A Full And Final Settlement?

The numbers are not adding up and there is panic in the Congress. HARINDER BAWEJA captures the mood of the ruling party, which irrespective of the trust vote, is gearing up for an election in the ‘national interest’

Nuclear red carpet: Manmohan Singh sticks to the path he chose two years ago

THE QUEST for political glory can be like a country-made pistol. If you are in luck it fires smoothly and strikes home; if not, it blows up in your hand. Neither success nor failure has much to do with the hand of the wielder or the state of his nerves. Most often it has to do with faulty material and flawed craftsmanship.

None of this was perhaps on the mind of that unlikely gunslinger, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as he stood by the side of American President George W. Bush in Japan last fortnight. It was the sidelines of the G-8 Summit; the mood was heady; the cameras were on overdrive; both heads of state were elated. It was a historic moment, the Indian prime minister’s legacy moment. The moment when the high-on-his-agenda nuclear-deal was being blessed by the international community. As a senior member of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) observed, “Ten years ago, in July 1998, the G-8 had unanimously condemned India for Pokhran II. This time, the same G-8 had passed a unanimous resolution backing India’s nuclear policy.”

In the short period of long, turbulent days that have followed, the glory of that moment has already been turned on its head. The maelstrom of national politics has already scratched and tattered the photograph of a smiling Messrs Bush and Singh. No one in the perennially duplicitous city of Delhi can tell you what the coming week will bring. Who will go to bed with whom? Which friend will turn out an assassin? Who will buy loyalty? Who will sell it? How much will it cost? And who will be left standing when the dust settles? And next to whom?

History’s assessment of the nuclear deal and Manmohan Singh will take its time, buIndian politics’ verdict threatens to be swift and brutal. At the moment, there seems to be a growing likelihood that the gentle, honest Sikh, the “proxy” prime minister, may soon be saddled with the opprobrium of having carted himself and his party clean out of power.

So has there been a mess-up? Or is this pretty much the script the ruling party wanted? And if there has been a mess-up who should be taking the rap? The moghuls and managers of the grand Congress? Or the prime minister and his band of merry apolitical officials?

As the days roll by and it becomes clear that the ruling party’s numbers are not adding up, the Congress’ save-your-skin managers are quickly beginning to shovel the blame on to the prime minister’s door. The charges are simple: the government should never have been risked on such a non-populist issue; and he has brought this about primarily by deviating from the settled script.

Is it true that there was a settled script? And, as crucially, were the prime minister and the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, on the same page? Few believe that the PMO went ahead without the consent of 10 Janpath. The fact that Manmohan Singh was keen — excessively — on the nuclear deal has been fully clear for the two years that the deal has been debated in Parliament and outside. So has the fact that he backed off in October last year after publicly daring the Left to withdraw support over the stand-off. However at the time the UPA’s allies — Sharad Pawar, Lalu Yadav, Karunanidhi — were unwilling to risk the government on the issue. So what did change this time around?

Officials in the PMO say that Manmohan Singh called on Sonia Gandhi in June to tell her the deal was historic and the Left was stonewalling it basically on doctrinaire grounds. In the officials’ words “because they did not like Bush’s face”. It seems the prime minister in his briefing to Sonia also told her that the deal took care of all the nine points that CPM leader Sitaram Yechury had flagged at the end of 2006.

By then the prime minister had already run the full gamut of emotions on the deal. From the excitement of having made it possible, to frustration at its snarling, to complete despair at the Left’s intransigence. In fact, if PMO sources are to be believed, Manmohan Singh had given up on it in October last year when he’d famously said if the nuclear deal didn’t go through he would be disappointed but “life would move on”. Thereon he had left negotiations to the Minister for External Affairs, Pranab Mukherjee, who was coordinating the text of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement with the Left leaders.

But this June, the prime minister unexpectedly discovered steel in his spine and decided to make a last stand. A close aide explains, “He thought he should get a 21-gun salute for what had been worked out with the IAEA because he had got more than what even he expected.” It was at this point, it seems, he began to put the heat back on the deal — allowing resignation rumours to circulate — and began to push Sonia Gandhi to take a decision.

