The Ram Prakash Gupta government of Uttar Pradesh has achieved little beyond tying itself into knots by advancing all those technical arguments for its right to survive in power despite a decisive defeat on a motion in the State Assembly. While the defeated Trade Tax (Amendment) Bill, 2000, may appear to tally with most common people's idea of a money Bill, constitutional pundits can debate endlessly on whether such a description fits a merely amending measure.Statutory hairs can be split, too, about whether the failure of even a money Bill at the introductory state should automatically lead to the fall of the government piloting it. What no so-phistry can conceal, however, is the serious political and moral reverse suffered by the BJP-led regime. To explain the defeat as the result of incompetent ``floor management'' and no more, as the Chief Minister has reportedly done, is to indulge in an egregious understatement.Such management, of course, was conspicuous by its absence, with even the chief whip of the BJP legislature party not being among those present and voting for the endangered government. Obviously, there was much more than just floor mismanagement to it, if only four of Gupta's 90-strong jumbo ministry were available in the House.It would have been too much to expect the Chief Minister to respond to the 55-to-83-vote defeat with a prompt resignation of his government. Times are past, almost beyond recall, when el-ected rulers evinced such touchiness. But, clearly, the unprecedented embarrassment calls for expeditious action by him to dispel apprehensions about the legitimacy of his government. The least he can do is to seek a vote of confidence in order to prove afresh his majority in the House. The Opposition has been predictably quick to allege that Gupta has lost the confidence of treasury be-nches.It has read into the rejection of the motion serious dissent in the ruling camp over Uttaranchal and other policy issues. To the unamused public onlookers, the unedifying episode may reveal no such rationale. They are apt to see it as only yet another instance of the system of non-governance that has come to be established in the state under successive governments.There has been little sign, in particular, of any purposeful cohesiveness in the ruling camp under Gupta who has given undue attention to Ayodhya and other issues avowedly put on the back burner by his party even as matters of administration and parliamentary affairs have taken the back seat.It was in the mid-90s that the UP Assembly witnessed wild scenes of violence. The House is yet to transform itself into a model of parliamentary functioning. It's time to revive the House with its forgotten traditions, which should invest floor tests of majority with greater importance than the Gupta regime would seem to accord them. It's time, too, for the BJP's national leadership to recognise the enormous damage the quality of politics in the country's most populous state can do to the image of a party that does not tire of projecting itself as different from all the other options before the electorate.
