Whose Dharam? Who's Bharti?

Government extracts a price. Opposition is free. That is the nature of the democratic system. You can see the difference in the body language. BJP leaders may not accept this, but you can already see that the party down the line is happier baying for blood than paying for power. The government, conversely, is beginning to wander around with a pained look on its face, the kind of face that suits the suggestion that there is something personal about the disruption of parliament, or that such acrimony has never been seen before. The Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, has, as usual, been more honest and candid in admitting that the roots of the mess travel back to the breakdown between government and opposition over Bofors. The disrupters-in-chief of the late 1980s included V.P. Singh, Ram Jethmalani and of course Somnath Chatterjee, with the BJP providing wholesome support from outside (it barely existed inside the Lok Sabha). Those were the days, my friends. And if you thought they would never end, you were absolutely right.

The larger problem may not be in the collapse of procedure. Bofors was a genuine issue. Politics is now propelled by a tide of non-issues, as substance cedes space to sentiment. Emotive issues have their place in public life. The voter does not live by bread alone. The problem is that emotive issues have occupied centrestage. Mani Shankar Aiyar should have let sleeping plaques lie. It was non-political, at the very least, to take snipe at Veer Savarkar in the Andamans, where the Maharashtrian icon spent years in a British prison. But for the Shiv Sena to smack around Aiyar's effigy in Shivaji Park under the personal supervision of Balasaheb Thackeray does seem an over-reaction. However, Balasaheb has managed to frighten the Congress on the eve of the Assembly elections in Maharashtra. In Mumbai chief minister Sushil Shinde discovered great virtues in Savarkar while Ghulam Nabi Azad, from Delhi, explained that Aiyar's remarks were purely "personal" and did not reflect the views of the party. (It would be interesting, though, to find out what precisely are the revised views of the contemporary Congress on Savarkar's role in the freedom struggle, the Hindutva movement and Gandhi's assassination.)

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The power of a chance remark should never be underestimated. The DMK's venerable leader Karunanidhi might, for instance, recall a statement about men in dark glasses made by Rajiv Gandhi during an Assembly election campaign in Tamil Nadu more than fifteen years ago. That remark was apparently authored by Mani Shankar, and was cited as one of the reasons for a massive pro-Karunanidhi vote that year. If sentiment about Veer Savarkar does energise the Shiv Sena-BJP vote in Maharashtra, it will not be the first time that Mani Shankar has nudged the fate of an Assembly election. Then there was a statement by Rajiv Gandhi during the Bengal Assembly elections when he was Prime Minister, describing Calcutta as a dying city. Even famished Calcuttans were upset at being told by a Prime Minister that they were dying. I have no idea who authored that sentence. Last week the Economic Times reported in its edit page diary that Mani Shankar Aiyar told the employees of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in Chennai on 12 August, "I am an atheist. If God does exist I am completely convinced that He must be Allah. Wherever He is worshipped there is oil and gas." (Pakistan is an exception. Add one more item to Pakistan's list of complaints.) Personally, I thought the remark reasonably witty. It is certainly the kind of line that would ensure a top prize in an Oxbridge union debate. But I doubt if Tamil Nadu's Congressmen are distributing copies of the Aiyar comment in order to improve local humour standards. Politics requires more circumspection than a college debate or a newspaper column.

As own-goals go, however, the Uma Bharti episode is in a class of its own. If the BJP had ordered a script to bail out the party, the scenario could not have been bettered. Not only did the Congress solve a difficult BJP problem, it handed the party a populist momentum at a time when it was thrashing about for ideas. As a chief minister Uma Bharti was turning into a liability. Her brother might be a maverick, but his campaign against her was an irritant the party did not need. The growing perception in Madhya Pradesh was of a government floating on rhetoric. All Digvijay Singh had to do was wait, and he could have walked back into Bhopal at the head of a triumph.

Uma Bharti's core competence is field politics, not secretariat management. But the BJP high command could not have removed Bharti from office without wounding the party in the foot, turning it into a crutch case in MP. Then, out of the blue, the Congress-led government in Karnataka remembered a forgotten case and revived the BJP. You can argue till the cows come home that the case against Uma Bharti is about inciting mob violence, murder, and arson; you can repeat endlessly that she dodged 18 non-bailable warrants and a hundred summons; you can write editorials that her resignation is politics, not morality. In the public perception, the Congress has chased Uma Bharti out of office because she went to an Idgah (a Muslim prayer-ground) in Karnataka to hoist the national flag, and that she has sacrificed a chief minister's comforts for jail and struggle. The Idgah angle suits BJP rhetoric perfectly. There have been strikes and bandhs; and now a group of holy men are marching to Hubli in Uma Bharti's support.

The Congress' partner in Karnataka, H.D. Deve Gowda, who has seen enough politics to understand its idiosyncrasies, asked the chief minister, Dharam Singh, why on earth he had erected a populist platform for the BJP to march on. Gowda is, understandably, concerned about the growth of the BJP in the state, where the party narrowly missed getting a majority. Dharam Singh pointed his finger at Delhi. He was obeying instructions, he said. Heaven knows who gave these instructions. The air is heavy with denials.

The Congress lost ownership of the anthem Vande Mataram to the Hindutva movement in the turmoil of pre-Independence politics. The Muslim League did its bit when it trapped the Congress by making it a touchstone of bias. The Congress was confused in its response. The Congress tricolour was once virtually identified by the people with the national flag; they saw only a notional difference, because it was the Congress that had given India freedom. I am not suggesting that the Congress has delivered the national flag to the BJP, but one more misstep has occurred in a long process of image formation. I recall being in Bangalore at the public felicitation of Rama Krishna Hegde on his 75th birthday. The stage was crowded with public figures of the non-BJP persuasion. The song that was sung was Vande Mataram. No one protested that it was communal. Hegde did not consider it biased, or it would never have been sung at his birthday celebrations. And yet it played a part in the politics that divided India.

Will a decision taken in Andamans or an arrest in Hubli affect the vote in Maharashtra? Ideally, the voter should make his choice on issues of stronger substance: drought management, or the lack of it; confidence, or its absence, in the Congress-NCP alliance; security, or insecurity, of the minorities; empowerment, or helplessness, among the Dalits. A government is elected to provide a better life to the citizen, and should be retained or removed on such considerations alone. There will always be peripheral tugs, and they need to be addressed by whoever is in power. But the rim should not become the centre.

The temptation to exploit every emotive issue only indicates that the election in Maharashtra is going to be closely fought, and if the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance can milk victory in even half a dozen Brahmin-dominated constituencies by invoking the memory of Savarkar they will do so. Half a dozen seats after all could make the difference in an even battle. The general elections left the two sides evenly balanced. But the fact that they formed a government in Delhi has strengthened the Congress and the NCP.

This election will go to the wire, and whoever has energy for the last spurt will claim victory.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.