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Material Girl

Everyone I met during the past week grumbled about the midterm polls. What a waste of national resources! they complained. This stupid, greedy woman and her vaulting ambitions have landed us in such a mess that it will take India a thousand crores and at least a full year to get back to where we were in mid-April! That was the general refrain wherever I went. Young students, indignant businessmen, stock market analysts, foreign investors, concerned housewives: everyone had an identical response. They were angry with the Congress for dropping the BJP-led coalition government at precisely that point of time when things were settling down. The economy was looking up. The stock market was booming. Yashwant Sinha's budget had unleashed a new mood of optimism and general wellbeing after a long, long time.

You must give credit to Sonia Gandhi for succeeding in bringing about such complete unanimity in our politics. Till she came upfront and announced herself as the official Congress candidate for the prime minister's job (and airlifted members of her family from Italy to witness the investiture), such unanimity would have been considered next to impossible. But she did it. In one stroke, she converted every Indian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isahi or neo-Buddhist, into a nationalist.

Nationalism is now synonymous with decrying the way the Congress has failed to contain its monumental greed for power, for pelf and once again dropped a democratically elected government at the Centre. This is not the first time. It has done this every time an Opposition government has come to power, be it Morarji Desai or Charan Singh. It was more obvious this time because it happened six times in quick succession, to five prime ministers. VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar, HD Deve Gowda, Inder Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee twice, once after 13 days and then again after 13 months. They were all victims of the fact that the Congress cannot survive without the oxygen of power and even though some of these prime ministers are now playing footsie with the Congress to way forward their own unscrupulous political ambitions, the fact remains that India does not condone betrayal as a political strategy.

This is where the similarities between Rajiv and Sonia become obvious.

Rajiv began his political career cunningly positioned by his hired imagists as a clean, decent, incorruptible guy. A reluctant politician, as they called him. Yet it was greed and corruption that eventually destroyed Rajiv and history will remember him only for Bofors. As the one Prime Minister who lost the elections because of the growing chorus against widescale corruption and the betrayal of all values that the Congress stood for.

Sonia began her political career with the support of the same gang of imagists. So she was also ended up as a reluctant politician, a new age Annie Besant who had no option but to take the responsibility for salvaging a sick, dying party riven by internal dissension. Yet, like Rajiv, she did not take much time to expose herself as what she actually is: A greedy and desperately ambitious politician out to grab power at any cost.

The public is now widely debating why she came out of the closet so quickly, to reveal her naked lust for power. Some say it was the fear of Bofors. It is a well known fact that the Vajpayee government was debating internally whether or not it should make public the papers it had received from the Swiss courts. This would have exposed the bribe takers and brought them to court, to face an open trial. Win Chaddha and Ottavio Quattrochhi had already been identified as the pimps. The CBI had asked for permission to proceed against two former bureaucrats who were involved in the scam: S K Bhatnagar and Gopi Arora, both of whom were inordinately close to Rajiv. The more charitable say that Sonia saw the imminent breaking up of the Congress and stepped in to save it so that her own political fortunes can stay afloat.

Whatever the argument may be, the outcome is obvious. Sonia revealed her true colours. As a typical Congress neta who would rather upstage an electoral verdict, drop a government that had a clear mandate to rule, and piece together a ragtag group of challengers who could not hustle together the numbers she needed in Parliament to replace the ruling coalition. Everyone knows by now the incentives her party offered every Judas in the treasury benches. Yet so brazen was the attempt, so sordid and contemptible that not one person was ready to risk the kiss of betrayal. The Vajpayee government fell with exactly the same number of supporters it had always claimed: 269.

Now the Congress will face the problems. Who will they promote as their candidate for the top job? All surveys show that more than half the nation sees Sonia as a clear no-no. Three-quarters of the electorate also see her as responsible for unfairly and unnecessarily dropping a government that had a popular mandate to rule. It is no use saying Pokhran 2 was wrong. It may well have been. It is no use accusing Vajpayee of turning a Nelson's eye to communalism. Even if he did, which is not exactly true, it does not give the Congress the right to upstage a popular government.

It is untrue to say that the BJP had lost the mandate to rule. The day it fell, the stock exchanges went into a tailspin and over Rs 40,000 crore was lost in market capitalisation. Nothing could have better reflected the confidence of the nation in Vajpayee. So much so that even after the BJP government fell the Congress sheepishly approved the Budget without a single murmur of protest in either the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha. In fact, history was made when the Budget went through both houses in less than five minutes.

What is worse, the Congress now has no specific programme -- as distinct from the BJP's -- that it can present before the nation. All it can exploit is the anti-incumbency vote. Which means it will try and work on the popular (and, by now, wellknown) desire of the Indian electorate to always kick out a government in power and replace it with a new one. To make this happen, they are looking out for the best imagists, the canniest designers of campaign strategy.

But marketing, effective as it may be, cannot win elections and the anti-incumbency vote can be easily fought back, as Digvijay Singh has shown in Madhya Pradesh. Money, powerful as it may be in politics today, is neutralised by the fact that most business houses have now learnt the art of hedging their political risks. They may pretend to be on your side but actually they pay your rivals as well. In fact, in recent years, most business houses have kept their options open and they are as happy supporting Pramod Mahajan and Amar Singh as they are in supporting Murli Deora.

So where does that leave Sonia? Not exactly in the best of positions.

No, I do not agree with the BJP that Vajpayee is the best prime minister we have ever had. I do, however, think that he has done a reasonable job, given the short time he had at his disposal. What is more important, however, was the fact that he represented (for better or for worse) the mandate of the people. To displace him, in fact to displace him in such an ugly way, was bad politics, bad strategy and the Congress will have to pay for this manoeuvre in terms of votes. The politics of betrayal always backfire and this will be no exception. Sonia will eventually realise this to her dismay. And the folly of coming upfront as the official candidate for the job of the prime minister of India.

India will spurn her not because she is an Italian. Whatever anyone may say, we are not such a narrow-minded nation. India will reject Sonia because we do not like greed in public life. Our leaders have always been people who give up everything they have and pursue the truth. Who abdicate office. Who practise renunciation. Who give, not seek.

We reject those who crave, who want, who desire and lust for things. Who demonstrate avarice and selfishness, an obsession for material gain. By positioning its leader not in the image of the real Madonna but as Madonna the Material Girl, the Congress may have found an eminently marketable commodity but has already lost the next elections.

Pritish Nandy

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