Udyog Parv and a Dalit president

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The job of the President of India surely glows with gravitas, complete with a bespoke palace on Raisina Hill that could make the White House in Washington look modest. The words in the Constitution defining the position of its occupant in the Indian republic are also grand. Article 53(1) says that the executive power of the Union shall be vested in the President.

But these are just words as the issue of the President’s power was settled way back in the 1940’s, with B. R. Ambedkar, draftsman of the Constitution, favouring a truly powerful chief executive, and the Gandhi-Nehru clique, on the other hand, being all out for powerful legislature. The latter won. No wonder the same article goes on to underline that (19-3): “Nothing in this article shall…prevent Parliament from conferring by law functions on authorities other than the President”.  The fact that the Indian President is merely a titular head is known to school students, so his election should hardly attract either politicians’ get-up-and-go or even common man’s interest. Yet, politicians have always given the Presidential election—with its cumbersome calculation of votes—more weightage than it rightfully deserves.

In the Sixties, Indira Gandhi, in her early years as prime minister, wanted her protégé V. V. Giri to become President but her right-wing ‘syndicate’ in the party had Neelam Sanjiva Reddy as its candidate. Giri won, but not until the differences escalated and led to split in the Congress. In the Nineties, K. R. Narayanan easily glided through the election when the electoral college was badly splintered, thanks to the Mandal-era politics then prevalent, and everybody thought the former student of London School of Economics would be too scholarly to be assertive in India’s cutthroat political environment. Yet, it is this short and unassuming Dalit who surprised all when he refused to dismiss two state governments, of Kalyan Singh and Rabri Devi, despite being pushed by I. K. Gujral and A. B. Vajpayee respectively. But the Rashtrapati Bhavan can truly prove to be a gilded cage for over-ambitious politicians, as it happened with present President Pranab Mukherjee, who had aspired to the prime minister’s post occupied by  Manmohan Singh and had gone some way in gathering support of UPA partners until Sonia Gandhi got him summarily despatched to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Mukherjee’s term is due to end on 25 July, before which his replacement must be elected. Except Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, no other president had a second term, nor is it likely that Mukherjee, a dyed-in-the-wool Congressman, will have too many helping hands stretching out from a predominantly pro-BJP electoral college. The total voting strength of the 776 MPs and 4,120 MLAs translates into 10,98,882 votes (each MLA has a voting strength multiplied by a factor of his state’s population), the halfway mark being 549,442. The ruling NDA is already ahead of it and is adding on to the lead after every election. There is little doubt, therefore, that the new occupant of the best address in Delhi will be a man (or woman ?) approved by the ‘saffron brotherhood’, if not being one of it.

Earlier, in 2002, BJP under Vajpayee as prime minister boldly supported ‘missile man’ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Given a chance, the party could produce a hard-core saffronite from its RSS stable. But it did nothing of that sort. Kalam, in his turn, made the BJP proud. Being a Muslim president, he still supported the Uniform Civil Code, an issue close to the BJP’s heart for decades. Moreover, he was not given to pussy-footing on dismissal of state governments headed by leaders mired in corruption charges. In 2005, he dismissed the Bihar government headed by Rabri Devi, a task that his predecessor, Narayanan, had refused to carry out. It is a fact that Kalam did not oblige hard-core nationalists as he prolonged the mercy petition of Afzal Guru, the mastermind of the plan to attack the Indian Parliament. But Kalam’s choice brought to the Vajpayee set-up a rare respectability in both domestic and international spheres as this aeronautics scientist was held in high esteem. In the Vajpayee years, the BJP ruled only through a coalition and its grip on national politics was still unsure. A pacifist and multiculturist at the Rashtrapati Bhavan was an asset then.

In 2017, things have undergone a sea-change. Apart from holding more than half the Lok Sabha seats on its own, the BJP, singly or through allies, is in power from the hills and the plains to the seas. Modi has succeeded in doing what Vajpayee couldn’t, winning states after states.  It is no time for an ideologically driven leader like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or his fellow-thinkers like party president Amit Shah and RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagawat, to shelter behind a façade of goody goody liberalism and be content with the party’s elders from the pre-Modi era. Example: L. K. Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi, Kariya Munda and half a dozen more. The new names that are surfacing are hard-boiled RSS men who are also Dalit: like 73-year-old cabinet minister Thawar Chand Gehlot, a Dalit. Also in the running is Satyanarayan Jatia, a jatav (Mayawati’s caste). Though he was denied Lok Sabha ticket, the party rewarded him with a Rajya Sabha seat. There may be an unknown, unsung RSS Dalit hero for the post. The presidential poll is like Udyog Parv in the Mahabharata.  The previous assembly elections are a testimony to abiding upper caste support to BJP. Modi himself claimed that he is an OBC and garnering non-Yadavs in big numbers. He is now eyeing the Dalits who were never part of saffron dispensation. Modi, ever since his arrival at 7 Race Course Road (Lok Nayak Marg), has done everything possible to embrace the legacy of Dr Ambedkar. A Dalit commitment completes the circle. Political pundits are unnecessarily misplacing their bets on yesteryears’ horses.

