NEW DELHI, 3 November — Why is a swearing-in ceremony called a swearing-in ceremony? Because everyone present at the ceremony is swearing for some reason or the other. The ministers, chief and not-so-chief, are naturally the most open as they swear to uphold the Constitution of India.
They want every television camera to record their pledge. No one may remember a word of the constitution, or have any intention of honoring it, but swearing in the name of God is easy.
The ruling party MLAs, sitting on chairs in neat, and later not so neat, rows are less ecstatic as they see their government being sworn in. They are, noiselessly, swearing at the lucky sods who have been selected by the chief minister to become ministers. Dark thoughts swirl through their minds as they contemplate plots that will sabotage ministers, forcing them to be dropped so that berths can open up for those who were betrayed by fortune this time.
The opposition MLAs are swearing at their own leaders, who are so worthless that they lost the election and left them simmering on the wrong side of the House. Their boss, defeated but given a seat in the front row as the ex-chief minister, forced to wear a political smile that displays all his false teeth, is swearing in every language he knows and some he is in the process of learning as he seethes with silent invective.
The boss is cursing, in this order, fate, the stupid voter, the worthless candidates who were too stupid to lose, and that grinning new chief minister who has replaced him. For evidence of this thesis, you have to do no more than to turn to Srinagar on Saturday the second of November, where and when Mufti Muhammad Sayeed replaced the Abdullah family after three generations and a total of 32 years in power in two spells.
The Mufti himself was doing the preferred kind of swearing, along with the magic eight who got their chance to become ministers. But a dozen of his coalition’s MLAs, who have collected under the grandly titled People’s Democratic Forum in order to strengthen their bargaining power for the rewards of office, were already swearing at Mufti and the deputy chief minister from the Congress Mangat Ram Sharma for not giving their group the portfolios they wanted.
The language they choose for their swearing is naturally disguised. How does an angry dissident curse his own chief minister? Naturally, in the most lofty terms. Sample: The head of the People’s Democratic Forum, Ghulam Mohiuddin Sofi said, “We have decided not to join the new government. We will offer issue-based support from the outside and have asked the bigger members (the two who got the ministers, Mufti’s PDP and the Congress) to clear their stand before the vote of confidence.”
This translates into: All right, smarty pants, or smarty shalwars, you can smile all you want as the governor gives you all the fancy titles but in a couple of days when the assembly meets and you need a majority of the votes in order to retain power, you will have to cringe and come crying to me. It is then that I will make you thoroughly miserable. If I don’t get what I want, I will sound so principled on every issue that you will puke.
If this is what the ruling coalition MLAs who have not been sworn in are saying, then we can easily imagine what the MLAs of the defeated National Conference are telling each other: “Those great Abdullahs! What hype we got from them! That we would win despite the visible anger of the people! All our superstar Farooq did in the last five years was build a golf course, indulge in dramatics, holiday around the world, party in Delhi and Bombay and then insisted that the infrastructure of institutionalized corruption he had created would pull in the vote.
Kept winking that at the last minute the rigging ghost would appear and take us to that magic majority. Here we are! This is our big, fat majority. And he didn’t even make a minister the last time.”
Farooq Abdullah, true to style, had found the perfect place to curse from. London. He disappeared for a few days to play golf in South Africa during the election campaign, so it is hardly surprising that the moment the elections were over he shot off to London. He must be using the Queen’s English to describe Mufti Muhammad Sayeed and Atal Behari Vajpayee. But his son and heir Omar Abdullah was there in the distinguished audience during the swearing-in ceremony, and you can make a safe bet that behind his pleasant smile he was doing everything possible to make the swearing more colorful.
His range would also be far greater than the narrow focus of the others at the function. The rest would by and large have single, if not singular, targets. Omar has the right to swear at all sides. Where would he start swearing? Imagine his thoughts at the party that his father inherited from his grandfather and what he has been left with. Then he could take a look at all the rigged elections that not only kept his father illegitimately in power, but also directly inspired a secessionist movement that left a generation in Kashmir and India scarred.
He might find a few words about the administration during his father’s days in power; that would be reason for some exceptional swearing out.
But if Omar were honest, he would also probably swear a little at himself, for being party to such a party. When the going was good, he wasn’t going anywhere else. Would he swear at the ministry he belonged to in Delhi? There would be enough reason to: If the BJP had not got wiped out in Jammu the National Conference’s options might have been a little more fluid. The only person he probably would not swear at would be the prime minister. Vajpayee simply refuses to accept Omar’s resignation, no matter how many times he offers it. Which grandfather would ever be so accommodating? The more intriguing question is: Is Omar Abdullah a minister of state for external affairs at this moment or not? He said he had sent in his resignation. Has the postal system failed? Has the PM sent the resignation? Is the PM resigned to the young man’s resignation?
The list of swearers is not complete. There was Ghulam Nabi Azad, dapper in polo-neck shirt and jacket, sitting with justifiable pride beside his leader Sonia Gandhi. We can only guess at his private thoughts as he watched Mufti Muhammad Sayeed taking the oath: There but for some good sense on the part of Sonia Gandhi, he could have been star of the day instead of being merely a front-row guest. According to the deal between the PDP and the Congress, Azad must wait for three years before he gets a chance to become chief minister. The word chance is used advisedly.
A week, as was famously said by Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics: To predict what will happen three years later is silly. Within the next three years not only will the rest of the states go to the polls, but there will be general elections as well.
In any case the dynamics of Kashmir politics will be controlled by extraneous factors. The real test that Mufti will face is not the survival of his government, but the survival of Kashmir as a peaceful and integral part of the Indian Union. It is this national consideration that persuaded Sonia to surrender the arithmetical claim of the Congress in favor of the more powerful wisdom of political reality and accept Mufti as the first chief minister of this coalition.
Sonia took one small step back to move two large steps forward in the evolving chess game of Indian politics. She was one person in Srinagar yesterday who had no reason to swear. The time for the people to swear has not come. It is of course too soon. But the difference between too soon and soon is only a small three-letter word which will melt in the thaw of the next spring.
The government, or durbar as it is still quaintly called, of Jammu and Kashmir will shift now to Jammu from Srinagar for the winter months. By the time summer returns, people will want to see whether the promise of good governance has any delivery systems or not. There are some visible definitions of good governance, with electricity and communication being at the top of the list.
On the political side, the people have voted for talks with militants in the long process to bring them in from the outside. To draw timelines for such a process would be irrational, and this is a problem that can only be eliminated piecemeal; it will not disappear suddenly. But the voter will expect the basic conveniences that have been denied to him by misgovernance and corruption.
Understanding will not stretch to a status quo on darkness and misery. There is one swearing-in ceremony that every government must be wary of, which is when people begin to swear. They do it without ceremony.
