Feb 22, 1999

Two massacres within a month force the Centre to once again push for the dismissal of the Rabri Devi government. This time the President agrees it is a fit case.

By Ashok K Damodaran and Javed M Ansari

In any age, in another part of the world, even in another part of India, human slaughter would be reason enough for a government to resign. Not in Bihar, not in any age. Since its birth in 1994, a brutal and shadowy private army called the Ranbir Sena has carried out more than 20 massacres: fathers speared through the heart, mothers shot through the head and little children with their throats slit. Horrific yes, but in Bihar such incidents were never reason enough for political transition or the dismissal of a government.

The carnage on the night of February 10 was something different. Only two days earlier, the Centre had despatched two companies of paramilitary forces in response to the state Government's request after the Shankarbigha massacre on January 25 in which 22 Dalits were killed. The upper-caste fanatics of the outlawed Ranbir Sena seemingly mocked at such official manoeuvres by striking the sleepy Dalit hamlets in Jehanabad's Khejan Narainpur, mowing down 12 Dalits in their sleep. What was equally shocking was that, just as in Shankarbigha, the Sena had dropped enough hints it would strike; handbills had been distributed announcing that Khejan Narainpur was next on its hit list. The paralysed administration did not respond to the Sena's challenge.

In Laloo's Bihar, a cognizable offence is committed every four seconds, a murder every two hours, a kidnapping-for-ransom every three hours and a rape every six hours, while loot of the treasury is a round-the-year activity. Sheer lack of governance has seen, among other things, extremists and private armies of feudal landlords establishing parallel administrations in nine of the state's 55 districts. During the campaign for the last Lok Sabha elections, Samata Party leaders George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar had exhorted voters to cast their ballots for the BJP-led alliance, saying, "If the BJP-led alliance is voted to power, the RJD Government will be thrown out within 72 hours."

It has taken somewhat longer. Last Thursday, as news of the Narainpur massacre reached Delhi, the Union Cabinet decided that the time had finally come to sign the Rabri Government's death warrant. As in September last year, when the Central Government first recommended President's rule in the state -- which President K.R. Narayanan rejected -- Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was abroad. Late on February 11 evening, Home Secretary Balmiki Prasad Singh was on his way to dinner at the Japanese Ambassador's when his cell phone buzzed, summoning him to the residence of Home Minister L.K. Advani. His brief was simple: prepare a note for a post-dinner cabinet meeting whose agenda was to send a recommendation to the President seeking dismissal of the Rabri Government. Narayanan had already been informed about the Government's intentions.

Even as the home secretary got down to work with Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, senior ministers began calling up alliance partners to inform them of the impending action. Fernandes walked into the meeting saying he had good news to convey: the alliance leaders he and Information and Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan had spoken to were not averse to the move.

The die had been cast. But technical glitches remained. After the snub from the President last September, the Government did not want to take any chances. Then the Rabri Government had managed a reprieve from the President mainly because of the poor case presented by Governor S. S. Bhandari. Attorney General Soli J. Sorabjee advised the Cabinet that the recommendation to the President must merely be a reiteration of the one made last time. "A fresh recommendation could have been sent back to us with questions from Rashtrapati Bhavan," said a minister, implying that by reiterating the original recommendation, the Government was only ensuring all loopholes were plugged.

By the time the eight ministers split after the meeting that lasted over 90 minutes, the decision to sack the Rabri Government had been taken. It was duly conveyed to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Jamaica, though the Government had to alter its plans to issue the notification the same night since the President had already gone to sleep. A half-hour's delay in the Presidential flight to Calcutta on Friday morning saw the Government make frantic efforts to rush the recommendation through.

That didn't matter though since the Centre then sent V.K. Malhotra, joint secretary in the Home Ministry, in a special aircraft to Calcutta to get the President's approval signalling the end of the Rabri regime. For much of the day, the President consulted his aides while closely scrutinising the Centre's case. Late on Friday, the Rabri Government was dismissed and the Assembly kept under suspended animation.

