Realising that corruption is becoming an issue agitating India’s middle class, as it once did in the mid-1980s, the Congress moved into a damage control mode and sent Ashok Chavan and Suresh Kalmadi packing. But it took the Congress a week to show A Raja the door. The time lost was the Opposition’s gain. For, the exit of the controversial telecom minister was seen to be done under pressure from the Opposition and the media, which bayed for his blood afresh, after the CAG report indicted him in the mindboggling Rs 1.76 lakh crore scandal. Had Raja stepped down along with Chavan and Kalmadi — his exit has been on the cards for some time — the Congress might have been on surer footing. The delay meant Advantage Opposition, whetting its appetite for more.
Having said that, this time the Congress did succeed in mounting pressure on the DMK chief to let the minister go. The DMK chief had also been under growing pressure from leaders within his own party — among them his sons M K Alagiri, M K Stalin and nephew Dayanidhi Maran — to drop Raja.
The Congress got a shot in the arm with the AIADMK’s sudden and ‘unconditional’ offer to the UPA the support of 18 MPs in the Lok Sabha, nine of its own and nine other invisible allies, who J Jayalalithaa promised to deliver — if the Congress dropped Raja. Her 18 MPs were meant to offset the loss of 18 DMK MPs, who are backing the UPA, if they withdrew support. This was not so sudden a development as is being made out. The buzz is that some Congress leaders — environment minister Jairam Ramesh being one of them as also some Chennai industrialists — had done the groundwork for the overture that Jayalalithaa made.
With the resignation of Raja, it is now being said that M K Alagiri may also quit soon because the minister now wants to concentrate his attention in Tamil Nadu with Assembly polls due next year and he has been given 100 Assembly seats to look after.
The Congress has for the moment turned down the AIADMK offer, but Jayalalithaa, say her supporters, is getting ready to come to Delhi with a bouquet for Sonia Gandhi on December 9, which happens to be the birthday of the Congress president. But it is too early to conclude that this will lead to the development of a new political axis in Tamil Nadu.
With the way the situation has panned out, the Congress is well placed to bid for a higher number of seats from whoever it decides to align with, DMK or AIADMK. There is a section in the Congress which would prefer to hang together with the DMK. For the simple reason that over the years, the DMK has shown itself to be a more reliable ally than the AIADMK, even though Jayalalithaa has drawn large crowds at her recent meetings in Tamil Nadu.
The Congress’ stakes at the Centre, of giving a stable government in Delhi for a whole term, are higher than its stakes in Tamil Nadu. It knows that Mamata Banerjee, if she wins the state polls next year in West Bengal, may become even more difficult to handle and the Congress may not want a situation on its hands with a volatile Mamata and an unpredictable Jayalalithaa, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee had to contend with in 1998, which had sent his government packing in one year, and brought on a mid-term election.
There was a time in the Eighties that corruption had escalated into a major electoral issue around the Bofors gun deal, and it had brought together the Opposition, from the left to the right, on a common platform, which had brought down the 415 Congress member-government of Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. In recent years corruption was less of an emotive issue as people saw no difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Recent weeks have seen the urban middle class in the metros and small-town India getting increasingly agitated by successive scams that the media has brought to light, be it the Rs 70,000 crore CWG scandal or the Adarsh housing society controversy where every rule in the book was broken to favour the powerful.
It would only be fair to say that the popular reaction is not so much against corruption per se which has seeped into the very being of our political institutions. It is more an outrage against the high and mighty getting away wrongdoing with impunity.
What is more, there have been signs of the issue uniting the opposition — the BJP, the Left parties and the regional groups — and they are moving in step against the Congress from day one in Parliament.
The Opposition’s offensive against the Congress on corruption has come as a warning to the ruling party. The BJP is now on the lookout for other scams to keep up the pressure on the ruling combine. The Congress’ counter offensive — the party stepped up its attacks on the RSS for its leaders’ alleged role in terror attacks and this is calculated to drive a wedge in the opposition ranks — shows that the country’s Grand Old Party is not unaware of the dangers that lie ahead, even as it finds itself on the backfoot.
The trouble is that there are no think-tanks in evidence in the party any more; its core group which meets every Friday deals with the latest crisis. In recent years, the Congress has slipped into a reactive mode. The party reacts to situations, but has ceased to set a proactive agenda which would drive the political discourse in the country, on where it is headed, what it stands for, and what it has achieved
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