ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Role Reversals

Politics is a mug's game. Never has this simple fact hit me more squarely in the face than during the last few days of the recent session of Parliament. That is, last week. When all work stopped in the Rajya Sabha and members from both sides yelled and screamed and shouted slogans over three issues that, according to them, deserved instant attention. At the cost of everything else. Including, alas, a discussion on the Budget in which I was keen to have my say.

The first issue, of course, was the sacking of Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat as our Navy Chief and its obvious corollary: Bhagwat's vicious diatribe against George Fernandes, Defence Minister. A truly sordid episode in the history of our armed forces. It is a dangerous sign for the future and portends the beginning of yet another intense conflict zone. This time, between career soldiers and elected representatives of the people.

The second issue was equally acrimonious. The sacking of Mohan Guruswamy, advisor to Yashwant Sinha and its predictable backlash: Guruswamy's angry broadside against the entire BJP Government, from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee down to Information & Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan, with Ranjan Bhattacharya thrown in for good measure. The fact that Guruswamy (till he turned rogue) was an Advani acolyte made the issue doubly complicated and, to cause further embarrassment to the BJP, the Harvard-returned economist deliberately went out of his way to make public the sensitive nature of the relationship between Vajpayee and Advani. Every interview by Guruswamy, every article he wrote (and timed with the session of Parliament) ensured more and more red faces in the treasury benches.

The third issue was, as always, Laloo Prasad Yadav's Bihar. There was yet another massacre in Jehanabad, where 35 innocent men, women and children were brutally killed to avenge an earlier massacre which took place to avenge yet another massacre which was in response to an earlier massacre. The BJP blamed the Rabri Devi Government for its callousness. The Rabri Devi Government blamed the State machinery, which (it claimed) was changed by Governor S S Bhandari during the few days of President's Rule, which they had not found the time to put right.

The Congress, of course, took the cake. As always. After having forced the BJP to revoke President's Rule in Bihar and bring back Rabri Devi, it now accused her of running an effete, incompetent government. In other words, it hunted with the hounds and ran with the hares. No one quite knew what it actually wanted to achieve, apart from its obvious short term strategy to embarrass the Vajpayee Government. The fact that, in the process, it has lost the little support that it may have been picking up in Bihar and made a complete ass of itself has not yet dawned upon its chief strategist, Sonia Gandhi and her supplicants.

Neither Vishnu Bhagwat nor Mohan Guruswamy are great paragons of virtue. In fact, their continuance in office was more likely to have embarrassed the BJP Government than their removal. Bhagwat was the ultimate soldier-politician, scheming, plotting, conniving, for whom nothing was low enough in his all-encompassing, all-consuming greed for power. Guruswamy, on the other hand, was a savvy party-hopper who was openly lobbying for many business houses, including the most disreputable in the land. The fact that he was caught trying to sneak through a convenient deal for one of them with the financial institutions, without the knowledge of the finance minister, has not exactly surprised anyone.

There are many cronies of the BJP who hang around the periphery of the saffron power centres seeking precisely this opportunity and some of them, it is rumoured, have already penetrated deep into the corridors of the PMO and other important decision-making bodies to lobby for the business groups they represent. I can easily name quite a few of them but if you ask BJP insiders they will give you a much longer list. For everyone knows who these pimps are and how they are subverting the system for the sake of their corrupt masters. The fact that they are not being openly exposed is simply because no one wants to throw the first stone at the glass house that some of the BJP leaders live in. Including some of the most powerful among them and their front organisations, who have for years collected money in the name of party funds from our leading business houses.

But for the Congress to now raise its voice against corruption sounds as ridiculous as Mamta Kulkarni campaigning for the rights of virgins. Everyone knows that there is no party in India as singularly greedy and corrupt as the Congress. Nine out of every ten scams that have taken place during the past 52 years of Independent India have taken place with the blessings of the Congress and that is not just because they have ruled for 45 years out of these 52. It is because the Congress encourages and breeds the culture of scams. Be it any scam, Bofors or HDW or Westland helicopters or the Czech pistols scam. Or the rice deals that shamelessly took place through the Prime Minister's Office itself, it was the Congress all the way. And its ugly minions who benefited from every deal, however sordid. Be it the Karsan urea scam, the sugar import scam, the Harshad Mehta one-crore-in-a-suitcase scam, the JMM bribery scam, the Sukh Ram telecom scam. Corruption has been, for 52 years, the absolute fiefdom of the Congress.

In fact, last week, after years of feedaddling, the CBI finally filed an FIR against one of the Congress party's greatest scamsters and a famous Rajiv loyalist, Satish Sharma for having property well beyond his known and professed means of income. For Sharma, of course, this is nothing new. He has been named earlier in the JMM bribery case where the Congress has been accused of paying off the Jharkand Mukti Morcha MPs for their votes in Parliament. He has been accused of giving away petrol pumps to his cronies and, to punish him for this crime, the courts handed out a rare judgement in which he was forced to pay a personal fine.

Sharma is also accused of having a hand in various other scams during the Rajiv Gandhi era and, later, during P V Narasimha Rao's time as well. The new FIR filed against him is not exactly an embarrassment for a party that is renowned for its expertise in generating illegal cash from the business community, be it Indian or firang. In fact, if the rise of corruption in India is to be historically analysed, Satish Sharma and the Congress party would have an enormous role to play in it.

But the tragedy is not that the Congress is corrupt. Everyone always knew that the Congress is corrupt. The tragedy is that the BJP is now being widely accused of being corrupt and more and more evidence is showing up in various deals to suggest that there is no smoke without fire.

Similarly, the tragedy is not that the BJP is communal or the Third Force is casteist. They were always communal, always casteist. The tragedy is that the Congress is increasingly exposing its communal and casteist face under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. The shameful murder of Graham Stewart Staines, the Australian missionary, in a Congress-ruled state and the subsequent communal attacks on Christian tribals out there is an example of state-backed hooliganism. Just like the pandering of Laloo in Bihar, despite repeated caste-based massacres, is an obnoxious example of pandering to casteist forces.

My suspicion is that the real reason behind the fracas in Parliament is not because the issues raised are real and important for India. They well may be but the real reason for the fracas is that there is a role reversal going on right now in Indian politics. The BJP is trying desperately hard to show that it can be as corrupt as the Congress while the Congress is doing its hardest to woo over the communal and casteist vote banks along the Gangetic plains. This is what is confusing everyone else.

That is why Jyoti Basu and H D Deve Gowda are suddenly finding Sonia so charming. That is why the BJP is playing footsie with Sukh Ram. That is why the Vajpayee Government is keeping Bofors on the backburner, despite having all the evidence in its hands. That is why Laloo and Mulayam Singh are smiling in front of the camera like a pair of Siamese twins and are backstabbing each other when no one is looking.

We are living through truly chaotic times when no one knows who stands for what. Where everyone wants to keep his or her options wide open by disrupting Parliament and confusing the already much-too-confused electorate.

Pritish Nandy

Tell us what you think of this column