Taming the Akalis

The art of managing a coalition is the art of making compromises. The arena for thrashing out a political compromise on Udham Singh Nagar...

The art of managing a coalition is the art of making compromises. The arena for thrashing out a political compromise on Udham Singh Nagar is the committee consisting of George Fernandes , Kalyan Singh and Parkash Singh Badal. There is no pussy-footing here.

The choice of committee members gets right to the heart of the dispute which is political. No one is better placed than the chief ministers of UP and Punjab to calculate the political costs to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiromani Akali Dal of any formula the committee is able to devise on the contours of the proposed Uttaranchal state. To pre-empt accusations that both sides are merely buying time, the committee has been given less than two months to come to a conclusion. The upshot is that breaches in the ruling coalitions at the Centre and in Punjab are temporarily mended and both parties need not worry about any negative fallout during Assembly elections in Delhi and Rajasthan in early November. This much is clear from the Prime Minister8217;sagreement with Akali leaders.

Uttarkhandis and Uttarpradeshis could rightly ask what a fertiliser plant in Bhatinda has to do with their needs and aspirations. The Akalis have come away from Wednesday8217;s meeting not only with a mechanism for a solution to Udham Singh Nagar but also with a number of financial commitments from the Centre. Besides the plant, there are loan waivers for farmers and compensation for 1984 riot victims. Sensing their advantage, the Akalis seem to have driven a hard bargain. Not all their demands have been met. Second language status for Punjabi in Delhi is likely to raise another hornets8217; nest and has not been conceded. But there could be more sweeteners, including another berth in the Union cabinet for them to occupy at a suitable time. Barring specifics like the populism of loan waivers, there is nothing wrong in essence with peace deals. Reaching a compromise means that both sides gain and lose something. But it is odd that the pay-off precedes an Akali compromise on Udham SinghNagar. Had Badal and Gurcharan Singh Tohra genuinely wanted to meet Atal Behari Vajpayee halfway, they should have stuck to their stance of a few weeks ago. At that time the Akalis had accepted, with only a show of reluctance, an amendment in the draft Bill on Uttaranchal which protected the land rights of Sikhs in Udham Singh Nagar.

The Akalis have as big a stake in the survival of the ruling coalition as the BJP. If despite this they chose to renege from the earlier compromise on Udham Singh Nagar and then threatened to bring down the government, the only explanation is the Akalis have been playing a shabby game with their allies in the government and their supporters in UP. There is no other name for such a game than ransom-hunting. It is a shame that the BJP has had to yield to such demands. It is the price one pays for taking a partisan political decision first and looking for a consensus after all hell breaks loose. The BJP has done this once too often. It can only be hoped that the same minds thatbroke the Cauvery impasse will be able to crack the UP problem.