The continuing travails of the NDA

THE DECISION TO institute a judicial inquiry and the exit of Mr. George Fernandes from the Union Council of Ministers - secured under tremendous pressure from within the ruling coalition - may have helped the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government in controlling the political damage inflicted by Tehelka's shocking revelations, to the extent that they removed considerable sting from the Opposition's campaign and, more importantly, in reaffirming the support of an outwardly ambivalent Mr. Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party, which held the trump card. In fact, once the TDP was persuaded not to pull the rug, the Government had won in the numbers game and hence its `challenge' to the Opposition to face Parliament and bring in a no-confidence motion. And it was precisely for this reason that the Opposition too was more keen on taking the issue to the people, by focussing on the larger security related concerns the expose has raised and arguing that the Vajpayee regime has lost its ``moral authority'' to rule. A regrettable upshot of the realpolitik driven strategies of the two sides has been a virtual paralysis of Parliament for days together, with crucial financial and legislative business remaining stalled.

With the numbers on its side, the Vajpayee Government may well expect to ride out the Tehelka-induced political storm, with no immediate threat to its survival, having bought time until the judicial inquiry comes up with its findings. But such expectation has necessarily to be tempered with the negative potential of the several faultlines the episode has either induced or aggravated within the ruling establishment as well as in the BJP-RSS relationship. For instance, the rumblings in the Samata Party - in the wake of Mr. Fernandes' resignation - and the defiance its three other Ministers had shown by insisting on quitting office as an expression of solidarity with their leader. True, Mr. Fernandes has succeeded in getting them round, but the now subdued sense of hurt may not take long to surface. Then, there was the discordant note struck by Mr. Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Dal (United) about Mr. Fernandes being retained as convenor of the NDA.

What could be really worrisome post-the Tehelka expose in the intra-NDA and intra-Sangh Parivar context, however, is the issue involving the Prime Minister's Principal Secretary, Mr. Brajesh Mishra, whose name figures rather indirectly in the murky story featured on the videotape. The Shiv Sena supremo, Mr. Bal Thackeray, and the RSS chief, Mr. K. S. Sudarshan, have been forthright in their criticism of Mr. Mishra (besides a few other key functionaries in the PMO notably Mr. N. K. Singh); Mr. Sudarshan even called into question the competence and constitutional propriety of those officials. To the extent that Mr. Mishra has become involved in the controversy, the case for bringing his role also into hard scrutiny under the microscope of the judicial inquiry is unassailable. An important factor to reckon with, of course, is that those in the governmental and political establishments of the ruling coalition who were `aggrieved' with the PMO top brass (on account of what they perceived to be its overweening authority) have found in the Tehelka tapes a potent instrument to press for change. Given that the forces at work include his detractors within his own party, the BJP, and its ideological fountainhead, the RSS, the travails of Mr. Vajpayee and the coalition he heads are indeed far from over.

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