Manmohan’s real test

Aditya Sinha
04 Oct 2008 03:30:00 AM IST
Ever since the July 22 trust vote, we have been hearing endlessly about how the prime minister, like The New Indian Express, is 100% steel and 0% gas; that it was his grit and unblinking determination that saw the deal through, and that it has emboldened him to things such as today’s news of prepoll sops and wagging an angry finger at the Orissa government over the anti-Christian violence. It is an absurd proposition. When the polls do arrive, and when Mulayam Singh Yadav —whose Samajwadi Party was the one to actually midwife the nuclear deal — inevitably double-crosses the Congress, you will then realize that, when the going gets tough, the tough get going to Sonia Gandhi.

This year, pre-poll season has coincided with the festival season. Shoppers are afraid of blasts, temple-goers are afraid of stampedes, and politicians are afraid of voters.

There’s a big question mark in the smokefilled air: with several state elections coming up next month, will the Lok Sabha elections be held with them, or soon after in December- January, or in February-March, or at the last possible moment, in April? Whatever the answer, the season of backroom confabulations is in full swing.

Believe it or not, our prime minister is still in favour of holding early elections.He believes he is India’s hero for forcing Sonia to push through the nuclear deal. He believes the nuclear deal will win his party all 544 Lok Sabha seats. This is why you occasionally see a story about those who feel an early election is the Congress party’s best bet, given the grim economic scenario that will envelope the world because of the US financial market crisis.

There is some truth in this. A US House of Representatives vote for the $700 billion dollar bailout of US financial markets will mean very little. The IMF may say that there is a full-blown recession, but the chances of a proper Depression are increasing. There is no money for corporate use in the Western world. There is going to be a run on banks any day now; foreign banks have already quietly started a run on US banks. A total systemic meltdown looms, and it will impact India. There is no escaping this.

To Sonia’s credit, however, she seems to realize she will lose heavily whenever the elections are finally held. Talk of her party getting less than 100 seats has become a commonplace nowadays. The Congress will lose the Delhi assembly elections; to prevent it from inflicting collateral damage on the parliamentary polls, Sonia has toyed with the idea of simultaneous assembly and parliamentary polls. But the driver of the timing of the Lok Sabha elections now seems to be the UPA allies, who want to delay jumping off the cliff till the last possible moment.

Till the end of August, the conventional wisdom was that the next Parliament was going to be hung, with all sorts of strange bedfellows coming together for a government that was likely to be unstable and unlikely to be full-termed. As a consequence, everyone has been wooing everyone else, as in one of those modern-day swayamvaras.

So the Left has been after AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa, as has the BJP’s Narendra Modi. She will join the third front only as its leader; the BJP are not averse to making her the NDA convenor. Chiranjeevi is another sought after politician as he will likely tip the scales in Andhra; and so, stateby- state, politicians are behaving like investment bankers on Wall Street, giving easy credit, and allowing massive price bubbles to build.

In late August, however, the Indian political sub-prime bubble burst when the violence against Christians began. The Kandhamal violence, sparked off by the murder of a VHP swami, was a continuation of last December’s violence; the Karnataka violence was sparked off, say Hindutva supporters, by derogatory literature spread by the particular evangelical group whose churches were attacked. To many of us, the violence appeared senseless. At the time we were more worried about the major cultural change in our lives: the Delhi police, rattled by successful terrorism, banned Ram Lila and Durga Puja after 10 pm. The anti- Christian attacks were nauseating.

Nonetheless, private surveys in north India indicate that after the recent aggression, the BJP has taken a big leap forward in its support among potential voters. Repulsive as it was, the violence has had its effect. The BJP was earlier thought to be in a shaky position in Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh (it was assumed that the caste equations would overcome the anti-incumbency factor in Rajasthan, and Delhi had tired of Sheila Dixit); it is said to have vastly improved its chances. The truth will be known next month. But if this is the case, then it will have its impact on the next Parliament as well.

Thus, everyone is playing their cards close to their chests, including Mulayam Singh, whose party doesn’t seem to have benefited from the nuclear deal, if Amar Singh’s spluttering against the home minister are any indication. In UP, the Samajwadi Party will apparently give the Congress 11 parliamentary seats to contest; they include the eight seats currently held by the Congress.

Despite the pact, however, Mulayam has told friends that there is no guarantee that the Congress will win the three extra seats it is getting. He obviously realizes that in the wake of the recent blasts and retaliatory blasts, the Congress’s electoral losses are his gains. If the polls are merely a positioning for the real battle of government formation, then why should he concede anything to the Congress? All bets are off. When the Lok Sabha numbers start rolling in, Sonia is likely to find herself a very lonesome woman.

This brings us back to Manmohan Singh and the recent declarations of his Superman- like qualities. All this talk of fierce determination, unhesitant courage and unsentimental willpower is a lot of bunkum.

He doesn’t have the spine to face even the media through one-on-one interviews or press conferences (the on-board special aircraft interactions are with a captive, if not courtier-like, audience). The simple fact is that there is a direct correlation between his success as a prime minister and the number of Lok Sabha seats he will fetch for the Congress party. Then it will be for the whole world to see, how much steel Manmohan Singh actually is, and how much gas
editorchief@epmltd.com
About the author:
Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express and is based at Chennai
source: http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?artid=iqU2jla3QFM=&Title=Manmohan%E2%80%99s+real+test&SectionID=d16Fdk4iJhE=&MainSectionID=b7ziAYMenjw=&SectionName=aVlZZy44Xq0bJKAA84nwcg==&SEO=