Kamal Nath and Sonia Gandhi lose an election in Gujarat and Vilasrao Deshmukh loses his job in Maharashtra. This is accountability, Congress style. It involves a new definition of ‘scapegoat’. When Sonia Gandhi wants to escape someone else has to become the goat.
Vilasrao Deshmukh did not lose his job because he was hopeless. Competence, either administrative or political, was never the reason. If he had to go because he was incompetent, then he should have been sacked at least a year ago. Anyone with a political ear, and some feel of the street, has known for a long while that Deshmukh, wooden all the time, and woolly about everything except his personal interests, was one of the worst chief ministers ever. If there were any system of audit in the All India Congress Committee headquarters, Deshmukh would have lost his job long before Keshubhai Patel lost his in neighboring Gujarat, opening the way for Narendra Modi. Governance for Deshmukh amounted to nothing more than cuts (for himself and his party) and handouts.
The fiscal mismanagement has been appalling. I was talking to a veteran former editor of a leading Marathi newspaper, who went to settle down in America a little more than six years ago. I asked him what he thought Maharashtra’s debt had become. He paused, considered, and offered what he thought was a huge figure. Two thousand crores, he volunteered. I replied that it had gone up to 80,000 crores rupees and was expected to cross 100,000 crores rupees by 2004. He started laughing, only because he did not want to weep. One cannot blame him for being shocked. When Sharad Pawar was defeated by the Shiv Sena-BJP combination, he left behind a state with a 250-crore rupees surplus. The Sena-BJP government turned that into a massive deficit of 49,000 crores rupees by the time it was voted out. The Congress will have doubled that and more by the time it is voted out next year. And no one has yet got the message. You do not win elections by throwing money at vested interests.
"Gone!" muttered my editor-friend. He was talking about both the state and the government. The people of Maharashtra have been making this clear for some time now. Anyone who has seen Udhav Thackeray draw cheers from plus-50,000 crowds in a small town knows that he has also seen the face of a future chief minister. Deshmukh added combustible folly to his incompetence when he promoted his son in a popular Hindi film that never became popular because his son turned out, at least in this movie, to be as big a flop as his father. The voter interpreted his chief minister’s involvement in the film industry very simply: the father was spending corruption money to help his son. It is the kind of interpretation that is made easily when you have lost credibility.
Sonia Gandhi should have realized what was going on in a vital state like Maharashtra much earlier, and sought to control matters when there was still time to make a difference. But the decisions of the Congress high command are not made on the basis of honest evidence and analysis. They are measured by loyalty and the regularity with which a chief minister sends funds to Delhi. Deshmukh kept Delhi happy, and Delhi kept him happy. It was cosy relationship. No wonder Deshmukh looked visibly shocked when he learned that he had to pay the price for Gujarat.
Sonia Gandhi has moved to protect herself. Before Gujarat, she had begun to believe that it was only a matter of time before she became prime minister of India. Her courtiers had been feeding her with the traditional fare of cooked-up lies. Either that, or they said what the boss wanted to hear. Sonia Gandhi could not distance herself from the complete abdication of ideology and common sense in the Gujarat campaign; she authorized the naïve and even childish notion that a "soft Hindutva" combined with the marginalization of Muslims would take the Congress to victory against Narendra Modi. After Gujarat, and the obligatory ten days of silence, she had to change the subject. She knew that if the Congress was routed in Maharashtra and Rajasthan she would have to share the blame since she had made Deshmukh and Ashok Gehlot chief ministers. So off with their heads, lest hers be in question later. Digvijay Singh is a different story. He became chief minister long before she appeared on the scene. This fact used to irritate her. But she is now too weak to move against him. If Kamal Nath had by some miracle won in Gujarat he would have made bid to replace Digvijay Singh.
So twinkling-blue-eyes Sushil Shinde becomes chief minister of Maharashtra because of the usual reason: bloody great luck. His first four thank you letters should, therefore, in descending order of importance, be to god, Narendra Modi, Sharad Pawar and Sonia Gandhi.
The preeminence of god on the list is inarguable. Napoleon, famously, preferred a lucky general to a good one, and god also gave Shinde the right caste. This is a good time in Congress politics to be a Dalit since no Dalit is voting for the party anymore. Shinde provides the first reason for the Dalit to return, although neither departure nor return is ever done in a hurry in politics. Shinde has waited a long while for this job. He has a strong sense of his own destiny, encouraged surely by the astrologer who has told him that he will be at the top of the heap some day. You cannot hold this against him. He started life as a constable. If he can travel from a constable’s beat to a chief minister’s palace, why should he not believe that he can go further, and perhaps to the top in Delhi as well. Shinde’s good fortune is all the better for the fact that he has become chief minister in the last phase of this Assembly’s five-year life. He cannot now be removed from the job until the elections, when the electorate will determine his future. Having helped him, Sonia Gandhi is now helpless. He can swim without her.
The reasons for a thank you note to Narendra Modi are obvious: no Modi victory in Gujarat, no turmoil in Delhi, no change in Maharashtra. The reasons for a thank you note to Sharad Pawar are more subtle.
Those familiar with the labyrinth of private equations know that Sushil Shinde and Sonia Gandhi’s bete noire Sharad Pawar get along famously, even if they do not advertise this equation out of political compulsions. Sharad Pawar intervened effectively to ensure that Shinde replaced Deshmukh rather than anyone else. Shivraj Patil, deputy leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, was a contender, backed hugely by those Congress Members of Parliament who wanted him out of their hair. (Such are the paradoxical rivulets that create rivers.) Pawar delivered a simple message. If his party and the Congress did not work together, they would both be sunk, with the Congress in deeper trouble than him. He indicated clearly that only Shinde had both the right caste and savvy to keep a difficult coalition going. He left the Shinde ball in Sonia Gandhi’s court. She had very little option except to pick it up. Shivraj Patil was never really in the game. He had about as much a chance as any dummy candidate. The game is also going to get interesting, since all the players are not going to play for the same result. To put it bluntly, Sharad Pawar’s end game is not Sonia Gandhi as prime minister.
However, in all fairness, Shinde should send a thank you letter to Sonia Gandhi as well. She could have got cussed and preferred Shivraj Patil. In fact, a stronger Sonia Gandhi would have installed Patil. But Gujarat changed all that.
The key question is: having made it to the top, can Sushil Shinde deliver? That is easier promised than delivered. The evidence is not encouraging. Every party has tried to change an ebbing chief minister in order to redirect the tide, but the original current has proved too powerful. Check with Sheila Dikshit, Sushma Swaraj and Sahib Singh Verma. Nearly five years ago, an anxious BJP tried to change the mood of the Delhi electorate by replacing Verma with Sushma Swaraj.
Sheila Dikshit still laughed her way to the vote bank. Sushil Shinde has about a year in real time to undo the damage of three and a half years of apathy, indifference and sheer absence of political understanding. Support corroded from under the Congress; how is he going to patch it together again? He cannot do it by mobilizing his caste alone.
He has to address the mind of the main body of voters, who have been driven back to the Shiv Sena and BJP by poor government in Bombay and naïve political leadership in Delhi.
The Congress is happy to do something about the first. Since it will continue to do nothing about the second, it must remain condemned to the margins.
— Arab News Features 19 January 2003
