Karnataka drama: Why Congress should come down from its moral high horse

There’s a special sense of irony in seeing whoops of celebration emanating from Congress leaders of various vintages deeming the BJP’s failure to form a government in Karnataka as a win for the Constitution, democracy, judiciary and all things good.   Seeing their celebrations, one might even be fooled into thinking that Congress had never veered off the straight road while fighting elections.Making his first post-result appearance after Yeddyurappa resigned, Congress president Rahul Gandhi claimed Amit Shah and PM Modi didn’t ‘respect’ any institution and that was the idea Congress was fighting.  On Twitter, he claimed it was a ‘triumph over tyranny’.

DK Shivakumar, the master of herding MLAs together in resorts, said ‘democracy’ has won on Twitter, while Sachin Pilot argued that the BJP’s ‘blatant disregard for propriety and democratic values’ cost the party more ‘political capital than it realises’.P Chidambaram wrote that when the ‘puppeteers fail, the puppet falls and breaks’. Kapil Sibal, who has been in the background given his role in trying to impeach the CJI wrote Modi’s new slogan ought to be “Na khareedunga Na khareednedunga " (will not poach, will not allow poaching).

Congress national spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi castigated popular writer Chetan Bhagat claiming that Congress ‘refused to learn the art-form of horse-trading’. She wrote: “And most importantly, Chetanji, we @INCIndia refuse to learn the 'art-form' of horse-trading & legitimize unethical &immoral wins, we'd prefer to ace keeping our Constitution supreme& democracy intact.”

Despite a clear political reversal, which saw them hand the CM’s post to a party with just 34 seats and losing 44 seats from its 2013 count, the Congress’ over-the-top celebration indicates that it will do anything to prevent the BJP from gaining power.While the grand-old party has done remarkably well to avoid a Goa-like fate when they were found sleeping on the job and BJP cobbled together a coalition, it’s almost laughable to think that the Congress didn’t indulge in underhanded tactics to form governments or strike down opponents in the past.

When it comes to horse-trading, the Congress was in the thick of it when members of the JMM were allegedly bribed in 1993 to defeat a no-confidence motion against the Narasimha Rao government.

In fact, the Congress in the past, like Rahul Gandhi accuses the BJP-RSS, was quite proficient in doing whatever was needed to be done to stay in power, even if that included striking down antagonistic non-Congress state governments using Article 356.

BR Ambedkar seems to have had great expectations from the men and women who ruled this nation even hoping that Article 356 would remain a ‘dead letter’.

Acknowledging that this particular article was liable to be abused or employed for political purposes, he had said: “If at all they are brought into operation, I hope the President, who is endowed with these powers, will take proper precautions before actually suspending the administration of the provinces.

I hope the first thing he will do would be to issue a mere warning to a province that has erred, that things were not happening, in the way in which they were intended to happen in the Constitution. If that warning fails, the second thing for him to do will be to order an election allowing the people of the province to settle matters by themselves.

It is only when these two remedies fail that he would resort to this article. It is only in those circumstances he would resort to this article. I do not think we could then say that these articles were imported in vain or that the President had acted wantonly.”

 There’s a difference between letter of the law and spirit of the law, and those that have ruled us have veered dangerously towards the former.Sadly, the Constitution was written by far better men that have ruled us and Article 356 and numerous Presidents acted wantonly to dismiss governments when asked to do so. The most famously diabolical of them was when the popular NTR government in Andhra Pradesh was dismissed in 1984 by Governor Ram Lal, while the former was out of the country for a coronary bypass surgery.

This wasn’t the first instance of a government being dismissed.  In 1953 the first non-Congress government headed by Gian Singh Rarewall in the Patiala and East Punjab States Union was sacked. In 1959, Kerala's first elected communist government under EMS Namboodiripad was taken out after Indira Gandhi convinced Nehru to dismiss the government.  It’s believed that the dismissal was engineered with the help of the CIA, since the democratic victory of a Communist party had sent alarm bells ringing in Washington.

Buta Singh, Rajiv Gandhi’s Home Minister from 1986 to 89 was infamous for taking down state governments during his tenure, and also for his role in denying NDA the chance to form a government in 2005.Even the first non-Congress government headed by the Janata Party did the same when it wrested power in 1997, as did Indira Gandhi to Janata Party state governments when Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980.It was only the 1994 Bommai Vs State of India 1994 judgement which took away the arbitrary powers of the Centre to strike down the state governments as it pleased.

To prevent the misuse of this power, the apex court ruled that all majorities would have to be tested on floor of the House, that Centre would have to give warning before pulling the plug and the courts could reverse decisions when Article 356 was improperly used.

While the Congress has done well to fight back against the growing clout of BJP, knocking on the SC’s door (with a CJI they had the gall to call bench-fixer) at midnight, it shouldn’t pretend to hold some fake high ground when it comes to using unconstitutional methods to undermine one’s opponents. If Indian democracy has reached a phase where it can be bought and sold on a whim, it’s because of the underhanded tactics used by the party that ruled India for the majority of its rule.

If there are safeguards in place that prevent this outright buying and selling it’s because of the judiciary has stepped in from time to time, (quite like when it did in Karnataka) to right wrongs and strengthen institutions.  And the judiciary did that despite the grand old party’s underhanded tactics, not because of it.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and while some on Twitter might think that the BJP’s Machiavellian tactics are brand-new, the truth is that they’ve been around since the dawn of the Republic of India.