The Hindu Business Line : Congress-SP: On the rocks?

The coolness between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party that began during the trust vote in Parliament has become frostier, with both parties unable to agree on seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh for the Lok Sabha elections and Mr Amar Singh demanding the resignation of the Home Minister. Is it the end of the road for the alliance, asks RASHEEDA BHAGAT.

The Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi

With each passing day it is increasingly becoming clear that all’s not well with the Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance that bailed out the Manmohan Singh government during the trust vote in the Lok Sabha on July 22.

First it was the failure of the two parties to come to an understanding on seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh for the coming Lok Sabha elections. According to some reports, the SP leadership insists that the Congress has little chance of doing better than it did in the Last Lok Sabha election and improving its tally of eight seats. All it is willing to offer is 11 seats, but the Congress, like Oliver, is asking for more…. anywhere between 25 and 30.

What enrages the SP about this demand is that some of the seats desired by the Congress in UP include those where the SP has sitting MPs, and others are constituencies where the Congress has no hope of winning!

After the high of July 22, and the events leading up to it, when the SP General-Secretary, Mr Amar Singh, sailed triumphantly through various television channels as the saviour of the UPA government, it has been a slow but steady slide for the party.

SP General-Secretary, Mr Amar Singh…

The shocker, of course, was the charge made by the three BJP MPs, who waved wads of notes in Parliament, claiming they had been offered bribes on behalf of Mr Amar Singh to vote in favour of the trust motion. As the Congress leaders quietly distanced themselves from this drama — even though the name of the Congress President, Ms Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel, was mentioned — there was a feeling of betrayal in the SP camp, which denied that Mr Singh had anything to do with the cash-for-votes scam.

Frosty relations

Since then, the two parties have had frosty relations; the SP deciding to support the UPA from outside, just as the Left parties had done, meant it was not sharing the spoils of power. And hence, reserved the right to criticise the government or give it any number of warnings whenever it felt like doing so.

The latest warning is on the continuance in office of the Home Minister, Mr Shivraj Patil. On Sunday, Mr Amar Singh was in full flow as he visited the Jamia Nagar area in Delhi, where there had been a police encounter on September 19 and claims made that two Indian Mujahideen terrorists involved in the first Delhi bomb blasts had been killed. The encounter specialist officer also lost his life in that incident, and some arrests were made. Demanding a judicial inquiry into the incident, Mr Singh said: “There have been examples in the past, whenever the Congress has been in power, when ministers have resigned, taking moral responsibility. Since the SP is supporting the UPA government, I would suggest Mr Shivraj Patil step down on moral grounds,” till a judicial inquiry cleared the role of the Delhi police in this encounter.

Virtually launching the SP’s election campaign, while addressing the local residents and expressing solidarity with the Muslim community, Mr Singh demanded the Home Minister’s resignation.

Accompanied by the SP Parliamentary Party president, Mr Ramgopal Yadav, and MP Jayaprada, and playing to the gallery, he said if such an inquiry found that those who were arrested in the encounter were actually innocent, the SP would have to “reconsider support” to the UP government.

Taking a dig at the minority community for shifting their alliance to Ms Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, Mr Singh said: “We could have come here earlier, but you were riding the elephant.” The reference was clearly to the BSP symbol of Mayawati.

In the last UP Assembly election, a section of the Muslim community that had been disenchanted by “Maulana” Mulayam Singh had shifted their allegiance to the BSP and, along with the votes of the upper-caste Hindus, contributed to Mayawati’s spectacular victory in the State last year.

Mr Singh also did not fail to remind the Congress how it had welcomed four of the SP’s MLAs into its fold in Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress, on its part, continues to defend Mr Patil, and its spokesperson, Mr Shakeel Ahmed, urged the SP not to make “such statements that cause confusion and bad blood”, as this would only help “communal parties”. Any differences should be sorted out through dialogue, was his suggestion!

Wooing Chiranjeevi

But the SP seems to have already worked out a game-plan. Significantly, after Telugu actor-turned-politician Chiranjeevi launched his Praja Rajyam Party in Andhra Pradesh, Mr Amar Singh was quick to call upon him, accompanied by two party MPs – Ms Jaya Bachchan and Ms Jayaprada.

Though he termed it a courtesy call, he spent almost an hour with the actor and, at the press conference that followed, dropped enough hints about the SP having a political alliance with the PRP. This meeting took place in the first week of September, when officially the SP was still backing the UPA, but cracks had already begun to appear in the relationship. Obviously, a party in alliance with the Congress at the all-India level cannot have an alliance with another party in Andhra Pradesh, so the signals from the SP were clear enough for the Congress.

Sunday’s development, with Mr Amar Singh demanding Mr Patil’s resignation, is indicative that Ms Sonia Gandhi’s meeting with Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav at the Lucknow aiport last week, when they were supposed to have discussed UP seat sharing, did not end well.

Two entities which will be chuckling at this growing disenchantment between the Congress and the SP are surely the BJP and the BSP. The serial bomb blasts across the country have given them a strong handle to attack the ruling UPA coalition on its failure to give people a sense of security. As the BJP’s demands for a strong POTA-like anti-terror law gets strident, the UPA government has been put on the back foot and has come out with weak responses on the possibility of the enactment of not a clone of POTA, but “some other more effective law”, to combat terror.

Orissa atrocities

While the bomb blasts have shaken the ordinary Indian’s confidence in the establishment to save them from terror attacks, the continuing attacks on Christians and churches in Orissa, particularly Kandhamal district, has not exactly covered the BJP with glory, as it finds it increasingly difficult to defend such attacks from organisations such as the Bajrang Dal and the VHP.

Initially, some BJP leaders and their sympathisers, both in the media and outside, were belligerent in defying and denying the rape of any nun in Orissa. What is the proof, they had demanded, and with great gusto termed the section of the media that reported this incident “pseudo secular”. But since then, and as the Orissa Home Secretary, Mr T. K. Mishra, himself termed the rape of the nun “an unfortunate and agonising incident”, they have been on the backfoot.

The embarrassing questioning that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was at the receiving end of in Europe about the continuing “massacre” of Christians in India resulted in the Central Government reading the riot act to Orissa to either get its act together and stop the continuing violence against Christians in the State or face the music.

It is doubtful that the Centre will use Article 356 to dismiss the Orissa government. Mercifully, sporadic use of this Constitutional provision has become rare over the years. But perhaps the threat is required to get an inept Orissa government to take effective measures to stop the senseless targeting of the Christian community. The saddest part is that as in any such episode, helpless women become the targets of men who anoint themselves “saviours” and use rape and violence as a weapon to punish the other community. That it continues to happen over decades and centuries only shows that the perpetrators continue to get away with the atrocity. Only the setting and the faces change; the weapon and the target remain constant.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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