Lock, stock and barrel

Meanwhile, Maharashtra’s Congress Party — which constitutes the other half of the state’s coalitional government — is also worrying about losing body weight and has just commanded its MLAs to depart to Karnataka double quick and escape being lassoed like horses by the cowboys in the Opposition.

Thus does politics become farce; thus does the Maharashtra state assembly come to resemble the Mumbai race course.

The trigger for the present crisis was the resignation last Sunday of nine MLAs of the Peasants and Workers Party, over a controversial ministerial appointment. However, what should concern us here is how that first hint of instability translated into opportunity — opportunity for some to come to power, opportunity for others to make enormous sums of money by agreeing to cross floors for a price. The alacrity with which the Shiv Sena-BJP combine in the state swung into action rose from a vision it had long nursed of coming to power on the backs of laterally mobile deserters.

But since the motivating factor for such mobility is just plain greed and little else, those that go can also be made to come, given the right incentives. The Shiv Sena-BJP leadership has had to take recourse to locking up the MLAs they have managed to net.

We will have to wait until June 14, when the Democratic Front government is required to prove its majority, to know how this sordid saga ends. In the meanwhile, all this coming and going has proved yet again how ineffectual are the provisions of the anti-defection law in this country.

The Aya Rams and Gaya Rams of Indian politics have rendered it empty, not just of morality but, worse, the will of the people. As Roman historian Livy had observed so many years ago, the fidelity of barbarians depend on fortune.