Earlier, the Centre's recommendation had caught the Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha (RLM) -- of which the RJD is a part -- leadership off-guard. Mulayam Singh Yadav literally stopped in his tracks during his brisk morning walk as the news was conveyed to him on his cell phone. The RLM's voluble spokesman, industrialist-politician Amar Singh, was for once left speechless as he turned back from the airport tarmac just as he was about to board a flight to Gorakhpur. Once the initial shock was over, the RLM leaders appeared to have resigned themselves to their fate. More so in view of the Congress' decision to distance itself from the RJD Government, making a strategic shift in its stand as compared to the last time. Sonia demanded that Rabri should follow the example of Orissa's Congress chief minister J.B. Patnaik and quit owning moral responsibility for her government's inability to prevent the recurrence of massacres.

Symptomatic of the widening rift between the RLM and the main opposition party was the manner in which its leaders targeted the Congress. "At the Centre the Congress is helping the Vajpayee Government survive and in the states it is helping the BJP dismiss our governments," charged Amar Singh. The RLM appeared conscious of the fact that it would henceforth have to fight the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as Sonia seeks to wrest back her party's lost base and woo the Muslim and Dalit vote banka. It is this fear of losing its usp that sees the RLM leaders turning increasingly shrill about the Congress, blaming it for the fall of a "secular government and for facilitating the formation of a Samata-BJP government in Bihar".

Laloo may actually have even been looking forward to the dismissal. For some time now, he has been waiting for the Centre to take some harsh measures so that he could cover up the failure of the RJD Government and go to the masses as a martyr felled by "communal forces". Laloo's game plan had been to use such a dismissal of the Rabri Government as a weapon in a future election. Unfortunately for him, the plans started to boomerang with Dalits showing signs of anger against the Rabri regime's failure to protect them from the feudal armies.

With the RJD clearly on the downslide, Congress leaders feel that their party can replace Laloo as the main political force to take on the BJP-Samata combine, a process that necessarily includes the minorities and the Dalits returning to its fold. Its call on Thursday for Rabri to quit "owning moral responsibility" and Sonia's visit to Narainpur last Saturday were all part of a strategy intended to make the Congress more appealing to the Dalits and the weaker sections. But now the Congress must be twinkle-toed and exhibit some deft political footwork. That has already begun. In a fine exhibition of political hair-splitting , it has been trying to draw a distinction between resigning on moral grounds as against being dismissed. It wasn't our idea to dismiss Rabri Devi, Congress leaders say with great earnestness. "We only wanted her to own moral responsibility and resign," says Ajit Jogi, Congress spokesperson. Perhaps as an extension of that logic, it is considering voting against the dismissal of the RJD Government when the issue comes up in Parliament.

During their campaign for the Lok Sabha elections a year ago, Fernandes and Nitish Kumar -- the two Union ministers from Bihar -- had vowed to throw out the Laloo-Rabri combine from power. The time had finally come for action. Last Friday, even before the Presidential nod came, Advani had already shortlisted advisers for Governor Bhandari. If anything, the list that includes former cabinet secretary N.N. Vohra, ex-supercop K.P.S. Gill, former Bihar chief secretary K. Prasad and retired bureaucrats D.K. Arya, K.K. Sinha, T.R. Jaitley and H.D. Pillai is indicative of the Government's intentions to clean up the mess accumulated over the last nine years.

That may well take time. The BJP-Samata combine's immediate aim, however, is to ensure that it takes over power in the state. The Centre is bound to keep that objective in mind while plotting future moves on Bihar. Last week, the state vice-president and the general secretary of the Samata Party quit and joined the Congress to protest the Centre's inability to deliver on its promise to dislodge the Rabri Government. The two Central ministers from Bihar now hope the trend will be reversed. With the RJD out of power and its leadership a discredited lot, the task of engineering defections from Laloo's party should be easier even as it makes his hopes of a comeback appear daunting.

In the 11 months since it came to power, the BJP-led coalition has rarely been able to evolve a national consensus on any item on its agenda. With the massacre in Narainpur last week, it finally carried out a decision with a virtual national consensus underpinning it. The dismissal was more than a foregone conclusion. At least the coalition leaders believe it was a national obligation.

--with Farzand Ahmed, Sanjay Kumar Jha and Harinder Baweja

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