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India’s Retail Revolution
How the bargaining happened at the Indian Political Mall
Sach Kanwal Singh
 India
has witnessed many a campaign designed and executed by political
spin masters of various political parties. Gareebi Hatao, Jai Jawan
Jai Kisan, Indira Bhagao Desh Bachao, Mandal or Kamandal, Ram Mandir,
India Shining, India Rising, Incredible India and what not. But the
mother of all campaigns was witnessed in the last one week as Indian
Government, headed by Manmohan Singh and directed by Sonia Gandhi,
tried to strike a deal with Uncle Sam.
"Conviction"
suddenly assumed many meanings. The Prime Minister, said every one,
has shown the courage of conviction. The UPA, claimed Sonia Gandhi,
had the conviction that the civil nuclear deal was good for
India.
But soon we saw that every one was appreciating conviction. Even
convicts. So both sides, the pro-deal and the anti-deal, were
scouring the jails of the country lest any MP languishing behind the
bars in a murder of dacoity case, or facing charges of murder, is
left behind in exercising his supreme right of deciding the destiny
of Tera Bharat Mahaan. Convicted and under trial MPs walked out of
jails, granted the permission to do so by various courts always
acting with a great sense of timing in consonance with the polity,
announcing who they will vote for.
 The
rest were sought to be arrested by either the UPA or the Left-BSP
combination. Each MP was being wooed, cajoled, and as top Indian
leaders told the nation on prime time national TV, "bought for Rs 25
crore or more". Here are the many deals that
India was
striking, not just to save a deal, but to retain the capacity of
striking many similar deals.
From
Kashmir
to
Kanyakumari,
India
is one when it comes to haggling and striking deals. So Sonia Gandhi
made sure that a special Indian Air Force plane is given to PDP
president Mehbooba Mufti for attending a meeting in Delhi on July
13; this when barely a week earlier she had pulle dthe rug from
underneath J-K CM Ghulam Nabi Azad. And in order to ensure that
National Conference (NC) of Omar Abdullah also plays along,
important since it has two MPs, Sonia Gandhi made a direct call to
Abdullah. So the NC is now likely abstain from voting.
In Karnataka,
Janata Dal (Secular) leader (and if you remember he was also the PM
once, something he barely remembers now) HD Deve Gowda, swing-swung
between UPA and Camp Mayawati so many times that one only believed
the JD(S) stance after his son Kumaraswamy actually started eating
from his plate at the UNPA lunch on July 20. But even then some were
wondering whether his father won't feel more hungry and have a
morsel at the UPA dinner too?
Sonia Gandhi
cleared the move to name
Lucknow's Amausi
Airport after Chowdhry Charan Singh. It must have amused the jat
leader's son Ajit Singh no end as three days later he was enjoying
the soup with Prakash Karat and Mayawati, knowing fully well that
Manmohan Singh government has landed in it.
 Samajwadi
Party's general secretary Shahid Siddiqui defended the deal so
vociferously on NDTV's Big Fight debate program but did not flinch
at all when he declared the deal 24 hours later as being
"anti-India", said he was suffering from pangs of conscience, and
walked into BSP, his new found sisterly love for Behen ji oozing all
over Indian TV channels and newspapers. Before Rakhi festival,
Siddiqui must be happy to have found a powerful sister.
“I have been
suffocating in the SP all this while,” Siddiqui said standing by
Mayavati at her residence. “The nuclear deal is against the national
interest and against the interests of Muslims, it is an affront to
the sentiments of my community and now I have come out openly to
fight it.” What he did not say was that he had driven there straight
from the Prime Minister’s residence where he had strongly defended
the deal and explained in detail how he had tried to bring all
parties on board. Siddiqui also edits the influential Urdu language
newspaper called Nai Duniya and had traveled in that capacity with
the PM recently.
Chartered planes
seemed to be in great demand. The BJP will need one to ferry an
ailing AB Vajpayee to Lok Sabha to cast his vote. Vajpayee has not
been heard on the deal, and it is clear that deep in their hearts,
many of the BJP MPs were actually pro-deal while in Congress, many
were anti-deal but that they are all pro-power is something about
which there is little doubt left.
