A messy aftermath

The Governor's actions have been exposed as having been dubious in their rationale and messy in their execution; and now the NDA faces a deepening ideological rift within its own ranks.

SEVERAL ambitions had come crashing down when the predictions of politically uninformed psephology yielded to the realities of Bihar's popular will. But the message of the electoral verdict clearly took a while percolating through to the gubernatorial ma nsion in Patna. Working on the rather coloured advice of the group that had seen soaring ambition transformed into the galling experience of defeat, Vinod Chandra Pande, the current incumbent of the Raj Bhavan, invited Nitish Kumar of the Samata Party to form a government. Nitish Kumar was the leader by uneasy consensus of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar. But he hardly had the legislative strength to form a Ministry. And indeed his claims were considerably weaker than those of the rival Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) alliance, led by Laloo Prasad Yadav and headed by his wife Rabri Devi.

When not one of outrage, the reaction to the Governor's decision was one of befuddlement. Not since Romesh Bhandari converted the Raj Bhavan in Lucknow into a cockpit of conflict with the legislative process some two years ago had a Governor acted in suc h unseemly haste and with such little regard for procedure and propriety. Pande's action seemed all the more curious for a civil servant who had spent many years in the principled isolation of retirement and successfully warded off a particularly crude w itch-hunt orchestrated by the Jain Commission of Inquiry. Indeed, his appointment soon after the Vajpayee Government won a fresh tenure in office last year was considered an effort to dispel some of the ill-will that had developed after two successive ef forts by his predecessor to secure the dismissal of the elected government had failed.

In the process of having Nitish Kumar sworn in, Pande effectively reversed a gradual but fairly promising line of development in political convention. Indecisive outcomes have become the rule rather than the exception in contests to Parliament. And since 1989, successive Presidents have sought to work out a procedure and a set of norms to ensure that stable Ministries can be constituted on the basis of these fractured results.

The convention that the single largest party should get the first call to form a government generally held good until it went badly askew with the 13-day long Vajpayee Government in 1996. There was then an alternative formulation that seemed to emerge: t hat the largest pre-poll alliance of parties should be given the first opportunity for Ministry formation. But since 1998, President K.R. Narayanan has been seeking reasonable assurances that a Ministry once sworn in will not be unceremoniously ousted at the first occasion it is called upon to seek the confidence of the legislature.

Despite quibbling and innuendo, these were norms that the President applied with appropriate diligence after the Vajpayee Government fell in April 1999. So insistent was he on clarity in this matter that he went so far as to obtain firm commitments of su pport from the BJP's allies even after the relatively unambiguous outcome of the elections to the Lok Sabha last year.

By these standards, Pande's recent actions have been dubious in their rationale and messy in their execution. Where Rashtrapati Bhavan has in recent times sought to deal with political instability through frequent clarifications and lengthy communique, t he Patna Raj Bhavan rushed into a thoroughly questionable action without even an effort at explanation. The only basis that Pande is known to have cited for his decision is the fact that the NDA was the first to apprise him formally of its assured suppor t in the legislature. Yet the extent of assured support only constituted 146 members in a House of 324 - nowhere near the figure required for a working majority. And the NDA numbers were far less favourable than those of the rival RJD alliance, which had won the endorsement of the substantial bloc of Congress(I) members after some hard negotiation.

The timing of Pande's action suggests that his basic motivation was to pre-empt the possibility of a rapprochement between the RJD and the Congress(I). He had been telephonically informed of the Congress(I)' decision to support Laloo Prasad as early as M arch 1. But a formal written commitment had to await the arrival in Delhi of Congress(I) president Sonia Gandhi. Nitish Kumar's effort to provide the Bihar Governor with written assurances of support just ahead of this communication reaching him, hints a t a collusive deal between the NDA and Raj Bhavan. The undue haste displayed in accepting the incredulous arithmetic of the NDA's claim and in having Nitish Kumar sworn in, only reinforces this impression.

Partly because it departed so grossly from the evolving practice of careful deliberation in Ministry formation, Opposition parties were completely flummoxed by the Governor's decision. A delegation including Pranab Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh from the C ongress(I), Kanshi Ram from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Biplab Dasgupta from the CPI(M), Gurudas Dasgupta from the CPI and Kanti Singh from the RJD called on the President on March 3, asking for instructions that the Bihar Governor rescind his decision. CPI (M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet deplored the Governor's unseemly acquiescence in the designs of the BJP and its allies, and demanded his immediate removal from office.

