The urge to dismiss

Mistakes are often the result of desperation, and/or bad advice. Both cloud judgment. The Congress, ever since it came back to power at the Centre in 2004, has had a surfeit of all three""desperation, poor advice and bad judgment. Nothing else can explain its anxiety to dismiss the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in UP, after having supported it till a few days ago, and just a week before he is due to test his majority. It seems to have forgotten its misadventures in Goa, Jharkhand and Bihar. There also it did exactly the same thing and came off worse for wear. All the three occurred in the last 24 months. As political stupidity and a refusal to learn go, this would be a hard record to beat, not least because in UP the Congress actually has the BJP's support. If that alone doesn't strengthen Muslim support to Mulayam Singh, one wonders what will.

Nor does the cost-benefit ratio appear favourable to the Congress. It has 19 seats in the current state assembly. Does it really think that by dismissing Mulayam Singh it can increase this number? If so, to what? Is the Constitution to be subverted for this mess of electoral pottage? Is the Supreme Court's decision in the SR Bommai case to be disregarded for this gain? Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh need to reflect long and hard. As things stand, the costs hugely outweigh the benefits for everyone except the Samajwadi Party, which will get the sympathy vote as also the benefit of a consolidated Muslim vote. The Communists, who have taken a principled stand, will gain at the expense of the Congress and the BJP. In sum, dismissal is both wrong and not worth it in terms of the electoral calculus.

The provocation for the urge to dismiss has come from the Supreme Court's decision that disqualified 13 of the 37 defectors who had joined the Samajwadi Party in order to enable to it to form the government in September 2003. The election of February 2002 had been inconclusive but the SP had been the single-biggest party in the assembly. The BJP and the BSP then formed the government, with Ms Mayawati as the chief minister. A year later the BJP walked out of the partnership. This was followed by large-scale defections from the BSP to the SP and Mulayam Singh formed a government, which had the support of the Congress. But it did not join it. Now, in a fit of sanctimony and piousness, it wants to dismiss the very government it has supported for more than three years.

This and the previous episodes of the misuse of Article 356""mostly by the Congress, it should be noted""lend weight to the Communist demand that this Article needs to be revisited. Few people know it, but this Article is a reproduction of Section 193 of the Government of India Act of 1935. It was an imperial device to ensure that the natives, who would soon be forming their own governments in the provinces, did not start acting against the imperial interest. It was retained in 1950 because there was a genuine fear that India might not hold together. The requirement of a Constitutional breakdown was code for secessionist demands. That threat is now mostly gone. The greater danger now is that the party or coalition in power at the Centre finds a state government inconvenient, and discreetly asks the governor of the state to send the kind of order identified with the queen of hearts in Alice in Wonderland: Off with his head! In other words, Article 356 needs amending. The regional parties have the most to gain from this, so it is doubly surprising that the DMK in Tamil Nadu should decide to play along in UP; after all, it has been the victim of Article 356 in the past. All regional parties should exert pressure so that the conditions under which this Article can be used are made both specific and much more restrictive.