The Shopping List - Making And Breaking Of Governments !

 

BY R.K.MISRA

“Win or lose, we go shopping after the election”, said Imelda Marcos, wife of one time President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. In a different context, this stands true after every election in India as political entities get busy making and then breaking governments, ‘shopping’ list in hand.

 Proof comes plentiful. After previous attempts at pulling down the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi(MVA) government came a cropper, a new one is underway in a never-say-die-spirit. If it was the NCP of Sharad Pawar in the cross-hairs of the BJP last time, it is the Shiv Sena splitting to align in ‘lotus’ formation this time.

National Highway- 48 linking Mumbai to Delhi passes through Gujarat. So did New Delhi’s attempts to align Maharashtra to its fold. The first whiff of  the move to splinter the Shiv Sena and replace the MVA with a BJP- led formation  came when Eknath Shinde and his rebels were moved out to a Surat hotel into the safety of  BJP- ruled Gujarat which is also the citadel of  Prime Minister Narendra Modi and union home minister Amit Shah. Interestingly, Gujarat BJP chief C.R. Patil, a close confidante of PM Modi hails from Surat as does home minister Harsh Sanghvi. The Surat hotel swarming with cops even before the rebel legislators landed was a dead give-away. The Prime Minister has visited Gujarat thrice  within the last one month while the frequency of Shah’s visits have been higher.

Though BJP chief Patil  with his Jalgaon connection remained the inter-face of the initial reach-out to the Shiv Sena legislators, it was overseen and fine-tuned from New Delhi. Published reports have also hinted at the use of  enforcement agencies to soften up the legislators before putting the plan into action.

However, it was the ease with which two Shiv Sena emissaries of Uddhav Thackeray managed to establish contact with  the rebel leader Eknath Shinde and arrange a conversation that alerted  the BJP leadership to the inherent weakness of Surat being too close to Maharashtra for  comfort and  therefore the move to airlift the rebels to Assam post-haste.

Chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma seems to have now become  the go-to person for the BJP and it’s look north-eastwards policy. It was the Assam police which had picked up Congress- backed independent legislator from Gujarat ,Jignesh Mevani for tweeting against the Prime Minister and just around the time the rebellion was unfolding in Surat ,Delhi chief minister Manish Sisodia was faced with an FIR and a Rs-100 crore defamation suit filed by the wife of  the Assam chief minister and then the move to shift the Shiv Sena  rebels, also to the safety of  an Assam hotel.

Whatever may be the outcome of this tug-of-war, what it has brought to centre-stage are the double standards of the political class. The framers of the country’s Constitution would be hard put to visualize a scenario where the law makers would need to be herded together and moved  cross-country to the safety of their favoured governments .The elite of the elected, trusted with the welfare of the people, fearfully cowering from their own !

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. What principle or morality was involved in the Scindia switchover or was it just personal pique and quest for power, remains a moot point.

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. The same script, tweaked with variations, had earlier played out in Karnataka, Meghalaya, Manipur, Goa and Arunachal Pradesh.

The recently concluded elections to fill up 57  Rajya Sabha seats presented a spectacle of sorts.

 The Congress legislators from BJP- ruled Haryana had to be spirited away to the safety of its own- ruled Chhattisgarh. And yet, all  in vain for legislator Kuldeep Bishnoi defiantly voted a BJP backed media-baron and another one wasted their vote . Haryana chief minister Manoharlal Khattar is quick to felicitate Bishnoi for listening to his inner voice and cross-voting . 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. BJP was happy with Bishnoi voting against  his own party, the Congress. However in Rajasthan when BJP legislator Shobharani Kushwah did the same thing, sinking the hopes of a BJP- backed media baron, she was promptly suspended.

Again, the very Congress which dismissed Bishnoi for cross-voting in Haryana  had no qualms about seeking a ”conscience vote” 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.

Thus it is, that they make the law and then they break the law. If not in letter then in spirit thereby cheating the mandate. If there is a cooling period for retiring bureaucrats before they can take up another job, should’nt there be one for the elected politician who changes parties? The break may do the country good.

( http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4136/orissapost/page/9# )