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All Jumbled Up
Both Congress and BJP are ready to dump any ally &
pick up any new one
Mansukh Kaur
 On
May 13, when this WSN edition will be in your hands,
India will be
voting in the last phase of elections to the Parliament.
Irrespective of who wins or loses, one result is clear: On May 16
when the votes are counted, it will be a hung Parliament.
A cartoon
recently in The Hindu newspaper was the most telling: A leader in
front of a crowd of thousands had his back towards the people and
instead is addressing the 15 odd people on the stage, asking them to
“Please Vote For Me.” The NDA’s rally in
Ludhiana was
less for the people, more for the politicians whom Advani and
company wanted to convince that they are in a better bargaining
power than the UPA in any post-poll trade offs.
One of the
toughest questions in
India currently
is: “Who will be the Prime Minister?” The problem is that there is a
surfeit of answers. The Congress and the DMK are fighting together
in Tamil Nadu but will Jayalalithaa be interested in joining hands
with Sonia Gandhi if the AIADMK gets more votes than Karunanidhi?
Will Sharad Pawar dump the UPA and go with the Third Front? Will
Samajwadi Party back the Congress-led UPA against whom it fought
elections? Will the Left be ready to back a Congress-led government
after having fought it bitterly in West Bengal and after Prakash
Karat has said about twenty times that Congress is living in a
fool’s paradise if it thought that Left can ever back it now?
Well, every
single one of these worthies has made a statement against a
statement made earlier by the same worthy. Welcome to Great Indian
Political Tamasha. The post-poll edition of the Dance of Democracy
is not going to be any different. Expect every rule to be bent,
every earlier statement to be tweaked, and a readiness to eat humble
pie from a platter if there is a promise for support in government
formation.
The two leading
alliance core centers, the Congress and the BJP have changed their
statements about each and every partner more than once. So no one is
untouchable. It is a pity that the Congress and the BJP are the only
two parties that are sure of not aligning with each other. (And not
that the idea has not been floated!)
Till the time of
going to the press, the trends (all trends are intelligent guesses,
the Election Commission has banned exit polls this time) showed that
the Congress would not be able to form the next government without
the support of the Left parties and allies such as Lalu Prasad’s
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakthi Party
(LJP) and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (S.P.).
Neither Sonia
Gandhi nor LK Advani has made bold to project the number of seats
their or other parties would win. The one common refrain of all
parties is that they are open to all possibilities.
That clearly is
a slightly less shameless way of saying that principles be damned,
we need numbers to form a government. So, players like Nitish Kumar,
Amar Singh, Jayalalitha, Sharad Pawar, TRS, are all up for grabs, or
could be.
Ifs and buts
politics also leads to the death of ideology. This is all the more
significant since none of the projected thrust issues of the two
main parties has had an impact on the electorate.
The Congress’
effort was to highlight the track record of the UPA government in
the social sector and the promise of inclusive governance. The BJP
jointly and severally sought to advance issues such as national
security, the need to bring back black money deposited illegally in
Swiss banks and use it for nation-building, and the need to use
information technology for the overall development of various
sectors.
Unfortunately,
even the Congress did not make Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra
Modi’s human rights track record a central issue. Worse, in
Gujarat, it did
not even refer to it, afraid of losing Hindu votes. The Congress was
seen as being capable of corrupting public institutions and using
them as political tools. At the same time, large segments of public
opinion were not ready to condone the BJP’s pursuit of aggressive
Hindutva.
But what stood
out throughout the campaign was that the electorate was more
interested in bread-and-butter issues. Bijli, pani, sadak
(electricity, water and roads), than highfalutin issues such as
black money in Swiss banks and catchwords such as inclusive
governance.
13
May 2009
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