The Manmohan Singh government demonstrated its durability by surviving the cut motions brought against it by the opposition in the Lok Sabha even if its success was largely due to the miscalculations of its over-enthusiastic opponents.
Persuaded by the government’s manifold problems – Maoist insurgency, inflation, the Indian Premier League (IPL) fiasco, signs of tension within the ruling coalition – the opposition apparently convinced itself that the time had come for it to strike a blow.
Its confidence was perhaps boosted by the fact that it had a fair number of parties on its side, including both the friends and foes of the government as well as neutrals.
The foes included, first, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies such as the Janata Dal-United, the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal and, secondly, the Left which comprises four parties – the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the Forward Bloc.
This indirect tie-up between the “communal” BJP and the communists has been in place ever since they voted together against the nuclear deal in 2008.
Another set of foes presented a remarkable alphabetical soup with parties such as the AIADMK, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), the Telugu Desam, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD).
Then, there were the neutrals such as Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), H.D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
The opposition’s calculation was that with all of them present and voting, it would be able to give the government a run for its money, especially if the latter was unable to keep its flock together on the crucial day.
It is not impossible that the opposition had expected the Trinmool Congress to play truant, as it did on the day when the voting took place in the Rajya Sabha on the women’s reservations bill, which it opposes in its present form.
Besides, there has always been a cloud over the loyalty of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) ever since it played footsie with the Left-led Third Front before last year’s general election. These misgivings may have been strengthened by the aspersions that have been cast on the role of its two senior leaders, Sharad Pawar and Praful Patel, in the IPL imbroglio.
In the end, however, the opposition’s house of cards came tumbling down even before it could be erected. The first gust which shook it was the BSP’s decision to support the government. Not long afterwards, perhaps realising that theirs was a lost cause, the RJD and the Samajwadi Party decided to abstain from voting. So did the JD-S.
But the unkindest cut for the opposition was the decision of Jharkhand Chief Miniser Shibu Soren to stand by the government although his party is the BJP’s ally in the state. Following Soren’s “betrayal”, the alliance came under strain, but the damage is being repaired after Soren’s apology.
As a result of these desertions, the government sailed through with flying colours. But its success is not entirely without problems. The most serious of these is the BSP’s decision to cozy up to it. The suspicion, of course, is that this mending of fences was at the government’s initiative since it feared the outcome of the cut motion. In an intriguing move a day before the voting, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) informed the Supreme Court that it might not pursue the disproportionate assets cases against Mayawati.
Although the opposition cried foul about this suspected manipulation of the CBI by the government for political purposes, the die had been cast. However, what this new bonhomie between the Congress and the BSP means is that the former will have to put on hold its plans to recover its lost base in Uttar Pradesh by wooing the Dalits, as heir apparent Rahul Gandhi has been doing by spending nights in Dalit homes.
The Congress seems to have decided to let Mayawati lord over Uttar Pradesh for the time being before making up its mind whether to renew its earlier offensive or opt for some kind of a semi-permanent understanding with her. As for Mayawati, she may have realized that she is no longer quite as powerful as before and that a truce with the Congress is preferable to a head-on confrontation.
However, any sign of a Congress-BSP thaw will further widen the gulf between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party, driving the latter to the Left, which used to be its ally till last year. This will leave the RJD and the LJP out on a limb although they will continue to be closer to the UPA than to the Left’s amalgam of a Third Front comprising, besides the four Leftist parties, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the RLD, the INLD and a few floating members like the AIADMK, the Janata Dal-Secular and the Asom Gana Parishad.
The compositions of the three main political formations led by the Congress, the BJP and the Left may have remained more or less the same, but if the fine-tuning done by the BSP, the RJD and the Samajwadi Party has benefited the Congress, the reason apparently is that the latter is seen as a more stable political entity than the BJP and the Left.
The BJP, for instance, cannot but have noted that one of the reasons given by the BSP, the RJD and the Samajwadi Party to support the government was they did not want to be seen in the company of a “communal” party. The Left’s travails are, of course, well known since it has perceptibly been losing ground in its West Bengal bastion as successive recent election results have shown.
