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Has Bhujbal really left the Sena?

The first round of the eyeball-to-eyeball between the Democratic Front and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra was a no-contest. Bal Thackeray is the winner by a mile.

Of course, neither the prime minister-in-eternal-waiting Sharad Pawar nor Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh or their deputy in different spheres, Chhagan Bhujbal, will buy that outcome, and instead crow that their point has been proved.

But let us not treat such outpourings as dismissively as we would normally do, and look instead at just what it was that this trio has achieved by their supposedly brilliant strategy.

Bhujbal says the state government was merely concerned with granting sanction to prosecute, not with the nitty-gritty of the actual prosecution or conviction by the courts. Bhujbal obviously thinks his decision would convince the people of the government's seriousness to proceed against the Sena chief, but the same people have also seen the previous Congress government sit quietly for months after the Bombay riots. If Bhujbal's government and/or party was/is really serious on this front, it would not have dillydallied soon after the riots, for which it holds Thackeray's writings in Saamna responsible.

Even to a casual observer, Bhujbal's behaviour smacks of political vendetta. Thackeray's offences were offences even when the Congress was in power. The riots happened in December 1992-January 1993 and the Congress party was voted out in Maharashtra only in April 1995. Inactivity when the law was on your side, and frenetic activity when the law has shackled you -- that surely can't be a sign of sincerity.

Worse indictment of the government's motives there cannot be than in this PTI report on Tuesday's Thackeray case: The Magistrate also pulled up the prosecution for making vague prayers in the remand application urging for suitable orders from the court. What exactly had the prosecution sought through the remand was not clear, the magistrate observed.

+In the absence of any specific prayers, the court had no other option but to release the accused since their arrest was barred by time+, the Magistrate noted. (italics mine)

"In the absence of any specific prayers". What exactly did Bhujbal achieve by his grand campaign against his former mentor? Barring self-goals, nothing. The ex-Sainik has only revived an organisation whose committed voter base has refused to grow, and made a giant out of a man who was fast shrinking to mortal status -- things he could not execute even when he was right-hand to the person he claims to be gunning for today.

The person who has scored a century for the losing side is, of course, Vilasrao Deshmukh. The poor CM had no clue what was coursing through his deputy's mind, but once he realised what was afoot spent little time in making the most of a bad situation. Bhujbal, he realised, was playing a double game: while the former said he was gunning for Thackeray, in reality Bhujbal's aim was as much on Deshmukh as on the Sena chief.

Deshmukh could have opposed Bhujbal's initiative only at his own peril. Bhujbal, an ex-Sainik, was out to prove that his, the convert's, zeal was greater, by battling for the secular ground the Congress had given up in the mid-nineties. So Deshmukh did the smartest thing: he went along with Bhujbal's game plan, despite knowing that it was doomed from the start, for the simple reason that the blame for failure would attach to the originator of the scheme, the deputy CM, and not to him.

That the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance was a marriage of convenience is well known. But even such alliances need a strong reason to break up, and Bhujbal had gambled on Deshmukh's rejection of the prosecution -- which would have given the NCP a surefire winner at the hustings. The last time round, the anti-Sena votes had been split between the Congress and NCP; this time, according to Bhujbal's and Pawar's game plan, there would have been no division. They were aiming for a straight fight with the Shiv Sena in a mid-term poll.

For Pawar, Maharashtra was the belljar within which he hoped to experiment and demonstrate to his former colleagues in the Congress how the saffron brigade can be tackled. If Sonia Gandhi's party was saved from utter ruin in Maharashtra engineered by Bhujbal's brinkmanship, she has only Vilasrao Deshmukh to thank for it.

But Pawar's calculation was near perfect. While Jayalalitha proved last year that a simple majority is no majority in times of fractured mandate, Pawar went one step further: he wanted to prove the adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and targeted it. In a way, he was trying to re-enact the fall of the Janata Party government at the Centre -- and why shouldn't it work! After all, most of the players of that time are in government now.

Pawar's gamble was that the Shiv Sena would force the central government into precipitate action in Maharashtra, which would alienate the National Democratic Alliance partners. And with the Centre in disarray, he would, fresh from vanquishing Thackeray in Bombay, lay claim to a United Front kind of arrangement in New Delhi. And the scenario almost came about, but for the court's intervention.

The biggest gainers in this political one-upmanship are obviously the Shiv Sena and its chief. A new lease of life is not what many were willing to give them even a few months ago. By the time the next round of elections came about in the state, it was clear that it would be a dispirited Shiv Sena that would be going into battle. Today's development negates that possibility.

It's not that the party rank and file, which was energised in the last one week, will sustain its morale forever and ever. But having won the first round of battle, under an inimical administration, they will be harder to put down when the two sides meet again.

On the other hand, the biggest loser in Thackeray's arrest that wasn't are the people of Mumbai, and Maharashtra. And to think Bhujbal could get away saying that he went through the ridiculous exercise to show the people of Maharashtra that no one is above the law! That can happen only in India.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy