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THE NATION
One Man's Poison
Another's meat? Subramanian Swamy's allegations against
Sonia have saved Vajpayee and the BJP Government from defencegate's repercussions.
By Lakshmi Iyer
The Ides of March
was bad news for Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government but those of April
have fortune smiling on it once again. When Parliament resumed its budget
session post-recess last week, it was not the beleaguered NDA Government
that was in tears. Instead, it was the main opposition Congress, which
had stalled both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha for a total of 16 days on the
Tehelka expose, that looked cornered, confused and desperate for a face-saver.
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GRIME STORY II: Both Vajpayee and Sonia find themselves with similar
woes—Tehelka for one and Swamy for the other
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At a meeting called by Lok Sabha Speaker G.M.C.
Balayogi, Congress Deputy Leader Madhavrao Scindia begged the Government
for some "give-and-take" to help the Congress return to parliamentary
business with its prestige intact. The party that began the week demanding
the setting up of a joint parliamentary committee as a precondition to
restore order in the Houses, was prepared to return to business with just
an assurance on the panel by the third day. But the JPC demand proved
to be its undoing.
The Government felt no need to oblige. It had
already made up its mind to curtail the session with tacit support from
a section of the Opposition. It found the parliamentary logjam useful
as it could avoid discussions on contentious issues such as scams relating
to the stockmarket, the telecom sector and customs.
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With
the Opposition in disarray, there is a very real possibility that
the budget may be passed without discussion.
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For a government on the backfoot such a privilege
should have been unthinkable. But a combination of factors placed it in
a fortuitous circumstance. In large measure, Vajpayee owes his luck to
an unlikely person, his bete noire, the irrepressible Janata Party President
Subramanian Swamy, and to some extent to the incompetence of the Congress
leadership and the ongoing elections to five state assemblies that led
to a division in the opposition ranks.
In March, Swamy had filed a complaint with the
Government linking Congress President Sonia Gandhi with smuggling antiques
and accepting KGB funds for the Congress party sometime in the past. The
complaint was duly forwarded to the CBI. Swamy held a press conference
to publicise his allegations. The Congress did not take cognisance of
it. However, days before Parliament was to meet after a recess, the party
ill-advisedly decided to focus on Swamy's allegations. It boycotted an
all-party meeting convened by the prime minister to protest against the
Government's decision to refer Swamy's complaint to the CBI. "The
Tehelka issue had gone down the tube. We needed a new issue as some of
us felt we could not return to routine parliamentary business after stalling
Parliament for 11 days," admits a Congress leader.
Raking up Swamy's allegations proved to be counter-productive
for the Congress. It isolated the party in the Opposition.The communists,
already livid at the Congress for aligning with the Trinamool Congress
in West Bengal, dubbed it Sonia's personal problem. Assembly elections
forced the Congress and the Left parties to even abandon floor coordination.
The Leftists also saw no virtue in the Congress demand for a JPC probe
into Tehelka. They also welcomed the government offer to bifurcate the
session to enable their MPs to campaign in West Bengal and Kerala.
The Congress initially viewed the disunity in
the Opposition as inevitable and did not think it would last beyond May
10. "We thought we had sufficiently climbed down. In the pre-recess
period we had demanded the prime minister's resignation. Since the Government
had initially offered the JPC, we thought it would have no problem in
accepting our demand. We underestimated the complexities," explains
an MP. The party's tactical failures coupled with the Government's obduracy
is leading to an unseemly situation where the general and the railway
budgets run the risk of being passed without discussion. The last time
such a thing happened was in March 1991. Then the budgets were interim
and a caretaker government headed by Chandra Shekhar was in power. This
time around regular budgets are poised to meet such a fate. For Indian
democracy, that is terrible news.
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