Two Wrongs Do Not A Right Make

THE makers of our Constitution had envisaged, indeed cautioned, that Article 356, which empowers the president to dismiss a state government, should be used only in the rarest of rare cases. If there was ever a state government that met this criterion it is that of Rabri Devi in Bihar (for Rabri Devi read Laloo Yadav). Never has an administration treated an entire state as a personal fiefdom and neglected its basic duties to the people who elected it so callously. Never has a government been so neck-deep in corruption and crime. Year after year this state returns unutilised Plan funds to the Centre because it no longer has the machinery left to make good use of them or any interest in creating one. In the halcyon days of the National Front, Mr Laloo Yadav was able to use Plan funds openly to meet current expenses bloated by an overstaffed civil service and countless rake-offs to crony politicians and contractors. Those days ended when Manmohan Singh became the finance minister. So money meant for development projects began to go back to the Centre.

In the meantime, the people of Bihar remain the poorest and most benighted in the country. To visit the state is to go back fifty years in the past. In large parts of the state, the stygian darkness of the rural night is unrelieved by the glimmer of electric lights. The roads are potholed nightmares in a state that once had the best road network in the country. Highway robbery, murder and caste wars are common: there is little law and order even in the towns and none whatever in the villages. There are more murders in Bihar than killings by militants in Kashmir.

According to a state intelligence report, there are more than 120 dacoit gangs at large in the state. The same report alleges that a large number of them enjoy the patronage of Mr Laloo Yadav himself. Finally, the Rs 900-crore fodder scam revealed the extent to which Laloo had 'Robin Hoodised' the Bihar administration. When the CBI obtained warrants for his arrest, he openly warned it against sending its officials to Patna to arrest him. In Patna, huge gangs of hoodlums took up watch outside his house to prevent anyone from entering it and serving him with the warrant, and a thoroughly co-opted and corrupted state police refused to help the CBI officials who had gone to Patna to serve the warrant. In Delhi, Laloo threatened to, and eventually did, break the Janata Dal. When then prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral finally succeeded in persuading him to give himself up, he insisted on setting his time and terms for presenting himself at the court. And in a final swipe at the spirit, if not letter, of the Constitution, he installed his wife as chief minister, and continued to reign from his five-star jail in a specially refurbished rest house.

In short, in the 51-year history of Indian democracy, no one has so completely betrayed the trust of the people who elected him, or so brazenly demonstrated his contempt for the law and Constitution of India. Despite that, Mr Vajpayee's government has made a grave error in recommending the use of Article 356 to dismiss the Rabri Devi government. To begin with, the government has, ostensibly, acted upon a recommendation by the governor, Sunder Singh Bhandari, who wrote to the president that in his assessment it was no longer possible for the administration to be carried on in Bihar according to the provisions of the Constitution. As has been pointed out, this is not only true but has been true for some time. The only problem is that the subjective assessment of the governor is the third of no fewer than 10 grounds for dismissal that have been expressly ruled out by the Supreme Court in the S. R. Bommai vs Union of India case. Allegations of corruption is the seventh of the grounds disallowed, and the maladministration of the state, which has to be Mr Bhandari's substantive justification for recommending dissolution, is the first of those 10 grounds. What the Supreme Court has laid down, in effect, therefore, is that except when a state government refuses to heed Central directives given under several specific Articles of the Constitution, the people, and only the people, who elected it, have the right to punish it. That is the essence of federalism.

The BJP's decision is also suspect because of its timing. It has come days after the state Assembly decisively rejected the bill to create a Vananchal state out of South Bihar. This has inevitably fuelled the speculation that it is dismissing the Bihar government in order to impose the truncation of the state upon its people. More even than the three grounds cited above, this suspicion can play havoc with Indian federalism. If the Bihar government is dismissed, and the Centre carves out Vananchal while the state is under Central rule, how will Indians allay Kashmiri fears that one day another government in New Delhi might similarly separate Jammu from the Valley against the wishes of the majority in the state? It is difficult, therefore, not to agree with commerce minister Ramakrishna Hegde and the BJP's other allies that recommending Rabri Devi government's dismissal is a monumental mistake.

Not surprisingly, the president, Mr K.R. Narayanan, took a decision to refer it back to the cabinet. In his communique to the home ministry late last Friday, one of the reasons he cited for turning down the dismissal plea was that Rabri Devi had not lost the confidence of the legislature. During Mr Inder Gujral's prime ministership too, Mr Narayanan had sent back the United Front's recommendation to dismiss the Kalyan Singh government on precisely the same grounds.

The BJP will, therefore, almost certainly get a reprieve from its own folly. If that happens it would do well not to insist on Rabri's dismissal. Constitutional and national considerations apart, the BJP should have realised that recommending Rabri Devi's dismissal cannot fail to rekindle Jayalalitha's demand that the DMK government be dismissed too. Since it is in no position to meet this demand, it will create a powerful urge in the AIADMK to quit the government. Even the Bihar electorate, which has been edging towards the BJP and Samata coalition from election to election, is likely to swing back behind Laloo if New Delhi pushes the Vananchal bill though while the state is under president's rule.