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| The power bargain begins | | |
INDER MALHOTRA
BY Wednesday evening the country would be able to heave a sigh of relief because the fifth and final phase of voting in this long drawn out election would at last be over. No one should blame the Election Commission (EC) for this. It’s the political class which has let things degenerate to the extent that without the most elaborate deployment of security forces, elections cannot be held peacefully. Moving a large body of men from one trouble spot to another takes time. Indian elections have, thus, become more of a paramilitary operation than a political exercise.
Violence during the first four phases — particularly during the first two when the Naxalites, hell-bent on disrupting the poll, went on the rampage in their strongholds — was vicious. Mercifully, the voters were not intimidated. The authorities crowed that the ballot had got the better of the bullet. Yet the scale of killings — 29 security personnel and election staff shot dead in 24 hours and a train hijacked on another day — cannot be taken lightly. Some lamented that the EC had erred in holding polling in all Naxal-infested areas on the same day. Few cared to listen to its rationale that the idea was to finish voting in the worst-affected areas on the first available opportunity when the maximum possible force could be mobilised.
However, the Naxalites of the "red corridor", the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa), other ethnic insurgents of the Northeast and separatists of Jammu and Kashmir are not the only perpetrators of violence and mayhem at election time. In parts of West Bengal there was no dearth of armed clashes — resulting in fatal casualties and scaring away some voters — between the so-called cadres of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and its bitter opponent, the Trinamul Congress. According to newspaper reports, Trinamul supporters "gave as good as they got". Nor is there any dearth of "honest-to-goodness" criminals in every political party. An impressive number of them have sat in successive Parliaments in the past. One out of every 10 candidates for the next Lok Sabha has a criminal record.
Tragically, from one phase of the election to the next the situation worsened and there is cause to be worried about what might happen on May 13. There are three specific sources of concern. First, the system of alliances during the last five years of the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) rule, such as it was, has been torn to shreds. This at a time when a coalition government has become even more necessary than so far, especially when every single participant in the poll, other than the two mainstream parties, is proclaiming from the rooftop: "All options are open". In other words, everyone would bargain hard and go with the highest bidder.
When Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Ram Vilas Paswan of Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) in Bihar denied the Congress, the UPA’s core, a single seat in Bihar and Mulayam Singh Yadav did exactly the same thing in Uttar Pradesh, top Congress leaders went on repeating stridently that the UPA was "intact".
Until at his famous press conference, Congress’ future leader and present strategist, Rahul Gandhi, made no bones about wooing Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh and J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu as potential allies.
Naturally, present "allies" such as Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mr Paswan in Patna and the redoubtable M. Karunanidhi in Chennai, were furious. Ironically, the former adversaries sought to be won over rebuffed Mr Rahul Gandhi’s overtures. Mr Nitish Kumar attended the massive National Democratic Alliance (NDA) rally in Ludhiana and vowed fidelity to the BJP-led NDA.
Meanwhile, within the Congress, Veerappa Moily came to grief for talking out of turn. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went to Chennai to placate Mr Karunanidhi and Congress president Sonia Gandhi shared the dais with him at a joint rally. All this is a prelude to the fun and games that would almost certainly precede the formation of the next government.
Secondly, the standards of public discourse and electoral oratory, painfully low from the word go, have lowered further despite an early appeal for restraint by the EC. Though hate speeches didn’t entirely disappear, they abated after Varun Gandhi’s plight following his alleged speech at Pilibhit. The nadir was reached with Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav’s shocking statement that his Samajwadi Party would join the side that agrees to dismiss the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh which is not only duly elected but is also the first single-party government in 10 years in the state that sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha.
Any aspirant to power in New Delhi that even considers this demand ought to be hounded out of politics.
The third source of anxiety is again focused on Tamil Nadu where the pre-eminent, if not the sole, election issue is the fate of the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Doubtless, passions across the state are highly inflamed. Even so, the two main Dravidian parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), implacably hostile to each other, are not acting responsibly. There is no discernable difference left between them and fire-eating zealots like Vaiko. Time was when Mr Karunanidhi and Ms Jayalalithaa — she even more than him — made a clear distinction between sympathy for Sri Lankan Tamils and support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). That is now a thing of the past. Doubtless, they are angry that nothing is being done to save innocent Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire in the small area where the desperate LTTE is bottled up. But isn’t one of the reasons the LTTE’s barbarous tactic of using civilians as human shields? Despite this, both the leaders who have alternated as chief ministers, are demanding Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, which is totally against Indian policy and interest.
During his visit to Chennai, Dr Singh did explain the facts of life and did so gently, taking care to add that it was impossible to send the Indian Army to a sovereign country. What impact, if any, this will have on the public mood and the poll’s outcome is anybody’s guess.
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