Fly on the Wall - Meira as interim AICC Chief!

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Meira as interim AICC Chief!

Utter confusion prevails in the Congress as Gandhi family loyalists are not sure how Rahul Gandhi will conduct himself to return as party president. These loyalists are pitching for his early return as interim president even before the revamped Central Election Authority (CEA) completes the organizational elections by March next year. The loyalists say Rahul Gandhi be brought as interim president and confirmed later as full-time president. But the dissidents are determined to prevent Rahul's return as interim party chief and have floated the name of former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. She will have 3-4 vice presidents representing various regions to strengthen the party. Since Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot is disinclined to don the mantle at this juncture, there is no other suitable name for the post. Bhupinder Singh Hooda will be one of the vice presidents.The Obama memoirs have done the worst damage to Rahul Gandhi at a time when he is trying hard to bounce back. Obama, in a way, has strengthened dissidents’ hands. On her part, Sonia Gandhi is delaying the whole process until the Assembly polls in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry. She hopes that Congress will perform better in these 5state Assembly polls which may pave the way for his return as party chief.

Why Nadda on 7th Heaven

Something unprecedented happened when the PM visited BJP headquarters for a “thanks giving” function to Bihar voters after its rare win. The BJP emerged as a “big brother” to Nitish Kumar after two decades and it was no mean achievement. The Bihar polls were a turning point for the party’s fortunes in elections due next year. Addressing workers, the PM suddenly turned to Nadda and said, “Nadda ji aap aage chalo hum tumahare saath hain” (Nadda ji, you lead it from the front and we are with you). Heads turned as such right-handed compliments were never given to any of Nadda’s predecessors by Modi in the past. When Modi repeated the compliment, Nadda got up from his seat to thank Modi. When Modi repeated the Nadda slogan a third time, Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari and others got up and clapped for Nadda rather sheepishly. Was Modi sending a message to leaders who did not go for campaigning in Bihar anticipating a defeat. The rare compliment sent Nadda on 7th Heaven as he single-handedly remained stationed in Bihar earning a feather in the cap. Is he coming out of the shadow of his seniors? One will have to watch out. But he has made his mark. 

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Finally, STC begins winding up

When the Modi government came to power, it had big plans to sell or shut down ailing PSUs. But six years in power, the Modi government realized it was easier said than done. It failed to sell or revive BSNL/MTNL despite spending billions of rupees of golden handshake to employees. It may succeed selling Air India and BPCL but at a far below the money it had envisaged. It wanted to shut down STC six years ago. It is only now that STC will be delisted from NSE and BSE. The STC Board has issued notifications to close down all branches including Mumbai, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad by November 30 and others by December this year. Come 2021, STC may exist only on paper to resolve its ongoing legal issues. Employees have been offered a lucrative golden handshake or transfer. Next in line will be MMTC. Both have huge land banks that could be sold off at a later stage to recoup the accumulated losses.

Rajnikant gives a miss

Amit Shah may have created a flutter by his roadshow in Chennai and sealing the BJP-AIADMK electoral alliance for the May 2021 Assembly polls. But his desire to meet the veteran cine-star Rajnikant or M K Alagiri, estranged brother of DMK Chief M K Stalin did not succeed. He held meetings until 2.30 in the morning in his hotel room. But both of them did not turn up.

Conscience vote goes abegging

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

In this space last week, I doubted if the secret ballot system in the presidential and vice-presidential elections could be entirely to the advantage of the BJP-led NDA. The opposition looked like having an ace up its sleeve as its candidate for Presidency, Meira Kumar, was bubbling over for what she thought could be “vote according to conscience”.

It wasn’t. Cross-voting had benefited not Kumar but Ram Nath Kovind, BJP’s victorious candidate. In Gujarat, as a prelude, perhaps, to former chief minister Shankar Sinh Baghela quitting the Congress, at least 11 Congress MLAs ditched Kumar to vote Kovind. In West Bengal, Kovind bagged the votes of 11 MLAs though BJP and its allies could have openly garnered only six MLAs. But its largely some dissidence in Congress & the Left that may have gone in favour of Kovind. Mamata devised a mechanism through which she ensured that there is no cross voting in her party except one MP who is suspended. In Maharashtra, Meira Kumar’s tally was 77, which fell short of her calculation by at least ten. In Uttar Pradesh, eight MLAs had violated their party instructions by voting Kovind; they could be ‘renegades’ from the Akhilesh Singh Yadav-faction of the Samajwadi Party. The numbers in the tiny north-eastern state of Tripura are baffling; in a state with no BJP legislator, Kovind found seven silent supporters. There were opposition reversals in Punjab too, as two of the Aam Aadmi Party’s four MPs are suspected to have for the BJP candidate.

