The political developments in Lucknow during the last few days clearly suggest that it will not be smooth sailing for whoever wins the trust vote in the State Assembly on Thursday. Whether it is Kalyan Singh or Jagdambika Pal, the winner will always remain at the mercy of the Aya Rams and Gaya Rams who have made mincemeat of political morality. What prompted the turncoats from the Congress, the BSP and the Janata Dal to prop up the Kalyan Singh Ministry was their self-interest and the certainty that they would enjoy the comforts of ministership. Since the lust for power could never be satiated, some of them shifted their loyalty to Jagdambika Pal when he offered them better portfolios and other perks. But as soon as Pal's grand strategy came up against a brick wall in the High Court, most of them returned to Kalyan's side. Their vote today will be determined by the simple logic of whose continuance -- Singh's or Pal's -- will benefit them the most. There is no issue of principle involved in theirdecision-making. For much the same reason, there is no guarantee that they will stay put with the winner for any reasonable period of time. The moment they are offered a better deal, they will change sides. For a test all that the Chief Minister has to do is to reduce the size of the ministry to the accepted norm of 10 per cent of the state legislature's size.The winner will, therefore, have no reason to rejoice over the triumph. He will have to be eternally vigilant against his own colleagues pulling the rug from under his feet as they did to Kalyan Singh on Saturday. The sympathy for the fraud perpetrated on him with gubernatorial assistance would have been greater but for the fact that the Chief Minister could not have expected better from the company he kept. Having had to induct rank criminals and history-sheeters in his Cabinet, he and his party lost their claim to the high moral ground. It is imaginable what kind of governance the BJP or, for that matter, any other party can offer when shadycharacters are capable of holding the entire political system to ransom. The chances of the present House throwing up a stable government are as remote as a Naresh Agarwal or a Raja Bhaiyya reforming himself. This raises the pertinent question: What after the composite trust vote?
Whoever wins the vote is in a position to recommend dissolution of the Assembly, and it will be binding on the Governor. It will give the people an opportunity to judge the conduct of their elected representatives and, hopefully, elect a more responsible House. In retrospect, if Kalyan Singh had gone in for dissolution of the House after proving his majority in the House late last year, he would have been spared the trouble of having to carry on with a jumbo cabinet. Not only that, his party would also have been spared the bother of defending the criminal composition of the ministry and what it implied for its supposedly clean image. On balance, the advantages that would have accrued to the party if it had taken a principled standagainst allying with doubtful characters would have been far more than the petty benefits that followed from having a party government in the state. What holds true for Kalyan Singh, holds true for Jagdambika Pal also.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
