Commentary/Saisuresh Sivaswamy

Any which way, Kesri comes on top

Not many will buy that the political crisis unleashed by Congress president Sitaram Kesri has pushed him to the top of Congress politics. Most of those who disagree belong to the Congress party itself.

Granted, if elections were held at this moment, the Congress would be hard put to take its tally to the 100-mark, so deep is the revulsion over the bad time Kesri gave the nation and his own party in the last three weeks.

To be fair, the Bihari politician knew all along that he held the aces in his hand; when you have a bloc of almost 150 members of Parliament and when you know the other side is as wary of elections as you are, you can afford to show who is boss. That is in the peculiar dispensation that is ruling the country from New Delhi.

Peculiar, in the sense that those who voted for the disparate elements that combine to form the United or Federal Front or whatever, had no inkling that they were voting for an entity that would be part of the central government; even those ardent fans of the Janata Dal in Karnataka, for instance, would not have expected H D Deve Gowda to become prime minister.

Since the peculiarity of the parliamentary system is that anyone who can cobble together a majority can rule the country, there is nothing much that can be done about it. Surely, for instance, President Shankar Dayal Sharma knew when he invited the Front to prove its majority last year, that it would be only as stable as the Congress wanted it to be, since it was dependent on the Congress for outside support. He would also have known that for most regional constituents of the Front, it was the Congress and not the Bharatiya Janata Party which was the local rival at the hustings. And if that is not a peculiar setup....

There is another peculiarity that has been thrown up in this crisis. Which is that the same formation in which Parliament expressed its lack of confidence only a week ago, will suddenly win the House's trust on Monday -- without it in any way having changed its policies or style of functioning. Now that must be a record of sorts in the history of parliamentary democracy, and those who say that the man who wrought it, Kesri, has really been weakened by his actions, are not seeing things in the right light.

If he was really weakened by these developments, surely someone as ambitious as Sharad Pawar, who believes in keeping his powder dry for exactly such an occasion, would not speak in a conciliatory tone.

First by threatening to withdraw support to the Front and then actually doing so when the Front leaders called his bluff, Kesri has bitten the bullet. It is the Front which, since the last one week, has undergone a change of stance, from saying that the issue of leadership was non-negotiable to desperately seeking a new tenant for 7, Racecourse Road.

Nothing has changed for the Front. It continues to be dependent on Congress support as it was three weeks ago, and it can forget this cold fact only at its own peril. In fact, the person who succeeds Deve Gowda to the hot seat will not see his way through the eleventh Lok Sabha since it won't last its full term.

It is not fear of the BJP that as brought the Front back to the Congress, but because it is not ready for another election at this point, despite its bravado. The wily Kesri knew it all along, even if his party colleagues, petrified at the spectre of the BJP in northern India, overlooked this fact.

Since the Front will continue to be dependent on the Congress for survival, it will be foolhardy for its leaders to settle on someone like Mulayam Singh Yadav or Ram Vilas Paswan who, for the most part of their lives at least, have been anti-Congress. What the Front will need at this juncture will be someone who knows Congress leaders on a personal level. This was one of Deve Gowda's major failures.

Thanks to his anti-Congress career back home in Karnataka, he was not familiar with the top rung of the Congress, something that has never hamstrung someone like the leader of the Tamil Maanila Congress, G K Moopanar. But, then, with the prime ministership of the country up for grabs, it is time for small men with little kingdoms of their own to dream of Delhi's throne.

When Front convenor Nara Chandrababu Naidu spoke of an institution by which differences with the Congress would be resolved, he was conceding to a point Kesri had made tacitly. This also means that major decisions, especially those affecting the Congress, would be discussed with the latter before they are implemented. This by itself is unprecedented in this country, and if this is not a clear victory for Kesri's gameplan, there is something seriously wrong with one's perception.

Of course, if the Front had been serious about completing a five-year term in office, it would have accepted the unspoken offer made by the Congress party to include it in the government. By refusing to heed this, the Front has shown that not only is it reconciled to another crisis somewhere down the line but also that premature elections are unavoidable.

If the Front leaders choose to believe that they have snatched victory in the face of defeat when Parliament reconvenes on Monday, a sobering though for them will be that the victory, if it can be called that, will at best be Pyrrhic. And that Sitaram Kesri will be laughing all the way to the vote bank.

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