After the scourge of scams in the 1990s which necessitated the judiciary to strike an activist and interventionist posture to restore people’s faith in democracy and democratic institutions, there was reason for hope that the fast emerging coalition politics may evolve its own checks and balances and sanitise and stabilise India’s democratic governance. The Congress, heading UPA-II, has dashed that hope, mainly because it has refused to learn from its own past, and in its attempts to hang on to power at the Centre and regain long-lost political space in states like Tamil Nadu it has debased itself sleeping with strange bedfellows and jeopardising vital national interests.
This trend was evident in UPA-I itself in which also the DMK was the ‘closest ally’ of the Congress. There could not have been anything more grotesque than the manner in which Dayanidhi Maran, Union minister of communications and information technology, was ousted to fulfil one of the wishes of his ageing, ailing uncle, the DMK chief M Karunanidhi, to have one of his daughters from one of his wives as a Rajya Sabha member. By ousting Maran for no fault of his Manmohan Singh undermined his position as prime minister and head of the Union Cabinet who appoints his colleagues.
Singh might not have been directly responsible for nominating Kanimozhi to the Rajya Sabha, but his role as ‘yes man’, as in the Maran case, made matters easy for Karunanidhi — and in retrospect helped him realise his wish of grooming Kanimozhi, the grossness of which has only begun to unfold. While Kanimozhi’s nomination to the Rajya Sabha has to be understood in the larger context of Karunanidhi’s penchant for perpetuating his family rule, democratising the polity and society of India which are still largely undemocratic calls for stymieing this evil.
The media’s role in this has been less than complimentary. To cite some instances: by first ‘walking the talk’ with Kanimozhi, and later ‘sitting the talk’ with her father in her presence Shekhar Gupta gave undue importance to Kanimozhi not because she was an MP but because she was an MP as her father’s daughter, and thus legitimised Karunanidhi’s family rule; shortly after A Raja was forced to resign, the person who was quizzed by reporters of English TV news channels was none other than Kanimozhi; their questions to her on who will succeed Raja were presumptuous; Kanimozhi’s replies to them that “the leader” will decide it, as though the telecom ministry was her patrimony, were more so.
But for the Maran episode the coalition politics of UPA-I worked reasonably well because the ministry was supported from outside by the Left whose demand was mainly implementation of a common minimum programme in national interest and not any self-serving political trade off. Unlike the Left Karunanidhi’s insistence on getting certain portfolios to his family members and others chosen by him was power play at its worst. Yielding to his brazenness itself was the first scam of UPA-II. For, as Union ministers are of the whole nation and not of the party from which they are elected as MPs, they are expected to be persons of national stature. Among the DMK politicians only Murasoli Maran had this quality. Take the case of Alagiri, Karunanidhi’s son, as minister of chemicals and fertilisers, a muscle-man of Madurai and a political raw hand, who could not have got elected even to an Assembly but for his father. Alagiri’s absence from Parliament has been blamed on his inability to speak English or Hindi. Such a minister can do no good for Parliament or the nation. Raja, ‘godson’ to Karunanidhi’s third wife Rajathi as reported by sections of the media, might have been slightly better than Alagiri as he can speak English, albeit falteringly; but he lacked competence to perform the complex tasks of the ministry. By foisting such political upstarts as Union ministers Manmohan Singh in some sense has been playing dice with the nation as Raja made it abundantly clear from the arbitrary and undemocratic manner in which he made allocation of 2G Spectrum in 2008 causing the national exchequer loss of about `1.76 lakh-crore, besides consequential losses caused by, among other things, the prolonged ‘siege’ of Parliament by the Opposition insisting on a probe by a JPC into the Spectrum scam.
Though Raja resigned on November 14 under relentless pressure from a belligerent Opposition, and of late has been under reprobation by the Supreme Court for his churlishness in the Spectrum deal, in a state fraught with corruption, family rule, flattery, flunkeyism, lumpenisation, and malfeasance, Andimuthu aka Spectrum Raja’s newfangled status as ‘father of all scamsters’ is seen by the DMK rank and file as valiant; while between the DMK and the Congress it is business as usual and even bonhomie. But the relationship is not without a streak of the Panchatantra tales. With skeletons of more Rajas and Divas tumbling out of the cupboard and straddling the corridors of power, in a worst case scenario the DMK may withdraw support to the UPA; and the AIADMK leader, and Karunanidhi’s bete noire, Jayalalithaa may refuse the promised support as her initial offer was spurned by the Congress. The result may be fall of the UPA ministry, which has another 42 months to go. The withdrawal in turn of support by the Congress to the DMK in the Tamil Nadu Assembly is quite unlikely as given his wizardry in political pyrotechnics Karunanidhi may use it for gaining political mileage. If for some reason the Congress withdraws support it will only advance the Assembly elections by a few months, which Karunanidhi may probably want.
In any case, the Spectrum scam, whose ramifications seem far too collusive and complex, has raised a political storm as never before and its spectre may haunt the nation for a long time. As a JPC probe may rebound on the UPA, when pushed further to an irrational dead end it may even force a mid-term poll on the nation. In the circumstances, and given the poor track record of JPC probes in the past, it is important to have a Supreme Court monitored special investigation to get at the truth, recover the loot, and punish the guilty. There is a major lesson for democratic governance in the opportunistic politics of the DMK and the Congress. That lesson is not trivialising scams and cover ups as ‘coalition dharma’ as Jayanthi Natarajan and other Congress spokepersons have been doing. It is to make coalition governance honest and serious business with a collectively evolved national agenda without any political trade off; make such governance transparent and accountable devoid of opportunism; expand the RTI Act, encourage civil society whistleblowers like Prashant Bhushan, restore credibility of the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission; and ensure effective functioning of Parliament.