A month ago, on June 28 to be precise, this column had said that Ram Nath Kovind’s election as India’s 14th president is a foregone conclusion and that “only the margin of victory needs to be ascertained.”
Of course the prediction was a no-brainer because the odds were stacked so much against the opposition that it had difficulty even to find someone to stand against Kovind.
Although eventually Meira Kumar showed the courage to put up a fight and did reasonably well in garnering the highest number of votes for a losing candidate (367,314 against Kovind’s 702,044), the main talking point of the election was the cross-voting that lawmakers belonging to the Congress and other parties indulged in and which eventually boosted Kovind’s margin.
The president of India is elected by members of parliament as well as members of state assemblies through a convoluted process reminiscent of the US presidential election.
The ballot is secret in that you will never know which lawmaker voted for which candidate. But because the total number of votes is fixed, it is easy to find out if cross-voting had taken place and in the present instance it did, in large numbers.
In Gujarat, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is up against nearly 20 years of incumbency when the state goes to polls later this year, as many as 17 lawmakers belonging to the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of Sharad Pawar and the Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP) of Keshubhai Patel voted for Kovind.
The Congress, which has 61 members in the assembly, could muster only 49 votes for Meira Kumar.
In Bengal, where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has given a war cry to “throw out BJP from India”, Kovind got 11 votes more than expected, although it was difficult to ascertain if any of those voting for him included those from Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, Kovind received 10 votes more than the 325-strong ruling coalition led by Chief Minister Adityanath Yogi of the BJP. Here the cross-voting was said to have taken place more from the faction-ridden Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav than any other party.
In Maharashtra too, at least six people from the Congress or the NCP had cross-voted in favour of Kovind. Other states where Congress legislators had voted against their party candidate and in favour of Kovind included Goa, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
Curiously, even in Delhi, where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Arvind Kejriwal enjoys an unassailable position, at least two of its MLAs had voted for the candidate put up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The only consolation for the Congress Party is that in Rajasthan at least six MLAs belonging to the BJP had voted for Meira Kumar who also got support from two independents and two MLAs belonging to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of Mayawati. That must sound a warning to Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah that things are not well within the state unit of the party.
Chief Minister Vijayaraje Scindia has acquired many enemies within the party and if not handled properly it could blow up in the party’s face when elections come round towards the end of next year. But Shah is too wily an operator who would leave any such things to chance.
The case with Congress is perhaps just the opposite. Dissidence has been the rule rather than exception in the party and the Gandhis, both Sonia and Rahul, have not been able to effectively control it in any of the states.
Rather, senior leaders have been sidelined for one reason or the other – S M Krishna in Karnataka and Shankersinh Vaghela in Gujarat are two prominent names that come to mind - leaving the party in the hands of upstarts with virtually no followers of their own or having their own individual agendas.
There is much talk about the need for strengthening the opposition to keep the Modi-Shah steamroller under check. People like Banerjee, Lalu Prasad Yadav of Bihar and Kejriwal have been quite vocal about it. But these worthies are at best regional satraps whose influence does not transcend their respective states. Kejriwal, perhaps, is the lone exception, his AAP having done creditably in the recent Punjab assembly elections.
Even Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who initially set out as a strident Modi critic, seems to be withdrawing into a shell of his own thanks to the shenanigans of his coalition partner Lalu Yadav.
The Congress Party remains the only hope to mount a challenge to Modi but Rahul Gandhi is woefully short of ideas and experience to be considered prime minister material. 
The presidential election only provided further proof as to how divided a house the Congress Party is and Gandhi seems to be able to do nothing to correct the situation. Some party leaders are looking up to Pranab Mukherjee now that he has demitted office of the president, but it is quite doubtful if he would want to wade into a party that is neck deep in trouble.
Meanwhile, with Kovind as president, Venkaiah Naidu as (prospective) vice-president, Modi as Prime Minister and Sumitra Mahajan as Speaker of the Lok Sabha, India will have four of the top constitutional functionaries of the government who subscribe to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology.
Curiously, both the president and the prime minister belong to Dalit/lower caste Hindu groups although the BJP itself is more identified as an upper caste Brahmin-Baniya organisation. How all this plays out in the months to come, especially in the context of the majority- minority equation, is sure to have a lasting impact on India’s future. 

Desperate Mayawati takes a gamble
The BJP named a Dalit as its presidential candidate and got him elected. There was much symbolism in it because the party had discovered it cannot do without the support of the lower caste Hindus.
This left the so-called champion of Dalits, Mayawati, in a quandary. She realised that the ground is slipping from under her feet. She had to do something equally or more symbolic to re-establish that she, and she alone, is the defender of the Dalits. Staging a walk-out from parliament is a common occurrence. Nobody pays any heed to such histrionics. At best it will be a footnote in next morning’s papers.  So the four-time former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh declared in the Rajya Sabha that she was resigning.
The immediate reason for her drastic step was the denial of permission by the chairman, Vice-President Hamid Ansari, to let her speak on the attacks on Dalits in UP’s Saharanpur last month. A discussion on such incidents was already scheduled for the following day, so Ansari told her that she could make a brief mention of it and wait for her turn during the full debate.
But Mayawati feigned dissatisfaction and insisted if she was not allowed to speak then and there, she was going to quit then and there.
Mayawati is now planning to stage a rally of Dalits on every 18th of each month starting September.
Why 18th, she was asked. “That’s the day I resigned from parliament,” was the reply. She may want to commemorate the date as ‘liberation day’ or some such but will the Dalits of Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere be sold on such gimmicks anymore?
Mayawati’s poor showing in the last four elections in the state is testimony to the fact that the Dalits in UP have moved on. In the assembly elections last March, the BSP fell to its lowest tally of 19 seats and in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls the party did not even get one seat.
By resigning from the Rajya Sabha she may want to portray herself as a victim of upper caste subjugation once again, but eventually everything in politics boils down to votes and unless she agrees to forge alliances – and every party worth its salt is wary of aligning with her as she has ditched most of them midway – Mayawati will have a long wait before getting a look-see into the corridors of power in Lucknow.