For several days after the swearing-in of Nitish Kumar, the Opposition's sense of outrage over Bihar merged with its campaign over the Gujarat-RSS order to paralyse virtually parliamentary proceedings. Significantly, the Government's retreat on both fron ts occurred within two days of each other. After having proclaimed that the Assembly elections in February would be the occasion to underline its status as the central pillar of the polity, the BJP found that the outcome had, quite on the contrary, contr ibuted to a serious erosion of its credibility and authority. It was in a sense the appropriate price to pay for a sequence of questionable administrative decisions.

For the duration of Nitish Kumar's brief tenure in Patna, no constitutional expert seemed able to rationalise adequately his assumption of office. It did not conform to any recognised convention, for the entity the Governor had invited was neither the la rgest single party nor the largest pre-poll alliance of parties. Neither did the step reflect sufficient deliberation on the part of the Governor. Rather, it seemed to enshrine an entirely new and dubious principle - that the party making the first claim to Ministry formation, even if palpably lacking in the necessary legislative strength, would be given the opportunity. Senior Advocate P.P. Rao seemed to be speaking for the entire community of jurists when he rebuked the Governor for rudely reversing a promising new line in the evolution of political convention: "The Governor should have allowed the strength of the two sides to crystallise. He could have called leaders of various groups and ascertained their views. But by his precipitate action, he ha s pre-empted the full range of his options".

Pande's step was then little more than an open invitation to horse-trading. By endowing one side with the trappings of power, he was effectively tilting the rules of engagement. Any possibility there may have been of a transparent bargain between diverse political interests was effectively neutralised. Once he was sworn in, Nitish Kumar's survival strategy revolved around the single inducement of offering a share of the spoils to anybody who might be inclined to bolster his tenuous position.

What is notable in this whole episode is the failure of the NDA to obtain any additional commitments of support after taking office. Apart from the superior organisational skills of the rival camp, a factor that worked against the NDA was the deepening i deological rift within its own ranks. The choice of Nitish Kumar as standard-bearer for the BJP-led alliance was the first concession to the needs of pragmatism. Though it is the largest component of the NDA, the BJP chose to efface itself as part of the conscious design to attract support from political sections that would have reason to be suspicious of it.

The gambit failed conspicuously. Laloo Prasad had shrewdly utilised the BJP's ideological servitude to the RSS as a potent campaign slogan, transforming the inglorious rout of last year's Lok Sabha elections into near victory. And in the aftermath of the elections, the political drama in Delhi, where the BJP was seeking to elevate the RSS to the status of a permissible political association for government servants, considerably reinforced his message. In this respect, the BJP's utter disregard of the s entiments of its allies undoubtedly played a role in dissuading other potential partners from teaming up with it.

As the stock-taking of the Bihar misadventure begins, the lesser partners within the NDA will undoubtedly bring up this issue. The BJP, for its part, will insist that the problems in Bihar arose not from its own supposed ideological rigidity, but from th e gross lack of coalition discipline among its partners. The murmurs started the very day Rabri Devi was sworn in Chief Minister. Senior BJP leaders were pointing to the fractious and quarrelsome character of the allies it was forced to cohabit with. The alliance's failure to work out a credible seat-sharing agreement sufficiently in advance of the elections, the large number of rebel candidates and the candidature of several individuals with criminal records - all these were identified as injurious inf luences in the BJP's remorseful stock-taking after the Bihar debacle.

All indications are that in the days to come the NDA will be torn between two conflicting perceptions. The allies believe that the ideological and political flexibility that the BJP has affected in recent times is a shallow pretence. Once in authority th e party is prone to adopting a policy of reckless political adventurism, as in the Gujarat-RSS affair (article on page 31) and the places of worship legislation controversy in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP for its part will begin to look with increasing sceptic ism at its allies' commitments and sense of discipline. With the newly anointed hardline element in the Hindutva fraternity goading on like-minded individuals within the party, it is likely to manifest a growing degree of distrust and disdain towards its partners.

Vajpayee himself affects an attitude of unconcern. Flying back from a state visit to Mauritius, he defended the decision of the Governor as one taken in "wisdom and conscience". That it had finally miscued rather badly did not reflect on its initial conc eption. He was equally confident that the assumption of the RSS leadership by K.S. Sudarshan would have no implications for his party's policy commitments or for relations within the ruling coalition. Despite the affectations, matters for his government had clearly taken a serious turn in the fortnight since the results of the Bihar elections were declared. And barely six months into its renewed tenure, the Vajpayee Ministry seems beset by crisis and devoid of the political and ideological resources to surmount it.