Carry on sparring

It’s videotape time again, folks, so sit back, punch the play button and watch. Things were bound to get stormy when the Samajwadi Party (SP), wearing an unlikely halo, handed over to the Uttar Pradesh governor a tape of Mayawati allegedly exhorting Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) legislators to replenish party coffers by diverting a part of their MLA’s Local Areas Development Fund. The lady hit back in a nanosecond, accusing the SP legislators and parliamentarians of misusing funds meant for the development of their own areas in order to construct an educational institution in Etawah, Mulayam Singh’s pocket borough.

She promised to teach her political persecutors a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry. There’s also a letter that she has despatched to the Union home minister, which is believed to have even more dope — and now that a no-confidence against her has been admitted in the assembly, we must prepare ourselves for a long and, we would say, useful bout of mud-flinging. There is that well-known expression that it needs a thief to catch a thief. In a similar fashion, it requires an MLA to expose an MLA and the more the issue unravels the better. This, after all, are public funds being talked about and should be of utmost concern to each one of us.

The idea of the Local Areas Development Fund for the parliamentarian was introduced by the Narasimha Rao government in December 1993. While cynics smirked that it was Rao’s pragmatic way to win over the opposition and save his minority government from certain fall, it did have a serious purpose: To enable MPs/MLAs to execute the development schemes of their choice, based on locally felt needs. All this was to be done under specific guidelines, of course, in a perfectly transparent fashion. Several legislators took this responsibility seriously enough but, clearly, going by the present controversy, there were several who deployed them for the most cynical purposes possible. This issue goes beyond the fate of Mayawati and the BSP, or the prospects of the SP and Mulayam Singh Yadav. Therefore, we can only express gratitude to the two sparring parties for raising it in the first place and would encourage them to carry on with their appointed task of exposing each other thoroughly. Perhaps then we may actually get to the truth.