'Luv and Kush' winning battles

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the inseparable duos from Modi’s years as Gujarat chief minister. Like Luv and Kush, the warrior brothers, their partnership is mainly forged on (electoral) battlegrounds. But it has matured over the decades, with their voyage from Sabarmati to Ganga. Just how much power they pack in their punch came to light, for the second time after the 2014 general election, along the entire upper stretch of the Ganga last week, with the BJP campaign steered by the duo. They captured 379 of the 473 seats in the two assemblies of Uttarakhand (70) and Uttar Pradesh (403). That’s more than half the land washed by the “sacred river”.

Like Luv and Kush, they have issues to settle. The fighter brothers of mythology longed to right the wrong done to their mother, Sita, by their father, Ram. Modi and Shah are on a mission to establish their BJP as the next national alternative, after crushing the earlier one, Congress, and squelching its single binding factor, the Gandhi dynasty. During the earlier NDA rule, BJP’s efforts to do it was half-hearted, at best, and the end of A.B.Vajpayee’s government in 2004 put the Congress and the dynasty again at the top for a whole decade. Before taking charge of the BJP’s 2014 combat, Modi had put Shah in charge of the party in UP, as the two could not fight separately indeed. They must draw their bow backwards at once and release the arrows together.

After the phenomenal victory in 2014, in which the Congress was humbled to only 44 seats in the Lok Sabha, Luv and Kush had to catch a breath as they faced reversal in the 2015 assembly election in Bihar. It’s not that Modi and Shah had run out of their magic. Modi’s oratory was grand as ever and Shah picked up candidates and party workers from caste groups with the alacrity of the pelican snatching a fish from the lake’s surface. But nothing worked as the opposition had buried their historic internal feuds to form a Chinese wall against BJP.

This time round, the Modi-Shah team was meticulous and lucky. They left nothing to chances and learnt from the humiliating defeat in Bihar. In Bihar, the BJP worked hard to woo the Yadavs thinking that they will be angry with Nitish Kumar being projected as Chief Ministerial candidate. In the process, it ignored the other OBCs in Bihar and the Congress-RJD-JD(U) alliance proved fatal. The Luv-Kush duo knew the consequences of BJP losing UP and left nothing to chances. The strategy was in place from April last year when an insignificant OBC leader Keshav Prasad Maurya was appointed as UP BJP Chief. Three months later in July several OBC first timers MPs from UP were inducted in the Modi Council of Ministers. The luck favoured Luv-Kush duo again when some behind the scenes efforts to form a Bihar-type Mahagathbandhan (umbrella alliance of anti-BJP parties) in Uttar Pradesh failed. Then came the generational conflict raging between Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh Yadav, Chief Minister. This left the carefully crafted alignment between OBC groups and Muslims all but defunct. Besides, Mayawati, supremo of BSP, the party of Dalits, carried such long and bitter record of enmity with Mulayam Yadav that a BSP-SP coalition was out of the question. 

This left Mayawati with her 11% Jatavs and truncated Muslims. Shah began to work on the non-Jatavs in a big way. Despite an alliance between Congress and SP in the state, hammered out between Akhilesh and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, the portly BJP chief tapped its backward constituents for lines of fissure. The Modi-Shah duo re-established the OBC link that BJP had lost with the political eclipse of former chief minister Kalyan Singh (he is now Rajasthan Governor). Shah ensured that Kalyan Singh’s grandson gets the Assembly ticket and any OBC leader worth a salt given primacy.

Shah’s long hunt for non-Yadav OBC and non-Jatav yielded a handpicked army that could bypass the caste silos that Congress, SP or BSP could occupy. Though community-wise voting behaviour reports are not available yet, there is little doubt that BJP could make deep inroads into non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBC groups. There was little hope, though, that Muslims would press the EVM button in favour of BJP. But Modi succeeded in created a ray of hope amongst the Muslim women by telling them that he would end the regressive Triple Talaq. Secondly, Modi’s campaign speeches remained refreshingly ‘development-oriented’ in the early phases of the seven-phase poll. But as polling moved eastward, Modi invoked his trademark divisive rhetoric while leaders like Yogi Adityanath did the rest to consolidate non-Muslim votes.

For Shah, revenge tasted best when served cold. His swagger, though muted, hit the jackpot as he said that in the first two stages of the poll, in which 125 seats were at stake, his party had won 115, against his own claim of 90 and rout predicted by the Opposition & the media. The BJP’s social engineering paid rich dividends in UP where BSP is routed, RLD wiped out and Congress decimated. The situation is so pitiable that Mayawati will be out of even Rajya Sabha in April 2018 when her term ends.

Though Congress has retained Punjab, a Sikh (non-Hindu) majority state. But the entire BJP leadership was praying for its win as it never wanted AAP to win the border state. The AAP’s rout in Goa has also gladdened the Duo’s hearts. In Manipur, inhabited by tribal people, it is facing extinction from the mainline states where Hindu identity can be political currency. Modi and Shah, the ‘Luv-Kush’ duo of BJP seems unstoppable in the 2019 general election.