Jharkhand: Tale of Congress Sycophancy By Inder Malhotra
ONLY the blinkered supporters of the Congress would believe that by belatedly reversing its own outrage in Jharkhand it has somehow retrieved the situation and can therefore forget the recent past and concentrate on building up the future. All that the core party in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre has been able to do is prevent wounding itself more grievously that it already has. It will take a long time to live down its sins of omission and commission. Moreover, even the damage limitation exercise has been possible due largely to the efforts of the usually unobtrusive Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. This good man, with an enviably clean record, had attracted so much discredit and criticism for the misdeeds of others that he found it necessary to cry halt. And this he did rather late on the night of Friday last. However, some very disturbing questions remain unanswered. The most urgent of these is that if the Union Cabinet could order Mr Shibu Soren � who should never have been sworn in as Chief Minister of the tribal state � to resign on Friday night, why couldn�t it tell him on Friday morning to obey the Supreme Court�s directive, let the majority test proceed smoothly and, in the event of failing to muster a majority in the Assembly, quit gracefully? Instead, Mr Soren and his rowdy cohorts, including the nine Congress MLAs playing second fiddle to him, were allowed to obstruct the trial of strength as many as six times, drawing all norms into dirt in full glare of the TV cameras. To cap it all, the Assembly was unpardonably adjourned until March 15. Some are trying to pretend that the Union cabinet could not have foreseen Friday�s �unfortunate events� in Ranchi. But this, too, is poppycock. The bitter truth is that the Dr Singh government had much less to do with what has happened in Goa first and now in Jharkhand than the coterie surrounding the Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi. At least twice a day, the Congress spokesman has been shouting hoarse that Soniaji never issued any directions to the Governor of either Jharkhand or Goa. This may well be true. But the trouble is that no one believes it, if only because from the days of Indira Gandhi the Congress tradition has been that no Congressman or Congress-woman can even visit the washroom without Madam�s permission. Under these circumstances, it is no coincidence that Delhi�s two major newsweeklies have published cover stories with the same message: �Sonia�s halo slips�. To be sure, the damage to her image is not irreparable. She has seen ups and downs several times during the seven years since she took over as Congress president. But it is one thing to undergo these vicissitudes when in the Opposition and quite another to do so after winning the nation�s highest esteem after declining the office of Prime Minister when it was firmly in her grasp. This, ironically, has happened within 10 months flat. In any case, it is inconceivable that the shameless time-server installed in Ranchi Raj Bhavan, Mr Sibtey Razi, would have acted entirely on his own and sworn in Mr Soren with indecent haste without hearing from someone purporting to have the authority to speak on behalf of the Congress president. It is difficult to overlook the parallels between the Jharkhand fiasco and the sordid episode in Hyderabad in 1984 when the state governor of that time, Ram Lal, had sacked the Andhra chief minister, the famous N T Rama Rao, who bounced back as CM within 30 days. When an embarrassed Indira Gandhi was constrained to dismiss Lal, he had whined that he had been ordered to do what he did by Arun Nehru, then in Indira�s inner circle! Just as Lal had had to swear in NTR before himself leaving Hyderabad, so Mr Razi has had to swear in the NDA leader, Mr Arjun Munda, whose claim the Governor had earlier brushed away with a flippant wave of the hand. It is only fair therefore that Mr Razi is given his marching orders sooner rather than later. Of course, he belongs to a place near Amethi, the constituency of two generations of the Gandhis, where he has rendered the family loyal service. But surely he can be rewarded with another sinecure far away from Ranchi. One joke in Delhi is that Mr Razi and Mr S C Jamir, Goa�s erring governor, might be asked to swap jobs. That, however, would be a disaster � in both places. The Left Front that supports the UPA �from outside� has so far been critical of the government principally on account of its economic policies. Now the area of its criticism has widened. Several Left leaders have deplored Mr Razi�s hurried offer of the crown to Mr Soren, and attacked the subsequent happenings in the state legislature as �bad for democracy�. It was only after Dr Singh had met the leaders of the CPI (M) and those of DMK allies that he acted to undo the grievous damage done to both the UPA and the democratic system.
