Thursday brought a prophecy of a death foretold. When the RJD-Congress-CPI(M) managed to get their candidate, Congress's Sadanand Singh, elected as the Speaker of the Bihar assembly on Thursday, it was clear that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was destined to remain a seven-day wonder. His resignation on Friday, therefore, came as no surprise. The NDA's time was up and Nitish Kumar did not even wait to seek a vote of confidence before bidding goodbye to his newly-acquired status. It was just as well then that he, ever the gentleman, had not sought to prematurely dishouse his ``bhabhi'' Rabri Devi from her residence at 1, Anne Marg.Only time will tell whether RJD's Rabri Devi will continue to enjoy her right to stay there. However, now that the NDA has comprehensively failed to muster the required majority, Governor Vinod Pande is duty-bound to invite her to test her coalition's strength on the floor of the House. Indeed, this invitation should have come her way on March 3, by virtue of fact that her party, the RJD, happened to be the single biggest party in the House and was also a part of the largest coalition in the House. Much has already been written about Governor Vinod Pande's misplaced impetuousity in choosing to invite Nitish Kumar to proved his majority first, even when Kumar clearly did not have the requisite numbers to back him. This action did not conform to well-established procedures and could have even led to the ugly scenes that had marked Kalyan Singh's assent to the chief minister's post in Uttar Pradesh in October 1997.Fortunately, the nation was spared a rerun of that unedifying experience. Yet there is no gainsaying the fact that Nitish Kumar's exit has conclusively proved the folly of Governor Vinod Pande's haste. Nitish Kumar too does not emerge from this affair smelling of roses. His hope of survival as chief minister hinged on a section of the Congress joining it, and till the end he pathetically clung to that hope. The NDA had made Laloo Yadav and the RJD's mafia rule the central plank of its election campaign. Therefore the image of its chief minister warmly shaking hands with the 11 MPs now in prison as undertrials for charges that include murder, could not have added to the NDA's stature and the credibility of its commitment to clean governance.So what are the lessons that need to be learnt from the latest developments in Bihar? More than anything else, it exposed the inability of this country, even after 52 years of existence as a democracy, of evolving an established procedure for choosing prime ministers and chief ministers in the event of their failure to establish a clear majority. Such a code would serve the country well since coalitional politics and wafer-thin majorities are increasingly going to dominate the political scene, given the polarised nature of the polity. The ineffectiveness of the existing anti-defection legislation has also surfaced time and again in circumstances such as those prevailing in Bihar.As constitutional experts have pointed out, the fact that the law does not come into force until the concerned assembly or Parliament meets and party affliations are declared is a serious flaw, since all the wheeling and dealing takes place before that event. In conclusion, now that Gujarat has withdrawn its controversial circular on the RSS and Nitish Kumar has resigned as chief minister in Bihar, would it be too much to expect the Opposition to allow Parliament to get down to some serious business at last?
