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Reprieve for Vajpayee

Thanks to Sonia Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee is not leaving to pay the wages of his sins. The Congress has been true to its line, maintained with vigour and consistency through the campaign, that it would do nothing to destabilise the government at the Centre. No opportunity to do so could have been more tempting than that provided through the wresting of Delhi and Rajasthan by the Congress, combined with the retention by the party of Madhya Pradesh.

A lesser party and a lesser leader would have found the prospect irresistible, as lesser parties and lesser leaders, such as the Samajwadi party of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the RJD of Laloo, did, in fact, consider inevitable. They continue to find incomprehensible the Congress party's reluctance to seize the opportunity. The Communists are, perhaps, a little less bewildered. Inheritors, as they are, of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, they know how to make friends with the enemy but also know that such opportunistic friends can, and do, turn on each other. So, the idiom in which the Left has urged the Congress to bite Vajpayee in his Achilles heel has been somewhat more sophisticated, if quite as insistent, as the bluntness of Mulayam and Laloo.

Yet, Sonia Gandhi has kept her counsel. Clearly, she had envisioned this scenario weeks ago and come to the careful conclusion that inheriting Vajpayee's woes was no way of bringing her party back to the arrow-head of national governance. Jayalalitha has, therefore, been firmly told or signaled that the Congress will cut no deals with her. Whether she walks out of the ruling coalition or stays in it is her business; she will have to come in from the cold if she wants to do business with the Congress.

Vajpayee himself has shown his political astuteness by playing the only card left in his hand, which was to hint at the possibility of a mid-term poll. There is nothing like the threat of a return to the hustings to put his allies in their place. For the congeries of groupuscules the BJP has gathered together knows they will never again have the opportunity given them by the fractionated composition of the 12th Lok Sabha to matter in the polity of the nation.

It is not that that the electorate in the February/March Lok Sabha election returned a fractured verdict; coalition politics of the United Front kind presented voters with a fractured choice, making a fractured result inevitable. True, Vajpayee won a number of seats by making alliances in advance of the elections; but it formed its government only after roping in additional allies after the elections. The National Agenda for Governance, the BJP-led coalition's alternative to the United Front's Common Minimum Programme, was itself a post-poll document.

NAG has gone the way of the CMP. The coalition partners are not interested in the totality of the programme. They have a special sectoral interest in parts of it. There is no common prioritisation or phasing. Therefore, what is immensely important to one partner is irrelevant to most others. This makes governance impossible. Why would Sonia Gandhi, or indeed, anyone wish to inherit this mess?

Which brings, us to the real lesson to be learned from the recent election -- the doom it has spelled for the "Third Force". In terms of national politics, the single-most important result has not come from Delhi and the three states which went to the polls, but from the bye-election held in the UP constituency of Agra East. In February this year, the Congress candidate secured 2.5% of the vote and stood fifth. This time round, the Congress has cornered 30 % of the vote and jumped to second position. And Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi party candidate has not only slipped to fourth position, he has even lost his deposit. And this in a constituency that has a large Muslim electorate.

It is the beginning of the end of the decade-old alienation of the Muslims from the Congress. It is also the first time in a decade that, in the key state of Uttar Pradesh, the Congress has significantly reversed its precipitously declining electoral fortunes. And although a single swallow does not make a summer, all four MLC constituencies, in recent elections in Bihar, have gone to the Congress. Sonia Gandhi has already secured Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh; if she can bring Bihar and UP back to the fold, as the recent bye-elections have shown she can, the Congress will be restored in the 21st century to its 20th century claim to being the country's natural party of governance.

The shaping of the Indian polity into a two-party or, at any rate, two-front democracy is now underway. The V P Singh aberration is playing itself out. In 1989, V P Singh broke the mould of Congress dominance by grouping together Congress dissidents and securing the outside support of both the communalists and the Communists to form a government. It could not last. Therefore, it did not last. We have since seen a succession of doomed attempts to run coalition governments: Chandra Shekhar's, Deve Gowda's, Gujral's, and now Vajpayee's. Not one has given stable governance. And without stable governance, there can be no able governance.

Which is why so distinguished a political career as Atal Bihari Vajpayee's is ending in such ignominy. In 1989, commentators (who should have known better) hailed the V P Singh experiment as the highest form of federalism.

Following the Narasimha Rao interregnum, the ever-fertile P Chidambaram coined the phrase "regional parties with a national outlook" to rationalise the irrational coalescing of a number of disparate parties into an incoherent mass, united only by the search for lucrative ministerships. This has given the country three coalition governments in three years, those of Deve Gowda, Gujral and Vajpayee, the instability and brevity of each of which has thoroughly discredited the notion in the eyes of the public. Only now is the electorate understanding why Rajiv Gandhi dismissed V P Singh's National Front as a "National Affront".

In consequence, in a constituency like Badarpur in Delhi (which, incidentally, the Congress candidate lost) the combined vote of the Janata Dal and the Samajwadi party has fallen to under one thousand! Even the BSP of Kanshi Ram, so triumphant but a few months ago as the authentic voice of the dalits, has been pushed to the backburner of the nation's politics.

The Mahabharat is between the Pandavas of the Congress and the Kauravas of the BJP; lesser mortals (and monarchs) are free to decide with which of the two main armies they might join their levies. The politics of the last decade of the 20th century is giving way to the new politics of the next century. That, more than the temporary rise and fall of individual political fortunes, is the enduring lesson to be learned from the recent election.

During the 1990s, the minor parties crowded out the major parties to the margin. Now the BJP and the Congress, from the right and the left as it where, are crowding out the minor parties from centre-stage to the wings. The regional parties are being pushed back to their regions, the caste-based and sectarian parties to their respective caste and sect redoubts. The electorate is saying the nation is more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, although, there is a place for the smaller parties in parts of the nation, the national stage must be occupied by parties, or at any rate fronts, with a national character and a national agenda.

It is in this long-term consequence, less then the immediate outcome of the BJP's humiliation, that the real significance of the November 1998 election lies. The UP government of Kalyan Singh looks set to collapse shortly, and Vajpayee might well dismiss, however illegitimately, the government of Laloo Prasad's spouse, Rabri Devi, paving the way for state elections there as well.

When Bihar and UP go together to the polls, the battle would have been really and truly joined. That is when the fate of the present BJP-led coalition would be well sealed. Unless, of course, the central coalition collapses of its own accord by then under the weight of its own contradictions.

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