The UPA’s lost honeymoon

Inflation is double what it was this time last year. Liberalisation seems dead in the water. Manipur is burning and the peace process is coming unstuck in Jammu and Kashmir. In Punjab, the chief minister holds federalism to ransom by evoking the spectre of terrorism unless he gets to exercise his “sovereign” rights. The coal minister goes on the run to avoid arrest and our beloved railway minister delivers homilies on morality while an embarrassed prime minister keeps quiet. The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity, to quote W.B. Yeats.

These are not the first hundred days of a new government, they are the last days of Aurangzeb! It has been far too long since I opened my copy of Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s classic biography of the tyrant, but I recall that the dying emperor was reduced to depending on the revenues of Bengal alone to fund his ulcerous campaigns in the Deccan. You can say much the same for this United Progressive Alliance ministry; it will be sustained, I think, by the Marxist MPs from Bengal but it may still be undone by events at the periphery. And so, to carry the analogy a little further, let us take a look at what is going on across the Vindhyas.

The plateau is divided between the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. The Congress is in power in all three; what kind of a job is it doing?

Elections to the Maharashtra assembly are now less than two months away. Is it possible that the Vidarbha question — carving a separate state out of Maharashtra — will be an issue in these polls? Ranjit Deshmukh, the man who was unceremoniously dumped as president of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee, is threatening to follow in Chandrasekhar Rao’s footsteps. What is Sonia Gandhi’s view on the creation of a separate Vidarbha?

The waters have been muddied by the Congress’s wishy-washy stance on Telengana. The party made a conscious decision to fight the Lok Sabha and Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls in alliance with the Telengana Rashtra Samiti — whose sole plank is the division of Andhra Pradesh. Today, Digvijay Singh — the Congress general-secretary who looks after that state — flatly denies that the Telengana Rashtra Samiti was given any assurance about a new state coming up in six months. All he talks about is constituting a States Reorganisation Committee (which would presumably also take up the question of Vidarbha).

The Telengana Rashtra Samiti is predictably furious at this backtracking. Chandrasekhar Rao has vowed that he shall not leave the Congress in peace until a separate Telengana comes into being. Rao is, of course, under considerable pressure, both from his own party workers and from the Naxalites who accuse him of “betraying” the cause of Telengana.

I would love to know exactly where Sonia Gandhi stands on the issue of carving new states out of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra but she has shied away from any remarks on the subjects. Even her own colleagues don’t seem to be quite sure on her approach: “I am not privy as to what transpired at the meetings,” was Digvijay Singh’s huffy response when quizzed about the Sonia Gandhi-Chandrasekhar Rao talks.

So, if Sonia Gandhi isn’t opening her mouth on Vidarbha and Telengana — nor about Punjab and Manipur — what has she been up to? The answer may lie in the third Deccan state, namely Karnataka.

I understand that the former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda advised Dharam Singh not to revive the ten year-old case against Uma Bharti. The chief minister of Karnataka reportedly responded that he was doing so because of orders from above. There is, as everyone knows, only one person who could put that kind of pressure on a Congress chief minister.

As Haryana’s Om Prakash Chautala said about another Congressman on ‘Walk the Talk’: “Tell me, a chief minister who has to wait at Sonia’s doorstep for three days to even appoint a parliamentary secretary or to camp out in Delhi for weeks to change a portfolio, how could he take such an important decision without Sonia’s consent? It is impossible.”

I agree; a chief minister doesn’t usually rush to the courts asking for a revival of a case against the chief minister of another state. None of these difficulties are of the Opposition’s making. Whether it is Ranjit Deshmukh being miffed, or Digvijay Singh riling the Telengana Rashtra Samiti, or Amarinder Singh redefining “sovereignty”, these are problems stirred up by irresponsible Congressmen.

History lays the blame for the decay of the Mughal realm squarely on Aurangzeb, not his ministers. It is a lesson that Sonia Gandhi might ponder over should she ever choose to study Indian history. If “things fall apart” and the “centre cannot hold”, well, blame the Empress and not the Wazir!