Inside track

Sharif was gratified a few months later when his state’s honour was vindicated and a Punjabi finally made it as Prime Minister of India. The way things are going, some wags joke that the only JD MP in the next Parliament may come from Punjab. If that happens, Gujral will owe his victory to every party but his own.

It is one thing to clutch at the Akali Dal’s coat-tails, but the usually mild-mannered Gujral has of late become more vehement about Bofors than even Atal Behari Vajpayee merely to ensure that the BJP rank and file does notswitch over to the Congress in the Jalandhar constituency. In Chennai last week, Gujral boasted that his government did not let down the DMK, unbothered that his own JD members, whom he snubbed at the Chennai airport, felt very let down by him. Now yet another Punjab da putar has come to Gujral’s aid. Kanshi Ram, the BSP supremo has given instructions to his partymen that despite their alliance with the Congress in Punjab, they should go soft on the PM in Jalandhar.

Cheque-out time

Donations to political parties and candidates continue to be in wads of notes in suitcases. Rattan Tata’s much-touted scheme to reform the electoral system by starting a trust fund where corporate funding would be made by cheque has failed miserably to take off. Far from getting donations from outside companies, even some of the Tata companies have refused to contribute.

The whole point of businessmen doling out money to politicians is intended not as a service to society, but as a quid pro quo for favours expectedshould the politician come to power. Thus Tata’s proposal that the contributions should be proportionate to the number of MPs in the outgoing Parliament defeats the whole purpose behind the businessman-politician nexus. As the Jain hawala diary demonstrated, money was doled out in proportion to what the Jains thought would be the utility of the politician concerned to them. And no political party was funded directly.

Once companies pay by cheque, share-holders would start asking questions, which is why business houses prefer to make contributions from special discretionary funds. In a large number of corporations, it is a standard practice for the man deputed to hand over the money to a politician to stash away some for himself. Considering the Tata Trust fund has failed to take off, it is a mystery why the Birla group has followed suit.

Manifestly unwise

Two groups in the BJP were tugging in opposite directions over the party’s economic manifesto. On one side was Jaswant Singh, chairman of themanifesto committee, who wanted a totally open-door policy towards foreign investment; arraigned against him were K.N. Govindacharya and S. Gurumurthy espousing the swadeshi platform totally. To get a middle-of-the-road policy in place, party president L.K. Advani pragmatically inducted R. Ramakrishnan, a retired IAS officer and former secretary, textiles, and Mohan Guruswamy, the party’s newly inducted intellectual, to strike a balance. Incidentally, two earlier economic gurus of the BJP, Jai Dubashi and Jagdish Shetigar, have been totally ignored this time.

Advani, meanwhile, prevailed over A.B. Vajpayee in deciding that the common minimum programme (CMP) of the BJP and its allies would be drawn up only after the elections. Vajpayee had gone on record affirming that the BJP manifesto would not be the programme for the new combination which came to power. But Advani insisted that the CMP was not possible before the elections and the BJP should not try to hide what it really stood for. By refusing to tonedown its strident line, the party’s poll prospects have been harmed.

Family firms

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is alive and kicking and the fifth generation is proving its mettle in the family firm. But dynasties are no longer a point of criticism in Indian politics since every party has its share of them. The maharajahs and maharanis have always considered it their divine right to represent their former kingdoms. In Haryana, the Bansi Lal and Devi Lal progeny are in the thick of the parliamentary poll in various constituencies. Biju Patnaik’s son Naveen has taken to politics like a duck to water despite his very westernised upbringing. Farooq Abdullah’s son is another rising son. And now Ajit Singh’s son-in-law Vikram Singh is keen to inherit Charan Singh’s legacy and is touring the Jat belt of UP and Haryana. Ajit, who has a 16-year old son, is non-committal on Vikram’s political aspirations but party leaders, Rashid Masood, Satyapal Mallick and Tirlok Tyagi, are miffed by the arrival of theambitious newcomer.