Keep The Centre Out

IN Bangalore the other day, prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made a strange statement. He said the results of the four state assembly elections to be held later this month had no bearing on the stability of the BJP-led government at the Centre. So far so good; but he went on to add that this would be so because the BJP was bound to win. Mr Vajpayee's understanding of constitutional niceties is so poor that he did not realise that his second statement contradicted his first. If the Centre will not be destabilised because the BJP will do well in the state elections, it means that the Centre will be destabilised if it does badly. Despite his stout assertions, very few people believe that the BJP is going to do well in the coming elections in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. It is therefore not surprising that the restlessness in his coalition has grown instead of abating.

What Mr Vajpayee has inadvertently done is to strengthen a trend that has been growing ever since the split of the Congress in 1969 and the growth of political instability in the states separated the assembly elections from those for the Lok Sabha. This is for political parties to claim that every reverse for the ruling party at the Centre reflects a withdrawal of the people's mandate in the states, and vice versa. The first party to use this pretext to dismiss an elected government was the Janata Party, which used Article 356 to dismiss nine Congress governments in various states in 1977. The Janata had at least the semblance of a justification: all nine were in the sixth year of their lives, having had it prolonged by a constitutional amendment that had been pushed through when 31 members of Parliament were in jail and was about to be annulled. But it set an unfortunate precedent that Mrs Gandhi was quick to seize upon in 1980 after she returned to power at the Centre. Unlike 1977, the dismissed governments had ruled for less than three years at the time when they were bundled out. They were therefore justifiably angry. One of them was the Akali government in Punjab, and thereby hangs a tale of 50,000 murders.

Our so-called political leaders, however, learned nothing! No sooner had Rajiv Gandhi swept to power on the coattails of Mrs Gandhi's assassination, than Karnataka Congressmen began to demand the dismissal of Ramakrishna Hegde's Janata government in their state. Unlike his peers, Hegde took up the challenge and asked for a dissolution of the assembly. In the election that followed, the people of Karnataka decided to end his minority status and gave him a two-thirds majority. Our "leaders" still did not learn the lesson that state elections are fought on different considerations from a general election and continued to marry one forcibly to the other. When Congress dominance of the Centre ended, this tendency entered a new and far more dangerous phase. Till 1989 changes at the Centre had been made the excuse for forcing changes in the states. This was a blatant violation of the democratic rights of the people but at least the damage was confined to only parts of the country. The nation as a whole was not threatened.

 In the nineties, ever since minority or shaky coalition governments have begun to assume power at the Centre, this discredited logic has been reversed. Today a defeat in one or more state elections is being used as a pretext for demanding a change of government at the Centre. The first time the possibility arose was  after Mr Narasimha Rao dismissed BJP governments in four states for complicity in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. As the November 1993 state elections approached, the entire cabinet committee on political affairs of the ruling party managed to convince itself that if the Congress did not do well in them, the government would have no option but to resign. Fortunately for the country, the BJP suffered severe reverses and the danger passed. Today it has come back to haunt the BJP.

NO one can tell for certain what the outcome of the forthcoming elections will be. If the BJP manages to win in even one of the three states, the danger will once more pass. But till the Indian political system learns to respect the fundamental principles of the democracy on which its leaders pride themselves, it will continue to hover over the nation like a portent of doom. The fundamental principle involved here, which must forever remain inviolate, is that state and central elections must be kept apart. A reverse in one can at most serve as a warning to the ruling party to mend its ways. It cannot be made a pretext for denying it the opportunity to heed the warning and change its policies.

That is only half of the reason. The other half is that polls now take place in several states every year. If each year's elections are taken as a referendum on the performance of the ruling party or coalition at the Centre, then all policy-making at the national level will come to a halt. All long-term planning will come to an end. Whatever little capacity remains in the Centre to take decisions that are unpopular in the short term in the expectation of reaping political dividends in the long run will vanish. In sum, the authority of the national government, which is the only thing that makes a state a state, will collapse in ruins. Disintegration will follow. It will be a disintegration that nobody really wants (any more than they wanted a change of government in Karnataka in 1985). But it will come nonetheless. This has happened more than once in India's long history. It is a sobering thought that every time an Indian empire has disintegrated, the collapse has started at the Centre. The Indian people should have been hearing this basic truth from the prime minister, and not from a lone columnist. If Mr Vajpayee is unable to educate them, the task, perforce, will devolve upon the president of India.