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A puppet play in Mumbai

By Inder Malhotra

Delhi's deep, deepening and seemingly endless freeze leaves little room for talk on any subject other than the cruel weather that has already taken a toll of 800 lives of the poor and the homeless across north India. Even so, the political class and its appendages have been busy discussing two diverting events.

The first is what the media, with striking unanimity, has called the "birthday bash" of Mayawati, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous and politically-key State. Incidentally, no one has explained why every celebration of a birthday has to be a "bash", not a party, just as every new publication "hits" the stands, never makes a non-violent appearance. But let that pass. Extravagant praise at and equally extravagant expense on celebrating the birthdays of politicians in power have become a firmly established routine by now. Mayawati, of course, broke the bounds of propriety when she encouraged coercive collection of "donations" and even dipped into the State treasury to the tune of over a crore of rupees to fund the perfervid festivities. However, some allowance should be made for a Chief Minister getting carried away while toasting the empowerment of the most oppressed of oppressed castes.

Ms. Mayawati was the country's only Dalit Chief Minister on the day when she converted her birthday party into an extravaganza. She no longer is. With the installation of Sushil Kumar Shinde as Maharashtra's first-ever Dalit Chief Minister, and the country's seventh since Independence, she now has competition. (That five previous Dalit CMs — T. Sanjiviah and T. Anjaiah in Andhra Pradesh, Bhola Paswan and Ram Sunder Das in Bihar and Jagannath Pahadia in Rajasthan — have been all but forgotten speaks for itself.) And this indeed is the second issue that is engaging the attention of political Delhi for the obvious reason that the changeover in Mumbai, from luckless Vilasrao Deshmukh to the amiable Mr. Shinde, is of much greater import than the transient aberration in Lucknow.

Remarkably, there is consensus on several points about the developments in Maharashtra. Most observers agree, for instance, that Mr. Deshmukh might have lingered on but for the beating the Congress party took in Gujarat. After all, his shortcomings, aggravated by his unconcealed and unorthodox efforts to promote his son's career as a filmstar, were well known to the party "high command". In any case, the party's general secretary in charge of the State, Vayalar Ravi, never failed to remind all concerned of these. And yet nothing was done until the jolt in "Modiland".

Another point of agreement is that once the Congress brass realised the danger of the Gujarat contagion spreading to the neighbouring Maharashtra, the idea of having a Dalit Chief Minister in the run-up to the Assembly elections suddenly became very attractive.

Consequently, Mr. Shinde had no difficulty pipping the other equally senior and qualified contenders, including the over-active chief of the State Congress, Govindrao Adik, to the post. Most important, there is general agreement that what had been advertised as the drama in Mumbai was, in fact, a puppet play in which the ventriloquist pulled the strings from a distance of over a thousand kilometres. In other words, it was Sonia Gandhi, the sole leader of the Congress, who called the shots. She could have let the wind of inner-party democracy blow across her cloistered ranks by asking the Congress party in the State Assembly to elect its new leader. But that was not to be. For, the legislature party, dutifully and unanimously, passed a resolution requesting her to "nominate" its leader and she was happy to oblige. No wonder then that in responding to the honour done to him Mr. Shinde thanked Soniaji and had little to say about the party to the people of Maharashtra.

It is doubtful if Ms. Gandhi is even aware that in the times of her grandfather-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru, when the Congress had much greater life in it, things were very different. He let natural leaders in each State emerge through the democratic process, which strengthened both the States and the Centre.

Indira Gandhi changed all that. Immediately after acquiring supremacy, she eased out veteran Chief Ministers with a political base and started the practice of nominating political lightweights as CMs. On a famous occasion, she summoned all members of the legislature party in Madhya Pradesh to Delhi. They met on the lawns of her residence, accepted the resignation the then State Chief Minister, Shyama Charan Shukla, had never submitted and elected P.C. Sethi his successor. Some years later, T. Anjaiah, when asked to quit within months of being appointed the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, made the classic remark: "I came by the grace of Madam and I am going under her orders; I don't know why I came... and why I am going".

More need not be said to underscore that Ms. Sonia Gandhi is steadfastly sticking to the Gandhian, not Nehruvian, tradition of sending, from time to time, "air-frieghted Chief Ministers" to Congress-ruled States. It must be clearly understood, however, that the Mahatma has nothing whatever to do with this. This legacy is that of Indira Gandhi.

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