A no-confidence motion only gets serious if there is a serious chance of defeating the government, or if the issue is serious enough to persuade MPs of a ruling party or alliance to withdraw support to the government on a question of principle. The two propositions are not unrelated: only a very serious crisis can threaten the majority of a government. The no-confidence motion brought in by Sonia Gandhi fit neither criterion. It was not meant to. The exercise was designed to create confidence in Sonia Gandhi rather than display no-confidence in Atal Behari Vajpayee. It was unsuccessful on the first count; and the second was a no-hoper in any case.
The lack of tension was evident on both sides of the house. When the opposition has nothing new to say it generally says it loudly in the hope of simulating interest. That is what the Congress, led by its reader, or perhaps read by its leader, did. The government was indifferent, since it knew that nothing would make a difference. It was a blip event, unlikely to be remembered beyond the weekend of obligatory obituary notices in the print media. Perhaps this was why L.K. Advani, a forceful logician when he is at his best, went underboard rather than overboard in his response to the motion. As for the prime minister, he was merely bored. Who can blame him?
Chandra Shekhar, as usual, hit the right key when he abstained from voting on the motion. It was his way of dismissing the proposition as immature. The only time he became exercised was when Sonia Gandhi made the rather unusual charge that Vajpayee had apologized to Indira Gandhi during the emergency and had begged for his release.
I have no idea who is in charge of Gandhi’s information base, but whoever told her this story clearly kept it a closely guarded secret for 25 years. Gandhi does not quite get the fact that there is supposed to be a certain decorum in Parliament, at least among the senior leaders. Parliament should be different from the mud-slinging that goes on when candidates wrestle on the election field. The culture is cut-and-thrust, not cannon filled with loose shot.
The Congress did have one opportunity to bring a genuine no-confidence motion against the government in the life of this Parliament, over the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat. That debate might not have brought down the government, but it would have broken its ranks. Issues that seared the conscience of India were involved. The prime minister himself made his anguish known. A government victory would have been numerical and technical; the opposition leaders would have ensured a moral defeat for the government, and done so with the nation watching on television. But Sonia Gandhi refused to move a no-confidence motion on the riots. Why? She did not have to consult anyone. She certainly did not consult anyone this time. In any case, no one outside the government would have disagreed, and many inside the government would have been too embarrassed to defend themselves.
Sonia Gandhi let that opportunity pass. Were those riots less important than Buta Singh’s unclear accusations? Why is no one in the Congress asking such questions? The answer is guilt. Sonia Gandhi did not move a no-confidence motion on Gujarat because she had decided that she would fight the Gujarat Assembly elections as a pseudo-BJP party, riding some imagined “soft-Hindutva” wave against Narendra Modi. She did not want to seem “secular” when she was ready to compromise on secularism.
She rediscovered secularism only after Narendra Modi devastated the Congress in Gujarat. However, the rediscovery remains uncertain, because the party has not totally lost its belief that laudatory references to the cow can woo an electorate that wants more electricity and better roads.
The fact that the Congress has lost its way is only part of the problem; more relevant is that it has lost the route map to any important political destination. The party has become a bit of a split personality. Its realistic half recognizes that it cannot win a majority on its own any longer; its egoistic half prevents it from becoming partner of a working coalition that can hope to come to power through cooperation.
The Congress continues to believe that the other non-BJP parties will have no option but to accept Sonia Gandhi as the leader of the coalition and therefore as the person to be projected as the future prime minister. The purpose of the no-confidence motion was not to challenge the government, but to force the other opposition parties to accept Sonia Gandhi as their leader, implicitly if not explicitly. But this is not a game of dare. And there is nothing personal about the stand taken by political parties who refuse to nominate Sonia Gandhi as their candidate for prime minister: personalized politics is poor politics. Leaders like Chandra Shekhar, Sharad Pawar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Deve Gowda are not children who have bought a lottery ticket and are waiting for destiny to send them a prize. They base their assessments on what they read of the Indian mind. A significant portion of the Indian electorate does not want a person of Italian origin to become the country’s prime minister. When the people of India are offered a choice between Gwalior and Italy, they will not spend too much in debate. His own personal stature makes Vajpayee add at least five percent to the BJP vote; with Sonia Gandhi as his opponent, he doubles the advantage. To suggest this in Congress circles is an act of treachery, and an act of treachery is an invitation to a beheading. Congress leaders therefore maintain a stoic silence when they cannot find the language to be sufficiently loyal.
Elections are a time when politics turns hard. There is too much at stake for levity. The Congress may have discovered an excellent ally in Laloo Prasad Yadav, but that does not mean that Laloo will give the Congress more than five or six seats out of 40 in Bihar. This too is a measure of the party’s decline. (It might be hard to believe, but when the Congress was the predominant party in Bihar in the 1950s, Bihar was considered the best-administered state in the country.)
Charity is neither offered nor expected among friends. If Mulayam Singh Yadav does negotiate an electoral adjustment with the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, he will not give the party more than 10 seats out of 80. In other words proportions will be the same, irrespective of whether the ally has been friendly or less than friendly. The Marxists may be the most vociferous supporters of Sonia Gandhi now, but it might be a good idea to check with them if they will offer even a single seat to the Congress in Bengal to honor such allegiance. They will not. So what price friendship? The allies of the Congress are telling Sonia Gandhi that she is not worth more than about a dozen seats in Parliament out of 180 in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. Her opponents will tell her the same. If the Congress does not accept such a marginal role in the north, it will not have any alliance and get even fewer seats. The northeast, which delivered for the Congress in the last elections, is out of reach this time. In states like Andhra Pradesh, where the Congress could have hoped to do well, new factors like the Telengana movement will chip away its potential gains. Power has led it into a swamp in a substantial state like Maharashtra. Broadly, the Congress will pick up seats because of the spread factor rather than the strength factor.
These are the facts. They do not encourage Walter Mitty-fantasies. The timing of the next general elections will be decided after the results of the four assembly elections in November. If the BJP wins three, it will hold the general elections in late January or February (I am assuming that the prime minister will go for the SAARC conference in Pakistan in early January, and the campaign season will start, officially, only after that).
There is therefore not much time. The Congress should use the upcoming assembly elections to create the environment for coalition-building by offering a share of the seats to its potential partners in the general election.
For some reason I do not see that happening. In all probability, the various parties will go their different ways and then get into intense bargaining when, and only when, an election date is declared.
If the Congress loses in the assembly elections, a Third Front could finesse it. That is a tired term, however, and the Front might want to consider that one reason why Third Front sounds appropriate is because it always comes third. How about Second Front? It has a martial ring to it as well. Cynicism apart, the Second Front may not be such a bad place to be parked in. It is the only parking lot that has roads leading in either direction.
The good thing about every election is that it is always so different from the last one — except for losers.
Arab News Opinion 24 August 2003
