Congress turning UP gun on itself

A law student in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, which is going to polls on March 3, made a pithy point when he said many Muslims like him were ‘very excited by Rahul Gandhi’ but were thinking twice about voting for the Congress, thanks to Union coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal’s statement that if the party did not get a majority, there would be president’s rule.

Everyone knew, he argued, that the Congress was not going to get a majority.

It was widely believed that the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) would form the next government. But now if the Congress was not going to support the SP, it was not inconceivable that Mayawati would try and form the next government with the BJP’s help.

Why then should Muslims like him, he asked, waste their vote? Why not give it to the SP, which was likely to be best placed to form the government? Or, hypothetically speaking, to the BSP, though by and large Muslims in UP seemed unenthusiastic to support Mayawati this time, except in some constituencies where she had fielded Muslim candidates who have their own standing. His logic was impeccable. 

It is not clear why Jaiswal made such a faux pas. He has been pulled up by the party, but the damage was done.

Curiously, Digvijay Singh had also expressed a similar sentiment not long ago. So, clearly, the Congress has been thinking on these lines.

Rahul’s concerns - that having finally opened up the political space for the Congress in UP, nothing should be done now to close it again - are valid. But the trouble is that politics does not present ideal choices.

And if the Congress is foolhardy enough to impose president’s rule, thinking that it will be able to rule Lucknow from Delhi, and that by so doing, it will be able to avoid the flak that may come its way for the SP’s acts of omission and commission if it supports the Samajwadi Party, then it needs to think again. But there are obviously senior leaders in the Congress who feel that a stint of central rule in UP would enable the party to intensify its efforts for a better showing in the next elections, which will have to be held within a few months.

Technically, you cannot fault the Congress for taking a position that it does not want to support any party if it does not get a majority and would instead prefer to sit in the opposition.

But there is every chance that the SP- and not the Congress - would come back with a bigger tally whenever elections are held. The SP, as the single-largest party, will be seen as a martyr, deprived of an opportunity to form the government. 

Jaiswal’s formulation assumes that the governor will not explore the different options of government formation. So, hypothetically speaking, if the SP does not get the Congress’s support, he will not call the second-largest party to take a shot at government formation (say the BSP gets 110 and the BJP 70 and they want to join hands). Such a situation is likely to trigger off a nationwide outcry. As it is, regional parties have been opposed to the use of Article 356.

Recently, many chief ministers, including UPA ally Mamata Banerjee, have been up in arms over the federal principle getting compromised. Only last week, the government had to backtrack on the setting up of the NCTC. A move like president’s rule in UP could unite unlikely political players, including the Left and Right, and spawn a new political platform against the Congress.

Political implications apart, it was highly objectionable for Jaiswal - he is not just a party leader, like Digvijay Singh, but holds a constitutional office as a minister of the Union - to talk of president’s rule in the midst of elections. After all, polls are held to enable an elected government to be formed, not with a view to impose Central rule, and that too before the election process is over. 

It is possible that government formation, in a rare case, becomes impossible, given our fractured polity, with many parties in the fray, with antagonisms between them.

But then, president’s rule is resorted to when the constitutional machinery breaks down in a state, and not when one party has failed to get a majority and that happens to be the ruling party at the Centre. Jaiswal’s statement only showed the less-than-democratic mindset of some Congress leaders.

Considering they came during the critical UP elections, the free-for-all statements by senior Congress leaders - Salman Khurshid vs the CEC, Beni Prasada Verma vs PL Punia and then Jaiswal on president’s rule - raised questions that individual agendas were overshadowing the push being given by Team Rahul. 

More worrying, they pointed to the weakening authority of the Congress core, unable to rein in its leaders.