Is Congress carbon copy of the BJP?

Numbers are important in a parliamentary system and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's assertion that he has them should be assuring to the ruling Congress. After its debacle in state elections of UP and Punjab, the party's anxiety is understandable.

Yet the annoyance by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee can reduce numbers. Her Trinamool Congress party has 19 members in the Lok Sabha. She has already given a notice for amendment in the presidential address which mentioned the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). Supporting her are also six non-BJP state chief ministers.

If the Samajwadi Party's Mulayam Singh, lionised by the victory in UP, were to align with the Trinamool Congress with his 22 members, Manmohan Singh's majority can come tumbling down, reducing him to a minority in a house of 543. The Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK) with 18 members can add to Manmohan Singh's troubles because the party has given notice to express its annoyance over the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Even then the numbers meet the needs of the constitution, not that of governance. Except for the first few years, the Singh government has been poor in its performance. Price rise has been constant and the decline in growth relentless. If one were to count the scams, they would beat all the governments hollow since independence. So much money, trillions of rupees have lined pockets of ministers, bureaucrats and outsiders, both Indian and foreigner. Never before has the public exchequer been looted so openly and so unashamedly.

The reason why the people voted for it in the past for decades was the different image the Congress projected from its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Whether it is competitive politics or the abandonment of values, the Congress looks a duplicate copy of the BJP. Both are corrupt, communal and casteist. True, when former prime minister Indira Gandhi ousted morality from politics in the seventies, the party lost the sense to differentiate between right and wrong, moral and immoral. Still there were times, even during Singh's regime, when the hope of cleaner and nobler politics flickered.

In fact, the party can begin a new chapter if it were to introduce a bill in parliament to lay down that the political parties would accept money only through cheques and would get their accounts audited by the recognised chartered accountant firms. This step will raise the reputation of the Congress and remove the stigma that suitcases full of currency go right up to the top in the party to finance elections. The BJP is no different but the responsibility of cleansing the system lies on the shoulders of those in power.

Decentralisation

The Congress is, however, doing the opposite. With the help of obedient Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) the scandals are minimised to favour the party which comes to support the Congress. More than that is the absence of remorse. The insensitive Congress continues to make mistakes. Take the case of reservations. During the recent election in UP, which has 19 per cent of the Muslim electorate, Law Minister Salman Khurshid introduced a sub-quota for Muslims from the overall 27 per cent reservations for Other Backward Classes. That the Muslims are 80 per cent backward is a fact which the Sachar Committee has brought out, but the law minister using this during the elections has given strength to the BJP's obsession with Hindutva.

The Congress is supposed to have secular credentials. But then the Congress of today is increasingly going away from those values. Now its purpose is to concentrate power at the centre, unlike Mahatma Gandhi's precept of decentralisation. Federalism is the core of the constitution and it is that very core which Home Minister P. Chidambaram and his ministry are trying to destroy. The proposed creation of NCTC is nothing but setting up machinery for snoop at what the states are doing in the subjects which the constitution has allotted them exclusively.

If nothing else, such acts of the Congress government may revive the third or fourth front of non-Congress and non-BJP chief ministers. They are meeting on April 19 to chalk out their strategy on how to stop the federal government from encroaching upon their authority. They have also been disturbed by home secretary's remark that the chief secretaries should not "act like stenographers" to the chief ministers. This may have made the non-BJP states all the more determined to have a loose kind of liaison so that they are not pushed by the centre any more. Were this to happen, the prime minister's claim that his government has the numbers does not mean much. His other allies may also leave him.

Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a former Rajya Sabha member.