Chennai’s not-so-super kings

The trial court’s decision that the CBI need not investigate P Chidambaram’s role in the 2G spectrum scam — which the CAG said cost the country Rs1.76 lakh crore and which forced the Supreme Court this week to stunningly cancel 122 2G licenses — would have made one person unhappy: A Raja, the former telecom minister who for over a year has been a guest at Delhi’s Tihar Jail. After all, from Raja’s point of view Chidambaram is one of his own.

Chidambaram is a senior Congressman, but his party is almost non-existent in Tamil Nadu; in last year’s election to the 234-member TN assembly it managed just five seats, despite several visits by Rahul Gandhi and his high-profile Youth Congress recruitment drives. (UP watchers take note.) Chief Minister Jayalalithaa has alleged Chidambaram entered Parliament in 2009 due to poll fraud, and a case is currently being heard in the Supreme Court. (Chidambaram has denied the charges, though the talk at the time was that he was indebted to M Azhagiri for his victory.) The UPA’s stint in power since 2004 is in no small part due to the support from Raja’s and Azhagiri’s party, the DMK. That would at least be the way that the DMK, a party that relies on brute force, would see it. Allies during good times ought to be allies during rough times, as the DMK probably sees it.

There is precious little the DMK can do at the moment, however. The party lost so many seats last year that its leader, M Karunanidhi, isn’t even Leader of Opposition in the assembly; that honour has gone to popular B-film actor Vijaykanth and he is making use of it as if he were following a script that calls for the annihilation of the DMK. Such a script ends with the replacing of the DMK, in the two-pole politics of TN with Vijaykanth’s DMDK. Just this week Vijaykanth managed to get himself suspended from the assembly for 10 days for rude behaviour. With his devoted youth following, he is on the path to have all anti-Jayalalithaa/AIADMK forces coalesce around him, undermining the DMK’s raison d'être. To add to Karunanidhi’s woes, Jayalalithaa has rid herself of her most obvious vulnerability, her one-time aide Sasikala, rumoured to be the fountainhead of corruption in the AIADMK. Hence the DMK in its home turf is politically neutered.

This is one reason why Karunanidhi was unable to do anything for the six months that his daughter Kanimozhi was sitting in a north Indian jail. He did not threaten to pull down the UPA-2, though other allies might have tried to egg him on from behind the scenes. He got some relief when she was released on bail in November; others like Raja or the former telecom secretary did not get bail, and the case is far from over. No doubt, an unspoken threat hangs over the heads of father and daughter.

Yet it seems a bit unfair if you’re a DMK man that your family members and close associates have to go through all this; and that the guy that you put into Parliament and who has accumulated so much power that he dreams about replacing Dr Manmohan Singh as prime minister — that guy gets to walk free. It’s especially unfair since all the private parties who participated in the 2G auction — approved by silent acquiescence if not by conspiracy both by Chidambaram as well as the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) — have had their licenses snatched from them. It’s not just a matter of the Cabinet system of government by definition being collective governance; it’s more a matter of political quid pro quo.

The Congress party is obviously burnishing its image for the UP elections, in full flow at the moment, and whose results will decide a lot of things in India’s medium-term political landscape, such as the election of the next President of India this summer, and the roadmap that Rahul Gandhi adopts for his ascent to the top job.

The licence cancellation and Chidambaram’s clean chit help paint a picture of how the Congress is cleaning up a mess caused by its allies; how it had nothing at all to do with the corruption that Anna Hazare has been jumping up and down about; and how it has put the misery of the last year behind it and is ready to get back to the business of running things.

Except the DMK people know from last year’s TN experience that Rahul Gandhi, even with the help of his sister, is not going to make much impact on the actual results. If the Congress is hoping to get enough seats to help Mulayam Singh form a government, and then use his support to jettison the increasingly of late troublesome Mamata Banerjee, then it may be in for a surprise.

If you’re an eighty-something politician who’s been deeply hurt, you wait for your moment to come, which will be when the Congress is at its weakest. And it will be at that moment that you will make the Congress rue the day it decided not to sacrifice Chidambaram and instead leave you in the lurch.    

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai