It is now becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the question: does the Constitutional writ of the Republic of India run in the Republic of Bihar? If you take a purely legalistic view of the farce enacted by Laloo Prasad Yadav in Patna today, it is difficult to fault him. His party proved its majority less than two weeks ago; the Supreme Court gave him a reprieve from arrest today and his doting, devoted wife was elected unanimously by his legislature party to replace him. Laloo has not only thumbed his nose at all Constitutional propriety and political morality but also at the vast army of his urban, upper-caste detractors whose scorn for his rusticity has acquired a new moral legitimacy with his crass display of arrogant venality.
It could be argued that in installing his wife, Laloo has only done what many others, of more privileged upbringing, have done in the recent past. After all, Kamal Nath and Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh did put forward their wives as electoral proxies to preserve their constituencies while they were in the dock. So possibly the anointment of Rabri Devi could only be yet another argument against the bill reserving seats for women in Parliament and no more. Dynastic rule too is nothing new in our system – it is just that those who opposed it so bitterly through decades and came to power fighting it, have now been co-opted by the system.
But the constitutional affront in Patna is far more serious than that. In three weeks of obstinate, shameful manipulation of the system, Laloo has shown it to be impotent, ineffective, and short of ideas when it comes to dealing with somebody willing to treat it with such cynical contempt. We will be erring gravely in not seeing the dangers inherent in the kind of precedent now being set. Possibly it was situations such as this that the framers of the Constitution visualised when they drafted Article 356. But even if that does not remain an obvious option, Prime Minister I K Gujral can no longer take refuge under the alibi of Constitutional helplessness. If he is indeed as outraged as the rest of us, and thinks a bit less passively, the Prime Minister might find that he is not as “laachar” as he recently confessed to being. What he has to do is as follows: expel the Rashtriya Janata Dal from the United Front, sack its ministers in his council and publicly dissociate himself and his Government from Laloo. This will not shame Laloo into taking a holiday from power. But only political isolation and excommunication of this sort will save our democracy from a grave national shame. It might also save Gujral from that awful slur of passivity.