The leak of the Liberhan Commission report comes at a time when the dust was beginning to settle in the BJP, as far as the change of guard was concerned. It was clear that Nitin Gadkari would replace Rajnath Singh yearend. It was also becoming clear that Arun Jaitley would continue as leader of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha and Sushma Swaraj the Leader of Opposition when Advani steps down.
Advani had told friends he would step down after the new chief and his team were in place, and that he would not want to continue for the simple reason that any mistake made by the new team would be attributed to him. The Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat would have liked Murli Manohar Joshi to be Leader of Opposition but Advani was not likely to agree to make way for him. Clearly, the leak, indicting Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi, and the RSS, is bound to close ranks in the BJP and the parivar which had appeared to be at war within.
It will also go to strengthen the position of L K Advani as a party stalwart under attack on an issue that has been the centrepiece of the BJP-Sangh’s campaign in the last two decades. So much the better for Advani if the government goes on to put him in jail for a few days after the Action Taken Report is finalised and tabled.
The government will have to show that it is serious about punishing those held culpable by Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan who took 17 long years to establish guilt. More so when the ruling Congress is regaining its old constituency of Muslims in UP and in the Hindi heartland.
The Congress may not want to build up Advani and give him a new lease of life, but it will be left with little choice but to take action against him, if nothing else but to prove its bonafides to the minorities. Whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav or Lalu Prasad, or Mayawati, all claimants for the Muslim votes, they can be expected to clamour for action against Advani and company.
The timing of the leak — the Liberhan Report along with the ATR was expected later in the session — has obviously been prompted by the need to break the opposition unity which had begun to be forged in Parliament. This had pressed panic buttons in the Congress, particularly after the way opposition parties mobilised farmers on the opening day of the winter session. Lakhs of farmers converged in the capital to protest against the sugar ordinance — which had let the mill owners off the hook, making state governments responsible for the payment of the difference advised by state government over and above the fair and remunerative price of cane stipulated by the Centre.
Such a protest by farmers has not been seen in the country’s capital for close to two decades, and an embarrassed government was forced to climb down. The whole affair raised questions inside the Congress about what Sharad Pawar, whose agriculture and food ministry had brought the ordinance, was about, and why there was such a ‘non application of mind’ by senior Congress leaders in government on an issue as vital as this.
The Congress is aware that given its recent electoral victories, the opposition is in a mood to cooperate with each other and corner the party. As it is, the UPA is not in a majority in the Rajya Sabha and the Congress is heavily dependent on the support of the DMK in the Lok Sabha. The southern party has been exerting pressure on the government to go easy on the G2 spectrum scam, under investigation, with the opposition demanding the head of the DMK Union minister A Raja. An uncomfortable Congress, which is having to contend with a maverick Mamata Banerjee — she has recently written a letter directly to the CBI asking it to investigate her predecessor Lalu Prasad — is suddenly discovering the virtues of dealing with the Left.
Given the challenges it is now facing, the Congress resorted to dividing the opposition ranks, even though deploying a weapon like the Liberhan Commission report runs the risk of uniting its enemy, the BJP.
It would be able now to deflect attention from issues such as price rise, farmers’ woes, big scale alleged corruption in the communications ministry and of former Jharkhand CM Madhu Koda, who had been propped up in power by the Congress, JMM and RJD. Once again the focus will be on Ayodhya, though ironically the temple has ceased to be an issue with the people and this has been borne out by successive poll results.
The Liberhan Report, a voluminous document, has been leaked to the press selectively. The report has referred to the failure of the Muslim leadership in the Babri Masjid Action Committee, in other words making the point that the non-Congress Muslims did not come up to scratch. It also lets P V Narasimha Rao off the hook, that his hands were tied in the absence of a governor’s report, even though everyone knows that Article 356 provides for Central action on grounds other than the governor’s report.
One last word about L K Advani. The Liberhan Report can give a new legitimacy to the BJP leader who has been under attack from within the larger Sangh family. Having pulled up Advani, and having put the Gen X Four in their place by publicly declaring that the next BJP chief would not be from among them, RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat then went in for a readjustment with Advani.
It is said that Nitin Gadkari’s name was proposed by Advani in the final round. With his four favourites out of the race, Advani’s first preference was for Narendra Modi, and the RSS ‘had no objection’ to it, but Modi himself was not ready. Modi might make a bid to lead the party before the next general elections, if Gadkari — who is a lightweight — fails to make the grade and people clamour for Modi, and once Modi has managed to undo the damage of Godhra and ‘reinvented’ himself.
Can the report and its aftermath create a situation which makes Advani’s continuance as the Leader of Opposition a necessity for the BJP and the RSS? Leader of Opposition or not, it will certainly go to strengthen his hands.
The Liberhan Report, even before it has formally been tabled, has come to the rescue of Lal Krishna Advani — and a Congress which is suddenly finding that the situation is not so hunky-dory for it as it had imagined.
neerja_chowdhury@yahoo.com
About the author:
Neerja Chowdhury is political editor, ‘The New Indian Express’