So did Sonia Gandhi go along reluctantly? Congress spokesman and MP Abhishek Singhvi tries to answer that question in an oblique way:“The understanding, cooperation and mutual regard between the prime minister and Mrs Sonia Gandhi is of a far higher and more intense degree than most people know or believe. I can vouch for it. At a Congress parliamentary party dinner, I remember how she had reached the exit when she stopped mid-step and indicated to me that she had forgotten that the prime minister was still in the gathering. It was only after she personally ushered him out that she left. This sensitivity and regard for each other should not be underestimated.”

IF THAT is so, and both the chiefs of the Congress wanted the deal, why then did they — and the UPA — not do their homework before the prime minister threw down the gauntlet to the Left a second time round by telling journalists aboard Air Force One on the way to the G-8 Summit that they would be approaching the IAEA “very soon”? The complete panic in the Congress — even as MPs are being brought out of jail to back the trust motion, as every vote counts — makes it fairly clear there was no robust gameplan in place when the prime minister spoke out.

For some time, many observers thought mistakenly that the prime minister had cobbled a joint strategy with the Left that would allow the deal to go through while permitting the Left to grandstand to its own constituency. In this scenario, the Left would abstain during the trust vote; the government would survive; all would be well.

As it has turned out, the Left is now a thwarted, enraged beast, determined to humble the Congress, no matter what it takes — willing even to vote alongside the BJP.

As a rebuff to the Samajwadi Party (SP) and its switching of allegiance, the Left has teamed up with the irrepressible Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chieftain, Mayawati. And despite the division in its ranks over being on the same side as the BJP, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat has been sharpening the knife daily. In an interview to his party magazine, People’s Democracy, he says, “One must not forget that the Congress and the UPA are losing ground among the people. This is the political reality. If anybody wants to hitch their fortunes with the Congress that is their business.” So Karat is trying to scare off Congress allies not just with criticism of the nuclear deal, but with the spectre of being stuck with a party crippled by anti-incumbency.

Deal on Wheels: The Congress makes an attempt to garner popular support for the N-deal Photo: Shailendra Pandey

The feeling that the Congress may have messed up is growing among both the party’s own managers and independent analysts. Says political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “More than the Left appearing like a one-issue party, the UPA comes across as a one-issue government. Given the compromises it has been forced into, the government will find it difficult to enhance its credibility.” Saeed Naqvi, another political commentator, says, “There was so much secrecy surrounding the nuclear deal all along. The Congress could not market it and it is now in a mess.”

Worse still is the mood within the party. Even as theories bloom by the minute, the hard, unchanging truth is that the numbers are not safely adding up. There is also a sense of absences — no one quite knows who is working on conjuring up the magic figure of 272. Reveals a senior Congress leader, “The task of working the mathematical sum game seems to have been left to Amar Singh and Lalu Prasad Yadav. Unlike in the past, managers like Buta Singh and VC Shukla are simply missing.”

THE DESPAIR seems well-founded. As you speak to Congress leaders, an air of resignation floats thick. Unlike, say, during the presidential election when the party ensured Pratibha Patil won, there is little of the frantic activity that surrounds the all-important task of saving the government at any cost. Apart from one meeting that Sonia Gandhi has had with her general secretaries, none of them have been summoned to the All India Congress Committee — like they were during the presidential election — nor have they been tasked with aligning the MPs. Nor, for that matter, party sources point out, has the Congress president thrown a dinner for the MPs as she did when the party was garnering support for Pratibha Patil.

Says a Congress leader, “Where is the homework? We seem to be flying blind. In such situations, you mark your MPs man for man because they can also cross-vote. When AB Bardhan says we are paying Rs 25 crore per MP, he is only making it more difficult for us by raising the stakes.”

