Sonia’s ‘inner voice’ guides Congress again

In a display of assertive leadership, Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in India, seems to have played a major role in the sacking of the two cabinet ministers — law minister Ashwini Kumar and railways minister Pawan Kumar Bansal — whose names had come under a cloud after allegations of graft against them.

The fact that the dismissals took place within hours of her ‘unscheduled’ meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not without significance. Aware that any further dithering might irreparably damage the image of the Congress and Indian government, Gandhi saw to it that it was hers — and the Congress party’s — views which would ultimately prevail.

In the process, Singh’s reputation has taken a hit, for it was suspected that he was reluctant to remove the two ministers, especially Kumar, since the latter’s sacking would have exposed the prime minister to the direct line of fire in the coal block allocation scam, dubbed Coalgate.

Since Bansal’s dismissal would have automatically led to a demand for Kumar’s axing as well — as it eventually did — Singh was evidently unwilling to take even the first step. The delay, however, was proving fatally damaging to the party’s credibility despite self-serving explanations by spokespersons about how everyone was innocent under the law unless proven guilty, and that investigations were on.

Brazen attitude

What was more, it was taking the sheen of the Congress’s victory in the Karnataka assembly elections. Arguably, if the Karnataka results had not come out at this particular time, the government might have continued to maintain that there was no need to pre-empt the findings of the probes against Bansal and his relatives, and the Supreme Court’s final judgment on Kumar, by dismissing them.

The willingness to let things drift could be seen in the abrupt decision to adjourn the Lok Sabha sine die to stifle the opposition’s demand for the ministerial resignations.

However, what the government appears to have overlooked is the politically damaging consequences of public opinion, moulded to a considerable extent by an overactive media, which suspected a cover-up. This was truer of the law minister since he was seen to have been overzealous in changing the “heart” of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) report on the coal scam.

Since the prime minister’s name has come up in this connection, the surmise was that the law minister tampered with the portions unfavourable to his boss. The presence of bureaucrats from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) by Kumar’s side — while he was supposedly correcting grammatical errors in the CBI report to the Supreme Court — deepened the suspicion.

For the first time, therefore, since Singh became the “accidental” prime minister, his Teflon-clean image no longer seemed adequate.

From the vantage point of being outside the hot house atmosphere of the government, Gandhi had evidently sensed that any further dragging of the foot on the two ministers was politically untenable. If the Karnataka verdict brought forward the day of their sacking, the approach of the anniversary of the UPA’s ninth year in power — on May 22 — also made it imperative that Kumar and Bansal would be shown the door. The celebratory mood, already not all that upbeat because of a faltering economy, would have been further dampened by their presence in their official capacities.

This is the third time that Gandhi has been seen in a proactive mood. The first occasion was when she engineered the ouster of then Congress party chief Sitaram Kesri because of the belief that he was leading the Congress downhill.

Smart moves

The second was when her “inner voice” told her that becoming prime minister herself in 2004, as the party wanted, would give an unnecessary handle to a demoralised Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dramatise the “foreign national” issue and claw its way backs into public reckoning.

Hence, her selection of Singh.

Her latest action is the third time that she has taken a decisive step on what can be deemed an ‘official’ matter. However, the initiative is in line with the satisfaction she expressed when Ashok Chavan and Shashi Tharoor resigned from their ministerial positions a few years ago. (Tharoor has since been rehabilitated.)

She said at the time that while the BJP talked, the Congress acted.

This time, too, Gandhi could not but have noted how the electorate punished the BJP in Karnataka. It is also not impossible that she recalled how the Congress itself lost its massive majority in the Lok Sabha in 1989 because of the Bofors scandal.

She realised, therefore, that the party’s prospects would be dim if it approached the forthcoming state assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi, and the general election thereafter, with a tainted image. As for the Karnataka outcome, it is obvious that the Congress did not win so much — after all, its voting percentages remained virtually static — as that the BJP lost with a steep 13 per cent drop in its vote share.

If the ministerial dismissals mark the beginning of an effort to cleanse the Augean stables of corruption, it will be an eagerly awaited initiative by the people of India.

— IANS

Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst.