He had to go

The Vajpayee-led government has displayed some will at last. The sacking of Union Minister for Communications Buta Singh came at a time when it seemed that it would allow itself to be interminably buffeted by circumstances beyond its control. Despite the Supreme Court having recently ordered that he be prosecuted in the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bribery case, Buta Singh himself carried on as if nothing had happened. He even had the gall to tell a television news channel that he will not, under any circumstances, resign from the Cabinet 8212; and this much before the Prime Minister himself could discuss the matter with him. And it was not just in the JMM case that Buta Singh8217;s name figured. According to an investigation carried in The Indian Express on Sunday, the Enforcement Directorate ED was looking into his personal and family income assessed at Rs 10 crore. The financial transactions of his two sons were also a subject of ED scrutiny. Such a personal history would have inhibited a lesser man, but notButa Singh. quot;Dekha jayega let us see what happens,quot; was his sole response.

But Buta Singh is just one irritant that the BJP-led government has had to contend with. The time has now come for it to do a spot of introspection on its future trajectory. Above all, it must decide how it is to tackle the AIADMK and its temperamental general secretary. It is great irony indeed that the government of a party that won its mandate by claiming to provide a stable government under an able leader, has of late looked both shaken and shakey. Within five weeks of coming to power, its weaknesses have been displayed to all the world. Even the 14-member United Front government, notorious for its vacillation and in-fighting, took longer to reveal its inherent contradictions. It is easy to make J. Jayalalitha the villain in this tableaux, but the fact of the matter is that the Union government has only itself to blame for having allowed her to get away with untenable demands. A distinction should have been made earlyon, between her morally sustainable demands and those that quite obviously lacked that quality. To this day, the Vajpayee government has displayed an uncomfortable eagerness to please Jayalalitha. For its own sake, it should now learn to draw the line vis-a-vis the AIADMK.

There are other trouble spots that the government would be wise to recognise and address before it is too late. Of late there has been an unfortunate tendency on the part of its various constituents to air their differences in the public domain, much before they did so among themselves. Speaking in discordant voices is a luxury that a 19-member body can indulge in only at its peril and the sooner this is realised the better. True, coalition politics has to necessarily accommodate healthy dissent but it must not be at the cost of the larger, common objective that the various groups ostensibly share, which is to provide this country with a viable government. It was for this reason that the eminently sensible suggestion of setting up acoordinating committee that would oversee the working relationship between the BJP and its allies was mooted. If there is indeed such a committee, it is clearly not doing its job.