There was a reverse trend as well. In Rajasthan, Meira Kumar was supported by ten more MLAs than her expected tally, a feat which is not possible without some BJP MLAs having been driven by the ‘call of conscience’. But volume-wise, the trend of cross-voting was overwhelmingly dominated by the BJP. Like Kumar, Gopal Gandhi, Opposition’s Vice Presidential candidate,  too has pinned his hope on the electors’ “conscience”.

The failure of the appeal to ‘good sense’ is not a recent phenomenon. In the years between Independence and promulgation of the Constitution in 1950, the so-called idea of India got delineated in the very preamble of the Constitution. It was made on behalf of the “people of India”, which is, by itself, an assertion that the country would make no discrimination on the ground of caste, creed, gender or religion. The preamble defined the Constitution’s four pillars: justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. B. R. Ambedkar, the acknowledged architect of the Constitution, said on the last day’s session of the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949: “Political democracy cannot last unless there is at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life”. Ambedkar had also said that these three principles of liberty, equality and fraternity were “not to be treated as separate items in a trinity” because (a) equality without liberty would kill individual initiative, (b) without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many, and (c) without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things…it would require a constable to enforce them”.

I have cited this long passage from one of the most sparkling discourses in Indian politics because it provides, in a sense, the essence of the “conscience” or “good sense” that UPA, the loser, has vainly tried to invoke. Such ideal is embedded in the Constitution and is made explicit in Ambedkar’s radiant prose. As the first to form government, it was the Congress’ turn to follow the principles laid down in the Constitution. But it failed and failed the people of India.

It was during the Congress rule that equality got divorced from liberty by a bizarre quality of government and its myriad rules and regulations. It snuffed out “individual initiative”, exactly as Ambedkar had predicted. Again, it was in the Congress rule that equality of opportunity was denied to the poor while the rich had the liberty to influence policy and get richer. Another Ambedkar prophesy that came true.

However, the absence of fraternity has a long history. The communal holocaust and partition in 1947 itself is a testimony to the dismal fact that the Indian society was revelling in fratricide instead of being fraternal. Nor was the Congress any less divisive than what it accuses Modi of, in its handling of caste and communal issues. From the 1980’s, when infusion of militancy turned Islam into a security threat, successive Congress or Congress-led governments had, instead of promoting fraternity, tried to put the communities into their separate silos. In the Shah Bano case, by refusing to reform the obsolete Muslim marital system, Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi pushed the community back into its medieval isolation. A fraternal approach would have been to help the community to reform itself. On the other hand, the Rajiv administration, by allowing a Hindu group to perform worship of Ram in the Babri mosque, virtually ignited the communal fire which is still blazing. Equality and fraternity became victims of decades of vote-bank politics.

The problem with Congress’ recent and vociferous appeal to people’s conscience is that most people—the new generation, in particular—do not think of BJP’s adversaries as repositories of conscience. Instead, they are seen by the younger Indians as a picture of ineptitude and corruption. Its the loss of credibility on policy and conduct.  It is not that the Congress doesn’t understand it, but it has few options. If it must keep its own conscience clear, it has to snap ties with Lalu Yadav. With that vanishes its toehold on power in Hindi-speaking India.

You down jack, I down jack

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Analysing the upcoming election (July 17) of the President of India may be like replaying the tape of an old cricket match. Because there is not much surprise left in the contest between Ram Nath Kovind, a career politician and the ruling NDA’s official candidate, and Meira Kumar, UPA’s, or rather the Congress’, official candidate, daughter of former deputy prime minister Jagjivan Ram, diplomat, former Lok Sabha Speaker, and an amateur rifle shooter. Kovind is way out front in the race, which generally follows party lines. And, in the arithmetic of voting strength, the NDA starts from a winning score of 63 per cent; it may go up, not down, in the weeks ahead.