More forces were deployed to stitch up the rapidly-widening tears in the UPA after the prime minister announced the IAEA plan on

Waiting for the fall:BJP leaders LK Advani, Rajnath Singh and Jaswant Singh Photo: Shailendra Pandey

July 7, even though Pranab Mukherjee had by then written to the Left asking them to come for the coordination committee meeting scheduled for July 10. Even after the Left pulled the plug, Mukherjee once again said the government would not approach the IAEA until it had won the trust vote — words that would only make him the target of the Left’s ire once it became clear the government had already approached the international nuclear watchdog. A sulking Mukherjee presided over a damage control exercise with colleagues who included Mohsina Kidwai, Veerappa Moily and Kapil Sibal. One of them was shocked to learn that the MEA had no choice but to post the draft safeguards agreement on its website, when only the night before word had gone out that the text was “confidential”.

THE ONLY thing the Congress appears to have prepared in advance was the Samajwadi Party’s support, but they add only 39 MPs compared to the 59 the Left has pulled out. Even if the UPA scrapes through, it will remain on a shaky wicket. And the SP’s support is itself enough to ensure a hundred headaches. Amar Singh says he is batting in the national interest but has not refrained from asking the prime minister to intervene in the tussle between the Ambani brothers. Says Swapan Dasgupta, a Right-leaning analyst, “By putting crony capitalism at the centre of its survival strategy, the Congress has brought disrepute to the nuclear deal.”

Today, Congress managers have no bets to place on whether the government will survive. They are living on hope — on the hope that some Left MPs will abstain rather than vote on the same side as the BJP. On the hope that Amar Singh might help snare some MPs from the BSP. On the hope that some miracle rabbit will be pulled out of an increasingly improbable hat.

But even if there exists some magic formula, currently invisible, it is clear that the Congress will soon have to go into election mode. Some of them are already preparing for what they call “the martyrdom line”: that the party took a stand in the national interest, putting country before politics. But will this work? Has rural India even heard of the nuclear deal? Congress spokesman Manish Tewari is quick to respond, “When you stand up for the national interest, you expect the nation to stand by you. If there is one bottleneck which is going to impede India’s becoming a great power, it is the paucity of power and no sacrifice is too great to make India a great power.” Press him on whether an inflation-hit populace will respond to an issue like the nuclear deal and he says, “Since the early 90s, elections have been fought around the three integral issues of bijli, paani and sadak. This deal is about bijli.”

THERE ARE few takers for this argument. Reiterates Bhanu Mehta, “The nuclear deal is not electorally viable. I don’t think the government should have made it such a high priority, especially since Barack Obama has supported the deal.” Ask Naqvi and he says, “The Congress’ political managers might muster 272 but the voters will definitely not give them the same number.”

Curiously, the PMO has an electoral blueprint in place and Manmohan Singh’s confidants are willing to share it. Their stand is that if the party has to return to the people, the Congress should use the opportunity of having lost out over the N-deal to assert its difference from the Left and the Right. Two, it should emphasise that the deal was about energy security. Lastly, it can use the deal to play up nationalism to counter communalism.

The Congress managers, however, are worried about the Muslim votes, a constitu ency it likes to appropriate. In a survey conducted by SP MP Shahid Siddiqui for his newspaper Nai Duniya, 70 percent (out of 5000 urban Muslims surveyed) said they were against the deal. 85 percent, however, chose ‘‘inflation’’ when asked which issue they will cast their vote on. Says Siddiqui, “Muslims are emotional about the deal because they are anti-Bush but the community does not vote on foreign policy issues. Everyone tries to use the Muslims for political posturing.”

But as of now the focus is on the UPA’s D-day — July 22. One week is a long time in politics. But, even if it manages to survive, there is nothing, as many in political circles have darkly pointed out, to stop another trust vote being brought against it on some different issue. The only way for the Congress to recover some of its sheen is through some smart political management whereby they can try and keep the moral high ground by reiterating the point of having sacrificed party interest over national interest. Like Rahul Gandhi put it, saying, “I will have no regrets if the government falls because the deal is good and you need guts to do it.” •