Rajya Sabha polls: Crass opportunism all around

"If independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles," so goes a quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill but never authenticated. If true, it represents the damnable hypocrisy of a British ruler. If not, it still correctly prophesies the putrid squabbles littering the national political space today, seventy-five years after independence.

Examples abound, but the closest remains the just concluded elections to the Rajya Sabha held last week to fill 57 vacancies.

The run-up to the elections and the culmination of the process through voting and counting saw Indian politics oscillate between the theatre of the absurd and the drama of the depraved. Not even in their wildest flights of fancy would the framers of the Constitution have imagined a scenario where the lawmakers would need to be herded together and moved in mobile pens cross-country to the safety of their own party state governments in a bid to prevent cross-voting. The elite of the elected - entrusted with the well-being of the nation-state - fearfully cowering from their own.

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Singly they are not safe, and doubly, they remain doubted. So the Congress legislators from BJP-ruled Haryana have to be spirited away to the safety of its own ruled Chhattisgarh. And yet, all in vain for legislator Kuldeep Bishnoi defiantly vote for a BJP-backed media baron and another one wasted the vote. Haryana Chief Minister Manoharlal Khattar is quick to felicitate Bishnoi for listening to his inner voice and cross-voting, adding, "the BJP's doors are open if he wants to join". The BJP rules Haryana and yet feels insecure, so moves its legislators to the Union Territory of Chandigarh. The Congress rules Rajasthan and yet needs to shift its legislators to a resort in Udaipur.

However, in the Congress-ruled Rajasthan, a similar surprise by BJP MLA from Dholpur, Shobha Rani Kushwaha, did not elicit the same sentiments. She was promptly suspended for sinking the hopes of a BJP-backed media baron. Apparently, what was good for the goose was not so for the gander. Shobha Rani's husband, B L Kushwaha, was a BSP MLA who was sentenced to life imprisonment in a murder conspiracy case, and the BJP promptly inducted the wife into the party, gave her the ticket and she won the seat. The taint of the husband did not stick on the wife, but the political clout of his following did. So much for crass opportunism, which now stands repaid in full.

Again, the very Congress that dismissed Bishnoi for cross-voting in Haryana had no qualms about seeking a "conscience vote" - a bargain plea for backstabbing - from the JD(S) MLAs for its second candidate in Karnataka. With Jairam Ramesh largely secure, Karnataka CLP leader Siddaramaiah wrote an open letter to JD(S) legislators for the party's second candidate, Mansoor Khan stating that his win will be a victory of "secular ideology". Khan and Kupendra Reddy of the JD(S) both lost.

What is not lost, however, is the chicanery of the political class. The 2018 Vidhan Sabha elections, conducted at a stupendous cost to the exchequer in Madhya Pradesh, brought the Congress to power. The Kamal Nath government lasted 15 months before it was pulled down, with 23 legislators defecting to the BJP led by Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia. The defecting legislators had to be moved to the safe sanctuary of BJP-ruled Karnataka until the government was taken down.

The Anti-defection law was enacted by Parliament in 1985 as the tenth schedule of the Constitution to prevent destabilising of governments through defections. However, the class which enacted the law are the ones who comfortably bypass it by making the legislators resign and getting them re-elected under their own party government. With the same party in power both at the Centre and in the state, the process of the fence eating up the crop is smooth as silk, as witnessed in MP. The same script, tweaked with variations, had earlier played out in Karnataka, Meghalaya, Manipur, Goa and Arunachal Pradesh.

This is not the first time it has been done, nor will it be the last time. Pious platitudes of rooting out corruption are comforting, but pliable power is still purchased with pelf. They make the law, and then they break the law. If not in the letter, then in spirit. No sooner is the legislation passed than the bypasses are ready. What principle or morality was involved in the Scindia switchover, or the conscience dictates that come alive, of the many others who switched sides in the period before or thereafter? "It is the naked pursuit of power in the share bazaar of politics," points out a former chief minister.

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Three terms Congress legislator of Gujarat, Ashwin Kotwal, who quit to join the BJP, recently sought to make a virtue of his political cussedness, claiming that he had been an admirer of Narendra Modi since 2007. Fair enough, but what prevented him from joining the BJP right then would be an obvious question. The man was quite simply not in the reckoning at the time and has been promised a ticket on the greener side of the fence now.

It was to curb horse-trading that the venerable parliamentarians enacted this law. And who is circumventing them? The same people who were given the mandate for neat, clean, welfare-driven governance, not for pulling down people mandated governments and replacing them with their own by hook or crook. The failed attempts at pulling down the Maharashtra Vikas Agadi (MVA) government, the midnight drama and the vengeful turmoil that followed thereafter remains a classic example of an old prophecy finding current resonance.

Adds a retired bureaucrat, "It would not take a minute to curb this horse-trading. If you can have a cooling period for retiring bureaucrats, why not for MLAs and MPs switching sides? After all, they deserve breathing space to absorb the ideology of their new home. Just two years would do, and the results will be electric," he adds.

The moot point is who wants to do it? After all, you need chinks in the fence for flawed governance when chasing a fractious agenda.

(R K Misra is a senior journalist based in Ahmedabad)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.