President-da and the crown prince

Now that Pranab Mukherjee is certain to be our next President, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav can look forward to the central government helping his state Uttar Pradesh out with a nice, fat bundle of money which his party-men in government and in jail will loot with impunity while his chief minister son, whose clean looks and earnestness pretty much won him the sweep last year, looks on in shock. That is the way this party, like the DMK, interprets governance. Mamata missed out, but in such games of high politics either she was going to get the goodies or Mulayam; it couldn’t be both. This will only harden her resolve to pull down the government, which you can be sure is Mulayam’s plan anyway; and whatever you may read about Mamata being isolated in the aftermath of Congress President Sonia Gandhi formally announcing Pranab’s name and almost everyone backing Pranabda’s candidature, the fact is this: the evening that she and Mulayam gave Sonia the shock of her life by rejecting the Congress’s choices for Rashtrapati Bhawan, there was barely concealed glee among non-Congress leaders. Someone had finally stood up to Sonia Gandhi.

Actually, standing up to Sonia doesn’t require all that much these days, given her physical fatigue and the delegation of work it occasions to the worst coterie imaginable; her diminishing power due to the ineptitude and corruption of the UPA-2; and her son Rahul’s failure to pass the test of the recent UP assembly elections (plus his habit of holidaying abroad instead of buckling down and getting his hands politically dirty). She must be a very tired woman, and no doubt apprehensive, in view of the coming political storms: the attempts by Mamata et al in the next six months to pull the government down; her party’s probable failure at dislodging Narendra Modi as chief minister in the Gujarat assembly elections at the end of 2012; and the probable fall of the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh, where Jaganmohan Reddy has swept the by-polls and reportedly has the letters of support of about 38 Congress MLAs, which he will whip out when the time is right. On top of this, she has to help her prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, with political capital to steer the country out of the economic swamp it is in (with little respite ahead, what with today’s elections in Greece likely to herald the beginning of the unraveling of the Euro). This would be the ideal time for her to be heroically rescued, ideally by her son.

The hero, however, is nowhere to be seen. It is said that he is quite cut up with Manmohan Singh and wants the good doctor replaced; Rahul apparently feels the government’s forgettable stewardship of the economy is pulling the party down and must be stopped without further ado. This sounds suspiciously as if Rahul is trying to rationalise his UP loss by blaming it on the economy, even though immediately after the poll debacle he publicly took full responsibility. Well, if he needs this justification in order to rally himself back into political action then it’s one thing. But it isn’t certain that the average voter would forgive the young man if he sacrificed Manmohan Singh for the sake of the rebirth of his own political career.

Yet if Rahul is planning to jettison Manmohan Singh and take the job himself, and then take some initiatives on the economy to present himself, like BJP prime ministerial hopeful Narendra Modi, as a candidate of good governance, then the clock is ticking; he is going to have to make his move before Mamata et al make their move to pull down the government and force mid-term polls. A proactive move by Rahul Gandhi would of course stop everyone in their tracks, be it Mamata, the unpredictable Mulayam, or even Jaganmohan Reddy. True, his tenure could prove to be as listless as the one preceding his; which would mean the pause by the regional heavyweights would only be temporary.

It will be around this time that President Mukherjee’s moment will come. Actually, he’s probably going to have several moments. It would not be surprising if, during his tenure, he has to issue invitations to form the government more than once, and he has to administer the oath of office to more than one prime minister. But each of these moments, no doubt, will cause Sonia’s heart to jump into her heart: the very moment when she expects President Mukherjee to invite her son to be the prime minister. That’s when we will all realise the significance of the political mind-game that was played out this week.

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