Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Swordplay in the dark

As Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman, and as governor of West Bengal before that, Dhankhar spoke the lines scripted by the Narendra Modi government, almost as if they had written them out for him. In West Bengal, he took on the elected chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, every day, firming up a template for the disabling politics practised by other BJP-appointed governors in Opposition-ruled states. At the Centre, he confronted the Opposition and the Judiciary loudly and persistently, and weaponised the Rajya Sabha rule book to stifle debate. There seemed to be little or no daylight between the positions of Dhankhar and the Modi government. Up till now.

So, now that a crack is showing, wide enough for Dhankhar to have made his unceremonious exit, or for him to have been eased out abruptly — no one seems to be taking the health reasons he cited for his resignation seriously — in a so far unbroken facade, there is an opening.

All the fevered speculation in the last week about why the former V-P quit his job, however, boils down to this: Perhaps, hidden in plain sight, Dhankhar had overplayed the hand he had been dealt by the Modi government, and a regime that maintains tight control over its ministers and MPs and also over constitutional authorities, could not let it be.

The story of the V-P’s exit could have been more interesting than this. Arguably, it could still be.

It could have been that Dhankhar has done something that has not been done so far to a third-term government with a messianic self-image, which gives no quarters to the dissenter and lays all its opponents low, a government that loses no opportunity to assert its absolute power absolutely. It could have been that Dhankhar has spoken truth — or even better, the Constitution — to power, from within. And that, having successfully subdued the Opposition, and its own Ministers and MPs, the government has now come up against a pushback from the less bendable constitutional authority.

That’s a tantalising possibility, still. But there is a problem, and it is this: Nothing in Dhankhar’s public record till now, in the state or at the Centre, supports this theory. A modicum of publicness and transparency — completely missing from this episode so far — would also have been intrinsic to a power-drunk government being shown the red lines by a constitutional authority.

What we are left with, then, is a drama, less real and more imagined, of mincing moves on the chessboard of power and politics that ostensibly led to the V-P’s exit. This shape-shifting drama is set against the backdrop of the newly reconvened Parliament, where large issues and fundamental concerns have lined up — from unanswered questions about Operation Sindoor to fears of disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters touched off by the Election Commission’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.

As the Monsoon Session enters its second week, on one side is the shadow-play over Dhankhar’s exit, and on the other side an Opposition clutching at opportunities for small point-scoring even as it struggles to get a grip on the larger issue.

Leaders of the Opposition have proposed to host a farewell dinner for Dhankhar, ostensibly to embarrass the government, twist the knife in. But on the SIR in Bihar, the Congress-led Opposition’s legitimate criticisms of the Election Commission’s impractical timelines in a poll-bound state are in danger of being clouded by its internal disunity. And by Rahul Gandhi’s loose and lurching pot shots at the EC.

In Gujarat, on Saturday, Gandhi reportedly said the EC was like a “cheating cricket umpire” and that Congress defeats in the 2017 and 2022 assembly polls in the state also had to do with manipulated voter lists — this is blame-laying in retrospect, Gandhi never said so earlier. To be sure, there is room for overblown rhetoric when a leader speaks to his party — Gandhi was addressing the newly appointed presidents of the Congress’s district and city units. But by lashing out at the EC so widely in an attempt to let Congress off the hook, he also risks undermining the substantive case his party and others in the Opposition are making on the haphazard conduct of the SIR in Bihar by the EC.

In Gujarat, Congress has failed to stanch the flow of Congressmen to the BJP camp, to an extent that voters distrust the party’s ability to hold its own in the state, quite literally. As in many other states, it has failed to challenge BJP dominance through new ideas, or through a new set of leaders. Its messaging has been inconsistent, lacking follow-up on the ground. It has not been able to live down the shortcomings and mistakes of its own governments in the past. Not one of those issues can be fixed by turning the focus to voter lists.

The ongoing SIR in Bihar is a different story, where the EC is fumbling visibly. But by setting up the fight with a constitutional authority so indiscriminately, Congress makes it more difficult to ask the pointed questions that need to be asked at this point of the EC.

Both the V-P exit drama about shadowy things, and the loose balls Congress is throwing at the EC, are part of the same story. For an Opposition still flailing to seize the initiative, the best hope is that, in its third term, the government’s cracks have started showing.

Till next week,

Vandita