The BJP was also
planning to charter a plane to fly in Harischandra Chavan, the
Malegaon MP bedridden after a serious accident. Congress' Avtar
Singh Bhadana in Haryana seemed unhappy, but the moment it leaked
out, Haryana's Congress CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda landed up
unannounced Bhadana's residence on Friday night, then cancelled a
scheduled rally in Kaithal to reach
Delhi
to tell the UPA of his achievement. Bhadana was now back in the
Congress fold, saying how he has been "a sipahi of Sonia Gandhi."
BJP leader
Sushma Swaraj struck a deal with JMM leader Shibu Soren: Jharkhand
CMship with saffron support. Congress raised the stakes: Cabinet
berth and Minister of State for Soren and his associate and Deputy
CMship in Jharkhand for his son. Clearly, Soren knows how to
bargain. Not for nothing is he called "Guruji". Guru Ghantal is more
appropriate but Indian politics is sticking to polite diction.
Sharad Pawar
worked on some individual Akali MPs till the last day to make them
abstain.
The real
denouement came due to desertions from the Samajwadi Party (SP),
which had promised to deliver 39 of its members and a few more from
other parties. many of its MPs defied the party whip and voted
against the government.
Indian media
everyday carried "Today's Numbers" kind of stories, but newspapers
could hardly keep pace as numbers would change several times before
the morning editions could reach the readers. And the ugly Big
Bazaar was carried on under the gaze of many national TV cameras.
The Indo-US
civilian nuclear agreement was the fulcrum on which the relationship
of the Congress with the Samajwadi Party see-sawed. But it was
Mayawati, more than the Left, that forced UPA to change its partner.
Although
Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh’s “friendship” with
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes back over a decade and RJD chief
Lalu Prasad Yadav had been playing peacemaker between the Congress
and the SP for months, it was only on June 24 that Congress
President Sonia Gandhi finally decided to forget the past. She too
showed she was not above making any unholy deal. India Dealing was
the flavour of the day, sorry month.
Every one and
every trick was used in deal striking. Amar Singh, known as the
biggest dalal in Indian politics in the tradition of late Pramod
Mahajan, approached former President APJ Abdul Kalam so that he
could quote a Muslim leader to defend his position. Four years
earlier, Amar Singh had left 10, Janpath in a huff swearing revenge
for being “humiliated” by host Sonia at a dinner ahead of the
formation of the UPA Government. This time he was asked on national
TV whether he was served pakoras, samosas etc, whether Sonia indeed
asked him to savour another pakora.
Being hounded by
Mayawati, Amar Singh was the first one to strike a deal when he
walked with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav into the sequestered
residence of Sonia at 10 Janpath and offered apologies for whatever
had happened in the past. Amar Singh credited Manmohan Singh for the
Congress-SP rapprochement. So now we know, everyone was being a
wheeler-dealer, Manmohan Singh included.
The SP general
secretary said there has been “constant goodwill” between him and
the PM for over 10 years. Talk about Manmohan Singh not being a
political animal.
The WSN also
cannot but take notice of the usual suspects who remained silent.
Why did Mani Shanker Aiyar, that motormouth minister of the Congress
think it fit to write reams about Panchayati Raj even 24 hours
before the deal debate went on the floor of the Lok Sabha? Why did
we not see an Indian media continuing the debate on the merits of
the nuclear deal while blaming and accusing the MPs of not debating
the deal but instead only garnering numbers? The best of the Indian
journalists did not demand even a single briefing from the
knowledgeable about the deal. Not a single press club in the country
held a single seminar or talk aimed at ensuring that the journalists
in main cities get an inkling of what the deal is all about.
And top editors
wrote extremely partisan articles and editorials on front pages of
the newspapers, mostly in favour of the nuclear deal. One in
northern
India, widely read in Punjab, in fact carried a huge blazing banner
headline “THANK YOU MULAYAM JI” the day Samajwadi Party offered
support to the Congress. It clearly betrayed that the newspaper had
no bipartisanship left.
And not one
questioned the fact that the only thing the numbers game proved even
hours before the deal-specific confidence motion was put to vote was
that
India was deeply divided on the deal and that Parliament was deeply
divided over the deal. If in any parliamentary democracy, the
Parliament is to be seen to be sovereign that no foreign policy
major shift could be carried out on an issue which virtually saw the
Parliament split in half. If a country’s political wheelers dealers
think that their main job was to ensure that one half is slightly
smaller or larger than the other half, and that this size debate
will somehow justify their actions and the country can still be
called democratic, then the destiny of such a country is set to be
nuked at the altar of morality. And no dealers will be there to save
it.
23
July, 2008
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