Look who’s come to dinner

For years, both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party have gained electorally from demonising each other. While Mulayam Singh Yadav has long been projected by the Sangh Parivar as the “butcher of Ayodhya” for having, as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, ordered the firing on kar sevaks in 1991, the Samajwadi Party has consciously modelled itself as a BJP-baiter, losing no opportunity to attack that party’s anti-secular politics in order to build its own support base among the minorities in the state. In a recent interview, Amar Singh, the Samajwadi Party general secretary and the man popularly known as Mulayam Singh’s shadow, stated that his party would have nothing to do with the BJP until it severs its ties with the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. So what made this same man, within hours of pronouncing these words, enter into a secret tryst with BJP general secretary Narendra Modi in the home of a BJP advocate-activist on Saturday night?

Both leaders, of course, have been quick to denythe meeting, with Singh claiming that it was a private visit and that he didn’t know Modi was in the premises, and Modi returning the compliment in full measure. These loud protestations of innocence may have carried conviction, if this newspaper’s reporter hadn’t been at hand to provide a graphic eyewitness account on the comings and goings of both Amar Singh and Narendra Modi under the cover of darkness. In the face of such evidence, the least these leaders could have done was to avoid insulting people’s intelligence by spinning yarns. In any case, the dinner appointment was on the cards for some time now. Recent political developments did indicate that a significant realignment in Uttar Pradesh politics was in the offing. The first indication of this came when the Samajwadi Party, wary as always about losing its vote base, began to step up its anti-Congress tirade and project the party as no better than the BJP. The warmth with which Kalyan Singh hailed his bete noire, Mulayam Singh Yadav, for notsupporting the Congress minority government last week was also too significant to be overlooked. Clearly, there was something more than just dinner cooking. Could it be then a formula to prevent the Congress and the BSP from gaining at the cost of the BJP and the Samajwadi Party?

But political parties must be told that they can go ahead and play their hide-and-seek games by all means, but if they happen to get caught they must have the grace to come clean. There’s another lesson here for politicians, if they will only have the patience and honesty to learn it. Transparency in politics goes a far longer way than cynical political wheeling-dealing. A few years ago, when Narasimha Rao’s Congress government was in dire need of some extra support to win a trust vote, some of its brokers had struck a deal with members of the JMM. An alert photographer presented the evidence in the next morning’s newspapers. To this day, both the political parties involved in that murky deal are paying the price forit.