete elimination of the Congress from UP. A similar aversion to the bjp made Sitaram Kesri support Laloo after he split the Janata Dal in 1997. The Bihar Congress paid the price by being wiped out in the March 1998 general elections.

Lastly, it might not have occurred to the Congress but it certainly did occur to a Bombay taxi driver that in getting Rabri reinstated, the Congress has humiliated the President of India. For he has twice sent back recommendations from this and the previous government to impose President's rule in UP and Bihar. He has therefore shown that so far as Article 356 of the Constitution is concerned, he is no longer a rubber stamp. By reinstating Rabri, the Congress has offered a hostage to fortune. It would be too much to expect a miraculous transformation in the Bihar government's performance. Thus all that the bjp has to do is to leak a steady stream of information to the national press on the Dacoit Raj in Bihar, the criminal backgrounds of Laloo's mlas, the absence of any semblance of responsible government, and the pandemic corruption that is the sole distinguishing feature of Laloo's decade-long rule, to keep the Congress permanently on the defensive. Three months of this, and the Congress' ambition to come back to power on its own will turn into a pipedream.