National

Comic relief amid grim scenario

By Inder Malhotra

The painfully prolonged standoff between the two partners in Maharashtra's ruling coalition — the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) — was squalid and pathetic, but it also had bathos. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in the midst of grim and surly haggling there was some comic relief.

It was provided by the Maharashtra Congress Legislature Party that met in Mumbai to "elect" its leader but adjourned in five minutes flat after passing the standard one-line resolution requesting the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, to nominate the next Chief Minister. This was strictly in keeping with the firmly established tradition that had begun in the days of Indira Gandhi, whose 20th death anniversary today has underscored yet again that she is much missed by most of her countrymen.

On one famous occasion she called a meeting of all Congress members of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, not in Bhopal but in the lawns of her official residence in New Delhi. It accepted the "resignation" of the then chief minister, Shyama Charan Shukla, that he had never submitted and "unanimously elected" in his place P.C. Sethi, a Union minister.

Just over 18 months later, equally abruptly and inexplicably, she recalled Sethi to the capital and put Mr. Shukla back in the Chief Minister's chair.

Thereafter, quick changes of chief ministers in Congress-ruled States became all too frequent. Ironically, a contributory factor to this was that immediately after Indira Gandhi named a new chief minister — at the unanimous plea of the party — knives would begin to be sharpened for him. And the same dismal drama would be repeated after the poor man's inevitable departure. The most apt comment on this state of affairs that persisted in Rajiv Gandhi's time and continues still came from T. Anjaiah, Andhra's chief minister for a brief interlude. Given his marching orders, he lamented, "I came because of Madam and I am going because of Madam."

Towering CMs

In the times of Jawaharlal Nehru — a stickler for democratic proprieties — things were vastly different. He did keep an eye on the goings-on in the States but never interfered with the democratic process for the emergence of the party leaders and hence chief ministers. Moreover, in those halcyon days, several States had towering chief ministers like Govind Ballabh Pant in

Uttar Pradesh, B.C. Roy in West Bengal, B.G. Kher and Morarji Desai in Maharashtra and Sri Krishan Sinha in Bihar. Their claim to leadership would have been contested only by a lunatic.

Even in States where Congressmen of almost equal stature pressed hard their rival claims for chief ministership, Nehru adopted a manifestly fair course. He would send a Central observer, someone like Lal Bahadur Shastri, to the State capital to ascertain privately the wishes of the party MLAs, inform the rivals of his finding, and persuade the losing candidate to propose the opponent's name for "unanimous election." At the same time, Nehru insisted on the formation of a "composite" Ministry so that the Congress was not disrupted because of the minority faction's frustration over exclusion from power and office.

Not alone

The Congress is not alone in believing that "the Leader" knows best and that appointment of provincial satraps is entirely his or her prerogative. The Shiv Sena has wielded power in Maharashtra, albeit in partnership with the BJP, for only five years and it was represented in the Central Government of Atal Behari Vajpayee during the same period. However, the Sena's supremo, Bal Thackeray, has never stopped boasting that he runs the whole show through "remote control". He has proved it, too, by arbitrarily replacing the chief minister. At least twice, at his behest, Mr. Vajpayee had had to drop a Shiv Sena minister from the Union Cabinet. And is it a sign of the shape of things to come that soon after the Congress' resolution in Mumbai, the NCP Legislature Party also unanimously requested Sharad Pawar to choose its leader?

Other political parties that matter are largely State-specific. Whenever they come within sniffing distance of power, there is not an iota of doubt that the party's "supreme leader" would be the chief minister. Mulayam Singh Yadav (Samajwadi Party) and Mayawati (Bahujan Samaj Party) in Uttar Pradesh or Jayalalithaa (AIADMK) and M. Karunanidhi (Tamil Nadu) are examples. In a class by itself is the case of the incomparable Lalu Prasad (Rashtriya Janata Dal) in Bihar. Forced to resign as Chief Minister because of the "fodder scam" he simply ensured that his wife, Rabri Devi, occupied his chair. She has been sitting pretty in it for eight years.

If this murky pattern has not degenerated into what used to be called "Democratic Centralism" in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, and the "Fuehrer principle" in the execrable Third Reich, the reason is that multi-party competition in this country remains lively and elections are, by and large, free and fair. But should the world's largest democracy continue to be propped up by political parties almost all of which are run as dictatorships, if not fiefdoms?

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