A Congress self-goal and a bitter fight with Centre: What a fractured political terrain tells us

These men have a nuanced understanding of complex affairs in a fast-changing global scenario. Their inclusion enables the Congress to claim legitimately that it is the Grand Old Party of India that really knows the intricacies of “raj kaaj (governance)” and, ultimately, other parties have to turn to it when it comes to the crunch.

Even if the BJP was, hypothetically speaking, trying to play mischief by dividing the Congress in the way it went about constituting the delegations, as some in the Opposition party suspect, it could have turned the tables on the ruling party by making a virtue out of a necessity. By openly opposing its own senior figures, the Congress has only scored a self-goal.

It is highly unlikely that those in the delegation would either sing paeans for the government or embarrass it on foreign soil. They are hardly likely to take a line divergent from the official government position, whatever the questions about Operation Sindoor that remain unanswered.

Let’s face it, had Tharoor’s name not been included in the delegation, the controversy would not have erupted. The Thiruvananthapuram MP is not a hot favourite with the Congress high command at the moment, given that there were reports not so long ago of his dissatisfaction with the party leadership. Tharoor’s articulation of the government’s stand on Operation Sindoor was better than that of most BJP spokespersons, and that was noted by both the BJP and his own party. This may be a reason why the BJP leadership wanted Tharoor to head one of the seven delegations, with his team assigned the United States, Panama, Guyana, Brazil, and Colombia.

Given his unhappiness, it is unclear what Tharoor or the Congress high command will do in the coming weeks. Action against him at this juncture could queer the pitch for the party in Kerala where elections are due next year. It is the one state the Congress has been confident of winning.

Tharoor, who has called for a bipartisan approach on security issues, has carved out a niche for himself in the last few years that goes beyond the Congress. He has a following amongst the intelligentsia, the professional classes, and the youth. He enjoys a constituency in the South, but that does not mean he will launch a new party, which is not so easy to do. Neither is he likely to join the BJP or the CPI(M), and may hope to play the kind of role the government has assigned him now.

A bitter atmosphere

To put together multi-party delegations should have been a simple exercise, the idea being to constitute a crack team of politicians and security experts who can effectively address the global community. Instead, even before the teams could be officially briefed, all the fault lines were out in the open.

It became a picture of government versus Opposition, Congress versus Congress, with the divisions in the INDIA alliance laid bare. Last week, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram spoke about the fragility of the Opposition alliance. Then Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s attacks on External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, alleging that he had alerted Pakistan about India’s military operation before it commenced, only widened the impasse between the two sides, with the Ministry of External Affairs dismissing the Congress leader’s comments as “utter misrepresentation of facts”. Nor did it help to have BJP spokespersons dub Congress leaders as ”pro-Pakistani”, Rahul Gandhi as “new age Mir Jafar”, and the Opposition party responding with a “new age Jaichand” jab at Jaishankar.

The government could have pieced together the delegation on its own without referring to the heads of other political parties. After all, this was not a parliamentary delegation. If sources in government are to be believed, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiran Rijiju mentioned three to four names of Congress leaders the government wanted in the delegations when he spoke to Gandhi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge. However, the Congress sent back a list of four different names.

A different past

To expect the government to have a quiet word with the Opposition and for both sides to amicably evolve a final view has become a thing of the past. This was not so unusual in the years gone by.

There is the oft-cited example of P V Narasimha Rao who, as Prime Minister, persuaded BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1994 to lead the Indian delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, after Pakistan sponsored a resolution at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights criticising the government’s human rights record in Jammu and Kashmir. It was an unusual move to have an Opposition figure lead the official delegation to the UN and depute Khurshid, then MoS External Affairs, under him. It was a signal to India’s neighbours that the government and the Opposition were moving in step on Kashmir. The resolution was defeated.

Vajpayee, when he was PM, also made use of the Opposition to ward off international pressures on him to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He called CPI(M) leaders Harkishan Singh Surjeet and Jyoti Basu to ask them what people were saying about the Pokhran nuclear test conducted in 1998. He knew the two Left leaders had opposed the test and, as expected, was told that people opposed it. Why then, Vajpayee asked them, were no voices being raised against it? The politically sharp Surjeet immediately caught on that the PM was asking them, despite their opposition to nuclear tests, to mount an agitation that India should not sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). They realised it would help Vajpayee ward off pressure from the West.

Vajpayee was taking a leaf out of Indira Gandhi’s book. She had reached out to him during the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 and taunted him that his party did not want Bangladesh to be created. “No, no, we are fully with you,” Vajpayee assured her. “But I don’t see any signs of it,” Gandhi responded, indicating the Opposition was not mounting any agitation to mobilise opinion in the government’s favour, something Vajpayee went on to facilitate.

All this was possible then because the men and women at the helm, though political adversaries, did not allow the working relationship between them to break down. Today, the relationship between the ruling side and the Opposition is vitiated, bitter and distrustful, with the normal give and take, as and when required, becoming a near impossibility.

Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide