Red-faced, vindictive

A lot of parties settled accounts on Wednesday, but the contrast couldn8217;t be starker. The BJP, the JDU, the TDP and others expelled MPs who defied the party whip during the vote of confidence. The CPM chose to expel the one person in the Lok Sabha responsible for proper, credible, constitutional conduct of that vote. The political masters of the dozen cross-voters understandably chose to see their behaviour as denting their party8217;s reputation. Somnath Chatterjee8217;s masters, remarkably, chose not to take credit for their own MP8217;s flawless performance of his duties 8212; saying instead, ironically, that he had 8220;seriously compromised8221; his party. Furthering a blind vendetta demanded every last vote they could summon: and it caused them to issue an order their man could not in conscience obey.

Chatterjee refused to follow that order and resign as speaker, even after the vote. This was a relief: this House could have been ungovernable if a new speaker had to be elected. These columns have previously pointed out the centrality of the institution of the speaker in an age of coalition politics: the speaker is not bound to his party, just as a judge does not serve the prosecution. It is this that Chatterjee defended. For the more palaeolithic parts of the Left, already uncomfortable with a comrade occupying a post specified in a bourgeois constitution, this public dissent will have been very upsetting.

That is not all, however, that lies behind this expulsion. The sniping in Parliament between Chatterjee and Gurudas Dasgupta, the predictable haste with which the politburo made its decision, the very tenor of their statements: everything indicates that the leadership of the Left are very, very angry men and women, and for some their anger has grown perilously close to bitterness. Much bitterness, not limited to the Left, has accompanied the lead-up to the trust vote and the special session itself; but it is the four communist parties, who precipitated this crisis, that have been the worst offenders. Until they learn that institutions are valuable in and of themselves, and not as way-stations; that we do not live in a world in which dissenters can be airbrushed out of photographs; and that decisions made in bitterness and anger will usually be blunders, they will never occupy the social democratic space at the centre which they so clearly feel is theirs by right.