India : Putrid Squabbles Crowd National Political Space

 BY R.K.MISRA

 ” If Independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles”, so goes a quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill but never authenticated. 

If true, it represents the damnable hypocrisy of  a British ruler state . If not, it still correctly prophesies the putrid  squabbles littering  the national  political space today, seventy five years after independence.

Examples abound, but the closest remain the just concluded elections to the Rajya Sabha held last week to fill up 57 vacancies.

The run up to the elections and the culmination of the process through voting and counting saw Indian politics oscillate between the theatre of the absurd  and the drama of the depraved. Not even in their wildest flights of fancy would the framers of the Constitution have imagined a scenario where the law makers would need to be herded together and moved in mobile pens cross-country to the safety of their own party state governments in a bid to prevent cross-voting. The elite of the elected, -entrusted with the well-being of the nation-state- fearfully cowering from their own .

Singly, they are not safe, and doubly, they remain doubted. So the Congress legislators from BJP- ruled Haryana have to be spirited away to the safety of its own- ruled Chhattisgarh. And yet, all  in vain for legislator Kuldeep Bishnoi defiantly votes a BJP- backed media-baron and another one wasted the vote . Haryana chief minister Manoharlal Khattar is quick to felicitate Bishnoi for listening to his inner voice and cross-voting adding “the BJP’s doors are open if he wants to join”. BJP rules Haryana and yet feels insecure so moves its legislators to Union territory , Chandigarh. Congress rules Rajasthan and yet needs to move its legislators to a resort in Udaipur.

However, in Congress- ruled Rajasthan , a similar surprise by BJP MLA from Dholpur, Shobharni Kushwah, did no elicit the same sentiments. She was promptly suspended for sinking the hopes of a BJP-backed media baron. Apparently, what was good for the goose was not so for the gander. Shobharani’s husband B.L.Kushwah was a BSP MLA who was sentenced to life imprisonment in a murder conspiracy case and the BJP promptly inducted the wife into the party, gave her the ticket and she won the seat. The taint of the husband did not stick on the wife but the political clout of his following did. So much for crass opportunism, which now stands repaid in full !

Again, the very Congress which dismissed Bishnoi for cross-voting in Haryana,  had no qualms about seeking a ”conscience vote”-a bargain plea for backstabbing- from the JD(S) MLAs for its second candidate in Karnataka. With Jairam Ramesh largely secure, Karnataka CLP leader Siddaramaiah wrote an open letter to JD(S) legislators for their second candidate, Mansoor Khan stating that his win will be a victory of ‘secular ideology” . Khan and Kupendra Reddy of the JD(S) both lost.

What is not lost, however, is the chicanery of the political class. The 2018 Vidhan Sabha elections, conducted at stupendous cost to the exchequer in Madhya Pradesh , brought  the Congress to power. The  Kamal Nath government lasted 15 months before it was pulled down with 23 legislators defecting to the BJP led by Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia. The defecting legislators had to be  moved to the safe sanctuary of  BJP- ruled Karnataka, until the government was taken down.

The Anti-defection law  was enacted by Parliament in 1985 as the tenth schedule of the Constitution to prevent destabilising of governments through defections . However the class which enacted the law, are the ones who comfortably by-pass it by making the legislators resign and getting them re-elected under their own party government. With the same party in power both at the Centre and in the state, the process of fence eating up the crop is smooth as silk  as witnessed in MP. The same script, tweaked with variations, had earlier played out in Karnataka, Meghalaya, Manipur, Goa and Arunachal Pradesh.

This is not the first time it has been done nor will it be the last time. Pious platitudes of rooting out corruption are comforting  but pliable power is still purchased with pelf. They make the law and then they break the law. If not in letter than in spirit. No sooner is the legislation passed that the by-passes are ready. What principle or morality was involved in the Scindia switchover, or  the conscience dictates that come alive ,of the many others who switched sides in the period before or thereafter?. ”It is the naked pursuit of power in the share bazar of politics”, points out a former chief minister.

Three terms Congress legislator of Gujarat, Ashwin Kotwal who quit to join the BJP recently sought to make a virtue of his political cussedness claiming that he had been an admirer of Narendra Modi since 2007. Fair enough but what prevented him from joining the BJP right then, would be an obvious question. The man was quite simply not in the reckoning at the time and  has been promised a ticket on the greener side of the fence now.

It was to curb horse-trading that the venerable parliamentarians enacted this law. And who is circumventing them? The very same people who were given the mandate for neat,clean ,welfare-driven governance, not for pulling down people mandated governments and replacing with their own by hook or by crook. The failed attempts at pulling down the Maharashtra Vikas Agadi(MVA) government, the midnight drama and the vengeful turmoil that followed thereafter remains a classic example of an old prophecy finding current resonance.

Adds a retired bureaucrat ”It would not take a minute to curb this horse-trading’ If you can have a cooling period for retiring bureaucrats, why not for MLAs and MPs  switching sides ?After all they deserve breathing space to absorb the ideology of their new home. Just two years would do and the end results will be electric”, he adds.

The moot point is who wants to do it ?  After all you need chinks in the fence for flawed governance when  chasing a fractious agenda !

(https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/rajya-sabha-polls-crass-opportunism-all-around-1118276.html )