That funny Bofors feeling

Parliament building | Bloomberg File photo

It now looks like it’s been a very, very long time since the three heady days of the Obama visit. Surely the high point (even more so in terms of the UPA government’s image) was his telling our Parliament that India was no longer a rising power, it had already risen. We had been generous enough to convene the winter session a little bit ahead of time to accommodate his visit. And since then, the same Parliament has not met for even one hour of legislative business. Do you also remember the first Indian to welcome Obama as he alighted from Air Force One in Mumbai? It was Ashok Chavan. He was fired on charges of corruption and nepotism within 11 minutes of Obama’s departure from India. And the man he praised so much through his three days, for his wisdom, integrity, foresightedness and intellect, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is now being projected by his own partymen as super-honest but too soft and sensitive to handle the charges that are being hurled at him and his government.

No prime minister of India needs Section 144 to protect him from his opposition MPs, and certainly this one does not need anticipatory bail from any scrutiny, including that of a JPC. For that is the lazy excuse being used by Congress people in whispers: if we concede the JPC and it summons him, the poor fellow won’t be able to take it and will quit.

We all know that a fortnight is a long time in politics, but, even for a society as adept at self-destruction as ours, this one has been remarkably disastrous. All of a sudden, far from being a risen, or even rising, power we are beginning to look like one that is drifting without an anchor, or wobbling without a centre of gravity. There is no prospect yet of the logjam in Parliament being broken. The scandal that is the cause of this parliamentary crisis has receded in the background, as the talk now is centred on political and corporate intrigues, phone-taps (legal or not, nobody knows), leaked transcripts that throw not a sliver of light on the scam but ruin many reputations (some entirely undeservingly, people just caught in casual small talk) and generally play into the raging feral sentiment where it is easy to believe everybody is a thief. Instead of getting any closer to catching the guilty in the telecom scam, then, we have so brilliantly succeeded in declaring ourselves as a nation where all professions, from politics to bureaucracy, to business and now the judiciary and the media, are manned by crooks.

How does one describe this situation? Sab chor hain, but I do not know, nor have the patience to find out who the real chor is. To those of us old enough to remember, this sentiment is not unfamiliar. We have seen this at least thrice in the past decades. First with Mrs Gandhi in the mid-1970s, when widespread allegations of corruption led to JP’s movement, sent our politics on a downward spiral and resulted in the imposition of the Emergency. Second, with Bofors, in 1987, and then with the Jain hawala case, in 1995. Each of these led to the same widespread belief that everybody was corrupt and compromised so nobody trusted anybody to catch the real crooks, and ultimately nobody got caught. But each one ruined the tenure of a government in spite of a fairly solid parliamentary majority.

Bofors, that broke out in 1987, is in fact a more striking example and deserves more detailed mention. Parliament stopped, all communication between the government and the opposition was reduced to gaalis, a JPC was set up and turned out to be an eyewash, the cabinet split as dissidents led by V.P. Singh used the opportunity to break away and build a political challenge that ultimately led to Rajiv Gandhi losing power and that too from a strength of 415 of 542 seats. Even more importantly, Bofors onwards, his government became as ineffectual as it had seemed purposefully effective till then. There were many mistakes made, some under panic and pressure, and some just to divert popular attention from the scandal. But the fact is that the government never recovered, and India lost nearly half the tenure of a very stable, powerful government.

You talk to the seniormost leaders of the UPA now, and they admit their government has got caught in a Bofors-like trap too early in this term. There are still three-and-a-half years to go and if this logjam, instead of being broken now, is allowed to get more bitter and complicated, it will unleash a period of non-functionality even longer than Rajiv’s, 1987 onwards. This is exactly what’s going to happen if this session does not resume functioning. And whether it is just allowed to waste away with adjournments in a battle of attrition, or adjourned sine die, it will result in the opposition, resurgent after the Bihar verdict, taking this issue to the streets. Do they really want that? Obviously not, but nobody has the courage to say so, just in case it is seen as defying the party-line. This newspaper strongly disagrees with the BJP’s silly insistence on a JPC because it would only serve to obfuscate the issue and save the guilty, as JPCs have done in the past. But is a JPC such a mortal threat to the UPA that they will not concede it to the opposition, whatever the cost? Or, can the Congress afford to be so arrogant as to not accommodate the opposition on anything, by way of a face-saver, or to at least flatter it with a degree of visible respect? No government can shut down its Parliament and join battle with the opposition on the streets halfway through its second year in power.

And what about the opposition, particularly the BJP? Is a permanent parliamentary paralysis what they want? You ask the more belligerent BJP leaders and they demand of you whether it is only their responsibility to ensure that Parliament functions. But since when has the total blocking of Parliament forever become a legitimate tactic for getting a demand met, howsoever important it might be? They also tell you, so smugly, that people will not accuse them of negative politics because they are so angry with telecom corruption. What they do not realise is that people are angry with corruption, and if you held an opinion poll on who is the most corrupt politician in India, the winner may be one who goes by the initials BSY and he is not a Congressman. As long as the BJP keeps him in power, its outrage over the UPA’s corruption will sound self-serving and hollow.

The good thing with the BJP is that, unlike the Congress, it has some internal democracy. But, unlike the Congress, it has no central authority at all. The seniors have been sidelined, and the younger lot think they have the Congress on the ropes and must not relent. But most of them are, by now, second or third-term parliamentarians. Do they realise what a dangerous example they are setting for our politics? What if the parties in opposition in our state capitals also take the cue from them and start using the stalling of their respective assemblies as blackmail to get their demands, even if for investigation of corruption, met? The result will be anarchy, and the BJP will share blame for that equally with the Congress.