Resignation demand rejected, censure motion defeated

By Harish Khare

NEW DELHI, DEC. 14. The Vajpayee Government survived its first parliamentary crisis when the Lok Sabha this evening rejected a Congress motion, demanding dismissal of three Ayodhya chargesheeted ministers. However, at the end of a two-day robust debate, the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, did not retract his formulation that the Ram Mandir movement was a ``manifestation of national sentiment''.

The coalition survived by a comfortable margin, 291 to 179 votes, but not before the ruling alliance partners extracted - pointedly and demonstratively - their pound of flesh by way of an unambiguous commitment from Mr. Vajpayee that the Government would not deviate from the National Democratic Alliance agenda.

Since the crisis was triggered by the Prime Minister's statements which suggested that he was reviving ``contentious issues'' (of a Ram temple at the ``disputed site'' in Ayodhya) outside the NDA agenda, the crisis ended when Mr. Vajpayee acknowledged that he was bound by the National Agenda for Governance. But it was an unedifying sight of the Prime Minister finding himself giving in to the allies' demand that he say once again - that too after a nearly hour-long intervention - that the Government ``would abide by the court verdict'' (in the Ayodhya/Babri Masjid dispute); and ``it would be implemented''.

Commitment after debate

The Prime Minister found himself forced, by the Telugu Desam Party and the Trinamool Congress, to give the commitment after the debate was over; the Speaker, Mr. G.M.C.Balayogi, had already called for a division. The ungainly drama prompted the veteran parliamentarian, Mr. Somnath Chatterjee, to note that this was ``unprecedented''. Later, Mr. Sharad Pawar (Nationalist Congress Party), observed, tongue in cheek, that what was witnessed in the Lok Sabha was ``a national manifestation of the regional parties' power''.

The Prime Minister was forced to give the categorical assurance because in his long intervention he did not retract from his controversial December 6 formulation (which queered the pitch for the Opposition and the allies) that the Ram Mandir movement (that culminated in the desecration of the Babri Masjid in 1992) was a manifestation of a ``national sentiment''.

PM invokes Somnath

Mr. Vajpayee made a belaboured attempt to draw a parallel between the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in the mid-1950s and the Mandir movement of the early 1990s. He cited the cases of the national celebration of the 400th year of the Khalsa faith, as also the decision to observe as national celebration 2600th year of Lord Mahavira; and, then, rather unconvincingly, he tried to say that it was in the same vein that he had termed the mandir movement a ``manifestation of national sentiment''.

Rejecting the demand for the resignation of three Ministers was easy, and the Prime Minister did this at the very outset. ``The question of the resignations does not arise; even if these are offered, I will not accept them,'' he declared to the satisfaction of the BJP benches. But he had a difficult task on his hand of satisfying the allies. In fact, the very first speaker of the day, Ms. Mamata Banerjee, Trinamool Congress leader, dictated the script. ``Mr. Prime Minister, clarify your recent utterances.'' The TDP leader, Mr. K. Yerran Naidu, provided the footnotes to that script.

Consequently, Mr. Vajpayee chose to fashion his reply on two levels. First, he did not say anything that would have annoyed the BJP's traditional `mandir constituency'. The Prime Minister repeated that only two solutions to the Ayodhya-Babri dispute were feasible; either the court should give a verdict in favour of those who wanted to build a temple at the disputed site or the Hindus and Muslims should arrive at some mutually acceptable way out.

`NDA is united'

At another level, he reiterated the commitment to the NDA agenda. If the Opposition's obvious strategy was to drive a wedge between the BJP and its allies, the Prime Minister asserted that ``the NDA is united''.

Addressing himself as much to his allies as to the Opposition, he made fun of the ``competition'' between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party to be more ``secular'' than the other. And, he came very nearly to challenging that the final verdict would belong the electorate. The Prime Minister's intervention was a masterly exercise in obfuscation. In his reply to the debate, the mover of the motion, Mr. Jaipal Reddy, termed Mr. Vajpayee's reply ``confusion worse confounded''.

Predictably enough, the allies were not taken in by his verbal callisthenics; and, insisted, later, on yet another commitment from the Prime Minister.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Front Page
Next     : Bush reaches out to Democrats