Tit for tat

Tit for tat

Newly anointed Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Rajnath Singh was looking for a safe route into the UP assembly and he has just received a helpful leg-up from across the political boundary line. Senior Congress MLA Surendra Nath Awasthi alias Puttu, long-time representative of Haidergarh in Barabanki district, has obligingly vacated his seat and invited Singh to contest the by-election from his constituency. Puttu's loud protestations about the ``death of inner-party democracy'' in the Congress and Rajnath Singh's ``humanitarian approach'' being the reason behind this unorthodox gesture are likely to impress none. Most chroniclers have already read the goings-on in Uttar Pradesh as an apt retort to the incident in Chhattisgarh where a BJP MLA vacated his seat for (Congress) Chief Minister Ajit Jogi. Welcome to India 2001. Amid fuzzy political lines and rampant ideological promiscuity, only the most intrepid, or the terribly naive, will venture a guess about who is situated where and is likely to remain there, onthe political battleground.

It would be highly unfair to single out UP's Puttu, or even that one BJP member in Chhattisgarh. As assembly polls to key states draw closer, even a cursory look at the parties will reveal that individuals are not doing anything that parties wouldn't. Consider the situation in Tamil Nadu. At the time of writing, and there is no guarantee that things will not have changed by the time this appears in print, Moopanar's TMC is an undecided lot. It must weigh the AIADMK's offer of seats against the DMK's offer of seats before it hitches its votebank to either. As it considers the competing offers, the Third Front remains a viable option. There are less clear-cut variants of the political choice too -- it has been suggested that the TMC could also strike up an ``electoral adjustment'' with the DMK while formally remaining in a Third Front. The political scene is equally fluid in West Bengal, another state that is going to the polls this summer. Here, the Congress is reportedly toying with the option of joininghands with the Trinamool Congress while continuing to oppose the BJP. This feat of political gymnastics will apparently be achieved by the simple act of putting up candidates against the BJP while sharing seats with the Trinamool which is sharing its seats with the BJP.

Clearly, times have changed and they have taken their toll on the old certitudes. While politicians and parties must always have been promiscuous, the onset of coalition times has brought about a bold new political intermingling. In an irretrievably fragmented polity, political deals with the enemy, tacit if not explicit, have arguably become the stuff of political survival. Why is it, then, that they still disturb -- these pre-election cross-overs, those post-election deals? Perhaps the answer to that question is that we, the people, have not adjusted to the new realities. Or perhaps, we need to formulate a new code of political ethics for the new times, one that still makes some crucial distinctions -- between political pragmatism and outright cynicism, for instance.