Cricket-mad Indians are used to edge-of-seat matches in the shorter versions of the game, especially when their national team plays Australia, which is often, and Pakistan, which is only once in a while on neutral venues. But last week another game that had nothing to do with sport or sportsmanship kept much of India awake into the wee hours when an otherwise innocuous, uninteresting Rajya Sabha election from Gujarat state assembly went down to the wire with the eventual winner – the Congress Party’s Ahmed Patel – edging his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rival Balwant Singh Rajput by a single vote cast in his favour by a Janata Dal-United (JDU) legislator.
One more seat in the upper house of parliament would not have given either the BJP or the Congress any extra advantage. The BJP will continue to remain the single largest party while the Congress, despite being pushed to the number 2 position just a couple of weeks of ago, will still hold the advantage of the majority because of its allies. But what made the election crucial for both parties is the name of the chief protagonist, Ahmed Patel.
For more than three decades Patel has been one of most powerful men in the Congress Party. If the capital grapevine is to be believed, he also holds many secrets about the Congress’ first family. “Backroom potentate”, “merciless hatchet man”, “the go-to man” are some of the more acceptable epithets used to describe Patel who had won three straight Lok Sabha elections from 1977 onwards. He is no stranger to the Rajya Sabha either, having been elected from Gujarat for four consecutive times since 1993. Last week he made it five in a row.
To defeat such a stalwart would have been the icing on the cake, as it were, for BJP chief Amit Shah, who himself got elected from Gujarat and has been having, except for that minor hiccup in Punjab, a glorious run in elections for the past 20 months or so. Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been harping on a “Congress-free India” for the past three years and Patel’s defeat would have turbo-charged that slogan. The next natural targets would have been Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareilly and Rahul Gandhi in Amethi in the next general elections.
But Patel won due to the stupidity of two Congress rebels who had switched their allegiance to the BJP but had agreed to stay within their party until after the elections. (Or were they double-crossing, one can’t tell these days because politics has become such a cloak-and-dagger business.) The rules of the game prohibit the legislators from displaying their votes to anyone except their party’s authorised polling agent. Why anyone should show her/his voting preference to anyone else, especially when it is supposed to be a “secret ballot”, is a question that has found no answers yet. Perhaps the parties don’t trust their own anymore as is borne out by the herding off of legislators to far-off resorts during pre-election periods for fear of poaching by the opposition.
Anyway, these two worthies, Raghavji Patel and Bholabhai Gohil, apparently in their enthusiasm to please their new ‘masters’ in the BJP, showed their votes to someone other than their party’s agent, and the Election Commission of India (ECI), after much deliberation, beat back attempts by powerful delegations of the BJP and pronounced their votes as invalid. So, in theory Ahmed Patel had lost the election but won it on a technicality. That’s not a stupendously edifying thought for a man of Patel’s standing but in the age of grab-and-run politics the smallest of fig leaves would do.
The Gujarat assembly has 182 members but since six Congress legislators had already resigned after switching to the BJP, the effective strength had become 176. That left each of the four candidates in fray to win at least 45 votes to get elected. The Congress had 45 members on its rolls and that would have sufficed for Patel. But the prospect of cross-voting stared him in the eye. It was left to the JDU’s Chhotu Vasava to seal the deal for Patel.
Patel’s back in the Rajya Sabha and all’s well with the Congress. Well, that’s what Congressmen would like to believe but the reality is anything but. Whereas it was a walk-in every previous time Patel had contested, this time was a last-gasp breasting of the tape and that shows the party’s dire straits. Gujarat goes to polls later this year. It is a straightforward fight between the BJP and the Congress with minor roles for Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of Sharad Pawar and the JDU, which itself is staring at a split thanks to Nitish Kumar’s decision to walk out of the ‘grand alliance’ in Bihar and join hands with the BJP.
In any other scenario, Patel’s victory would have had a galvanising effect on the Congress but with as senior a leader as Shankersinh Vaghela deserting the sinking ship, there is a rush to the exit door that is only likely to get heavier in the coming weeks and months. Amit Shah will use every trick in the book and something more to allure Congressmen into his fold. The going rate for a Congress MLA is said to be Rs150mn and there is only party in India that can afford to spend that kind of money.
While Patel is political secretary to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and wields much influence on everything that goes on within the Congress Working Committee (CWC), he and Rahul Gandhi reportedly do not get along well. This is bound to create issues at the time of selection of candidates which could again lead to further desertions.
Be that as it may, the Congress has something to celebrate after a long time. It owes its newfound happiness in no small measure to the ECI which had to stave off none other than Arun Jaitley, the most eloquent and erudite of ministers in the Modi cabinet, who had come to argue the BJP’s case against Patel. In the few hours between the end of voting and the declaration of Patel’s victory, many Congress leaders had wondered if the ECI, currently led by Achal Kumar Joti who was handpicked by Modi, would stay neutral or not. That the Election Commission stood its ground to rule in favour of the Congress gives hope that despite rumours to the contrary India’s democratic institutions continue to be independent and strong. That’s a comforting thought.
Low-key Kejriwal grabs attention
What has happened to Arvind Kejriwal? The by-election to the Bawana assembly seat is only a week away and the Delhi chief minister is unusually quiet. No name-calling, no accusations, no threats to destroy the BJP and the Congress.
Is it that the Rs200mn defamation suits filed by Arun Jaitley has scared him? Or is that at long last Kejriwal has mellowed down and realised that good governance is something more than simply caricaturing your opponents as bigots? Or is it that the defeats in the Delhi municipal elections, the Rajouri Garden by-election and the less-than-spectacular showing in Punjab have shown the light of pragmatism to the self-declared ‘anarchist’ of Indian politics?
Whatever the reason, this time around there is more decorum in electioneering in Bawana, one of Delhi’s largest constituencies area-wise although not in terms of population. The seat is reserved for candidates of lower castes thanks to the influx of migrant labour from Uttar Pradesh and the Congress Party’s Surender Kumar had won it three times from 1998 till the BJP’s Gugan Singh beat him in 2013. But that BJP victory was short-lived when Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) fielded Ved Prakash who till then was with the BJP but decided to switch when he did not get a ticket to contest in 2015. The shoe is on the other foot now as Prakash has resigned and gone back to his old party and is now the BJP’s candidate, proving once again, if proof is needed, that the game of musical chairs is best suited for Indian politics.
Prakash is up against Kumar, once again the Congress’ choice, and the AAP’s Ram Chandra but more than the candidates and their SWOT analyses, Delhi is talking about how Kejriwal has changed his style. For the better, one may add.
Dheli