But it is still an interesting election. For the BJP, the choice of candidate holds a major surprise for the assorted scaremongers who had begun counting the Doomsday by the annulment of the Constitution’s secular commitments, and expected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and the RSS to rummage through the nether world and pick up a Hindutva-warrior as the Presidential candidate. The political know-alls in the stretch between Raisina Hill and the gossip-filled bar and cafe of the India International Center were convinced that the apparent rejection by Team Modi of BJP bigwigs like L. K. Advani, M. M. Joshi and Sushma Swaraj for the prestigious (and powerless) job of the President had an ominous hidden meaning—that of eventually ‘Hinduising’ the Constitution with the help of a like-minded President. As if, given an encouraging pat in the back, any of the above persons would be shy to prove their Hindutva ! Apparently, it did not occur to the ‘cognoscenti’ that if the Constitution were to be twisted and mangled right down to its “basic structure”, its operation room could be the Parliament, and not the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The President is a cipher after all.

The fact that Ramnath Kobind is anything but a Swayamsewak—his only link with the RSS being that he had gifted to it his (none too pricey) ancestral home at Derapur in Uttar Pradesh—tells nothing much. If Modi is really harbouring some radical plans about governance, he can carry it through regardless of who is the President. Just as he did not say a word to President Pranab Mukherjee before ordering the scrapping of 86 per cent of the money in circulation. However, while the choice of Kovind is an obvious pointer to the BJP’s 2019 strategy of leaving no dalit sect unturned, it has a sub-text, which is that the dalit face the BJP under Modi and Shah is looking for is the quiet and sober type, not Mayawati’s kind of a restless soul who’d put caste at the centre of every discourse. Both Mayawati and Kovind are law graduates but the latter had practised law for years and, unlike Mayawati, joined a political party which is anything but someone’s personal property. On the other hand, to Mayawati, politics is a weapon of self-aggrandizement.

Just as Kovind’s choice underlines certain aspects of Modi’s mind, the selection of Meira Kumar by the Congress—which is the short-hand for Sonia Gandhi—is also indicative of its priorities. Kumar is dalit only by name but is a prominent member of the capital’s elite club that has all along set the rules of the game of politics. In her young days, she grew up a Lutyens’ Delhi girl and never left it at her present age of 72, having been elected five times to the Lok Sabha and then nominated as Speaker of the Lok Sabha. And, like all clever denizens of Lutyens’ city, she used her influence to get her father’s 6, Krishna Menon Marg residence allotted to herself for 25 years. Her selection as the Congress’ presidential candidate speaks volumes for the elitist bias that has crippled the grand old party, with choice of leadership at every stage being determined by pedigree and rank in society. Meira Kumar may not go down as badly as Lakshmi Sahgal in 2002, who bagged merely 107,366 votes against winner A. P. J. Kalam’s 922,884. The UPA’s performance could be a lot better if Sonia Gandhi showed a bit of imagination and started the ‘trick’ herself, forcing Modi to be the ‘taker’. Instead, the Congress allowed Modi to deal first, as in a game of bridge, and the latter played Dalit, his strongest hand. As successive elections in Uttar Pradesh are showing, economic and demographic changes are making the backwards dump their traditional guardians, Congress and BSP, with a big chunk of them tasting BJP’s hospitality. If Sonia Gandhi had a better sense of the game, she could in fact accept CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechuri’s advice and put up Gopal Krishna Gandhi as UPA candidate. That would have left Modi with no option to tapping the dark and thick seam of bigotry, and hatred of Mahatma Gandhi, in BJP’s sub-soil. Besides, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who is supporting Kovid as he’s too eager to get his uneasy alliance partner Laloo Yadav off his back, by keeping Modi pleased, if necessary, would have thought many times over if he had to oppose a scion of the Mahatma and stay on the side of his abusers. That has a cost, of expulsion from the respectable class. But there is a silver lining in the Congress game-plan; it may finally bring SP-BSP-RLD-Congress on the poll table during 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Modi should have a reason to worry.

However, Presidential election cannot gauge public opinion as its electors comprise those already elected. Still, it is an occasion to get a sense of the kind of people running the majority group among the country’s lawmakers, big and small; their values and the respect they have for the illustrious countrymen whom majority of the people respect. In this sense, the Congress’ role is disappointing. For Modi’s Dalit, all it could offer was its own Dalit. And one like them, to be sure.