JUST SPAMMING | Wrong Advice Can Take Politicians To Oblivion
The BJP that is in power at the national level is widely perceived to indulge in arm twisting smaller parties to join hands with it
One of the weirdest things that coalition politics has thrown up is parties and leaders with no people’s following, significant enough to win a seat on their own strength, getting posts and positions and, as the grapevine has it, sackful of money. Without verifying the money part, which no one will talk about despite visible prosperity often vouching for the prevalence of the practice, one can say for sure that the political fortunes of many leaders and so called leaders soar during elections. On the flip side, those who made wrong moves were left ruing the advice they had taken.
Since most governments formed at the State and national levels have many parties as participants, smaller parties that played their cards carefully have benefited from the arrangement while those who failed to strike right have been left behind, sometimes forever. Ragtag groups of politicians who come under a single coalition umbrella, have to transcend narrow ideological, communal and political moorings and join hands, claiming to represent broader interests of people, if they want to come to power. And they do it in style.
But in the rush to form such coalitions, India seems to have lost its true democratic bearings itself because the driving force behind such alliances, as it has emerged of late, is not people’s will or public welfare but other compulsions that do not reflect the aspirations of the voters or the followers of the parties involved in the transaction. Of course it has always been like that ever since the idea of coalition governments germinated, some may say. But now it has taken a turn for the worse since the bargaining tactics of some dominant parties, needing the support of smaller players, and also small parties obsessed with self-importance have become inimical to the concept of democracy.
The BJP that is in power at the national level is widely perceived to indulge in arm twisting smaller parties to join hands with it. So a party that insists on the State government accepting an education policy that makes learning of Hindi mandatory manages to hold hands (obviously by grabbing it) with parties that have been vehemently opposing Hindi imposition all through the years. The leaders also manage to lift hands together for the voters to see, sending across the message: Policies and Principles do not come in the way of electoral politics that aim only at winning the polls.
On the other side of the political spectrum, parties feeling that their support will be inevitable for the big brother to win the polls use different tactics now. The Congress, which is a small party in Tamil Nadu, suddenly thinks that it was being shortchanged by its coalition leader, the DMK, which formed the government in the previous Assembly elections in 2011. Since the professed priority of the Congress is to fight its bete noire, the BJP, at all levels in the country, it should have seen its tie-up with the DMK as something serving its own larger interest and continued in it before making a demand for more seats.
But the Congress, which has been seeing debacles in other States of late, rocked the alliance boat, the fact that the DMK was among the few parties that were opposing the BJP in the country and that it had helped in its electoral triumphs notwithstanding. Though some DMK leaders initially dismissed the sudden belligerence as a bargaining tool to demand more seats and, if possible, a share in power, in due course it turned into a war, earning the wrath of DMK leadership. While it was leaders from outside Tamil Nadu – but holding party responsibilities relating to the State – who took on the DMK initially, soon Congress MPs from Tamil Nadu who worked with DMK during elections joined the chorus ruffling many feathers.
The Congress high command, too, is seemingly hopeful of fighting the coming Assembly elections with the support of the Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK), led by actor Vijay, by abandoning the DMK if it did not come around to accede to its demand for a share in the power pie, something the TVK is willing to give as it had promised on the day the party was launched in 2024. But what those Congress leaders failed to take into account was the chances for the TVK to come to power. Perhaps those Congress leaders with not much understanding of Tamil Nadu politics and the prevailing ground realities think that the TVK will win if it joins hands with the Congress. If their forecast comes true, it would be a good bargain for the Congress that has been seeing defeats one after the other in recent times.
But the question is what if the TVK ship sinks after the Congress severs ties with the DMK. O Panneerselvam had failed to ask a similar question before his ‘Dharma Yuddham’ of February 2017, the protest at the memorial of former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa when he was about to be ousted from the Chief Minister’s post. That wrong move – otherwise he would have continued as Chief Minister till the end of AIADMK’s tenure – has now left him in the lurch with none of the political coalitions willing to accommodate him. Now he is ruefully accusing two former party colleagues of giving that advice though another prominent BJP acolyte had earlier taken the credit for that advice.
