Column

When history records the Manmohan Singh government’s trust vote, it will remember two things. One is the extraordinary expulsion of the Lok Sabha Speaker by his own party that masqueraded as discipline but played out as farce. The other is the debasement of the political party as a unit of democracy in the parliamentary system that we adopted from the British. Somnath Chatterjee’s autobiography, currently a work in progress, will probably be invaluable reference material for the first. He started writing it six months ago as a memoir of a life spent in 40 years of service to the Communist Party of India. But now, after the dramatic post-trust vote end to his association with the CPM, it will finish with a grim chapter on expulsion in which Chatterjee plans to tell it like it is, without pulling his punches. The news has sparked off a fair amount of consternation in his former party, which abhors having its dirty linen washed in public. But since he’s a free agent now, there’s little Chatterjee’s ex-comrades can do about what he chooses to write. Or for that matter how much he decides to expose about the backroom negotiations that preceded his expulsion and the resultant divide in a party that boasts of its great discipline. It must be a painful chapter to pen in the sunset of one’s life but Chatterjee’s resolve must have hardened further after the deathly silence from old buddies in the party on his birthday. None of them called to wish him.

Chatterjee’s expulsion by his party raises constitutional questions that will be debated in the coming years. But the collapse of the party system on which Parliament is based needs immediate redressal. It is obvious that the Manmohan Singh government would have lost the trust vote but for large-scale cross voting by rebel MPs in the Opposition.
Clearly, not all of them defied their party whip in favour of the government because they believe in the nuclear deal. The stories in circulation about how the vote was won boggle the mind. Two five-star hotels in the Capital were the headquarters for the deals within the deal to save the Manmohan Singh government. Normally, these things remain secret but because of the giant scale of the operation, word leaked out. On the weekend before D-day, the lobbies of both hotels filled with the most unlikely guests.
No tourists, just netas and touts from every corner of the country, hunting for barters. A vote for a..? If Congress sources are to be believed, offers of votes poured like a monsoon shower in Mumbai. Middlemen worked the cell phones of every prominent Congress leader to promise votes galore. It was building up to a two-thirds majority for the government. Or so it seemed. The ease with which party lines blurred in great vote bazaar has stunned leaders across the political spectrum. They’ve responded by expelling errant MPs but in a fragmented polity such as ours, party loyalties are bound to be subservient to individual aspirations. And with 143 of the 543 MPs hunting for new seats after losing their constituencies in the recent delimitation exercise, they were out of control. The story of the trust vote is a sad tale of the plight in which political parties find themselves. Today, the Congress can bask in the afterglow of victory. But it cannot remain unscathed by the rot that has set in to decay the system.

TAILPIECE

So, what did the Congress high command do to unwind from the tension of the trust vote? Sonia Gandhi had a day out in the Capital’s high-profile Khan Market. She was spotted there with daughter Priyanka Vadra in tow, just chilling in the fashionable stores that dot this elite marketplace.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net