That Awful Feeling Again

When Sonia Gandhi refused the prime ministership and asked her party to select the learned and scrupulously honest Dr Manmohan Singh in her place, virtually the whole of India allowed itself to believe that Indian politics had at last turned a new leaf. For, perhaps the first time since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, it had leaders to whom power was not an end but a means to an end. When it unveiled the Common Minimum Programme and promised 'reforms with a human face', hope blossomed that this government would not only make the lives of the poor easier, but would rescue the political system from the clutches of moneybags and musclemen into whose hands it had fallen.

But two recent events have dimmed that hope and revived the fear that when it comes to grabbing power, the Congress under Sonia is no different from the Congress under any of her predecessors. The first was the haste with which the party sought to grab power on the back of a defection and horse-trading from the ruling BJP government in Goa. The second is its unprincipled grab for power after the elections in Jharkhand.

The crisis in Goa began when BJP chief minister Manohar Parrikar dismissed his minister for town and country planning, Atensio Monserrate, on charges of inordinate corruption. Monserrate offered his services to the Congress and the horse-trading began. Within days, three other BJP MLAs changed sides and only days later, two more independents whom Parrikar had made ministers also deserted him.

When Parrikar survived a vote of confidence, taken allegedly while policemen were in the assembly chamber, the incensed governor dismissed him within 30 minutes under an article of the Constitution that has never been used before. The governor had good reason to feel that the Constitution had been violated, at least in spirit, but this immediately opened the Union government and the Congress high command to accusations that they had engineered Parrikar's dismissal from Delhi using a complaisant governor in order to grab power. The fact that a senior Congress leader, Priyaranjan Das Munshi, had been with the governor all afternoon only deepened the suspicion. The charge gained still more substance when the governor gave the new Congress chief minister Pratapsinh Rane a full 30 days to prove his majority—ample time for still more horse-trading. To most Goans and political observers elsewhere, it seemed that after all nothing had changed in the Congress.

The Jharkhand governor's decision to call upon the upa to form the government when the BJP is the single largest party not only goes against the emerging constitutional convention of asking the single largest party or pre-election coalition to form the government, but also against the argument that the upa itself is presenting in Bihar for being allowed to form the government—that with 92 seats it is the largest pre-poll alliance in the state. This has added to the disillusionment that is beginning to creep into popular perceptions of the Congress, for it shows that for the Congress cadres at least, if not for Sonia, power remains an end in itself, and is never likely to become a means to an end.

The governor's decision also shows that stable governance did not rank high on his and presumably the home ministry's priorities. For the 42 MLAs that the upa claims the support of belong to no less than seven utterly disparate parties and include three independents. Four decades of dismal experience has shown that such a government will not last long; that its chief minister will perpetually be hostage to the opportunism and greed of its independent members and smaller parties and that knowing they will not be in power for long, his ministers will lose no time in feathering their nests.All this too is dreadfully familiar.

It is not difficult to understand why even leaders who sincerely want what is best for the country fall prey to this kind of short-sighted opportunism. In Indian politics, power is the only glue that binds political parties together. A leader who denies his party cadres an opportunity to capture it when there is even a remote possibility of doing so risks losing their allegiance and having them gravitate to the party that is currently in power. For the Congress, this problem has become acute in precisely the states where it is no longer a dominant party and has been out of power for a long time.

But the damage that this kind of rank opportunism is doing to democracy and therefore to the future stability of the country is incalculable. For the Congress will not remain in power forever. So, what it is doing or tolerating today, the BJP can and probably will do tomorrow. The result will be a cumulative erosion and eventual destruction of all conventions on which democracy rests.

There is no quick fix for the problem that has been described above. But the government can limit the damage by calling an all-party meeting to hammer out a set of rules for governors to follow when faced by hung parliaments. By far the best course would be to make it mandatory for the governor to call the leader of the largest party or pre-election coalition and ask it to prove its majority not in a private head count, but on the floor of the house.