PICTURE SPEAK

FAILED EQUATION: Sonia and Lalu could not enthuse voters

A fortnight before the Bihar Assembly results came in, Congress President Sonia Gandhi, at a meeting with some close aides, brushed away suggestions that a loss in the state could have any impact at the Centre. Even the BJP had lost assembly elections when the NDA was in power, and the A.B. Vajpayee government had remained unaffected, she is reported to have said. She was wrong. In late 1998, the BJP had lost the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. Sensing a weakened national party holding the coalition government at the Centre, allies such as J. Jayalalithaa and Mayawati began to place increasing demands on the Centre, which finally fell when Jayalalithaa withdrew support in April 1999.

The Congress is now hoping that Lalu Prasad Yadav's defeat will make him more humble and less demanding, but it is all too aware of the fact that while Lalu may have lost his MLAs, he still retains all his 24 MPs. His stature within the UPA is undiminished. Questions now abound about Ram Vilas Paswan's future in the Cabinet. Lalu says openly that he holds Paswan responsible for splitting the secular vote that led to his defeat. The Bihar poll results have only intensified the bickering within the UPA. An unhappy ally can only make things worse. It was coalition compulsions that prompted the Congress to support the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly in March, leading to a very public dressing down by the Supreme Court. What Congress strategists are scared of is that Lalu's list of demands may increase. And there is very little they can do about it. The CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury has complained about the "split in the secular votes". But even his party was held hostage to the compulsions of coalition politics as the CPI rooted for Paswan and the CPI(M) held on to Lalu's coat-tails. The division of the secular votes began with a vertical split in the Left.

PICTURE SPEAK

TAKING CENTRESTAGE: Nitish flanked by Advani (left) and Vajpayee

It is a reverse situation for the NDA. Almost paralysed, the BJP has been handed its first victory in nearly two years. The party didn't lose the opportunity to extract primetime mileage. As the Bihar results trickled in, sundry BJP leaders rushed to JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar's bungalow in Delhi, where the television cameras had gathered. There were more BJP leaders flanking him than his own partymen when Nitish gave his first soundbites. Arun Jaitley, Murli Manohar Joshi, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajnath Singh and Sushil Modi were there. Joshi, barely seen in public since his ouster from the HRD Ministry last year, stopped to conquer TV space, even adjusting mikes and making victory signs. Nitish may have won the chief ministership but the BJP made sure that its role as the minority partner got majority coverage.

Now cut to the Left Bloc. Everything it says and does is in the name of the poor but in this land of the poorest, it cut the sorriest figure. So they are pointing fingers at each other. While the CPI(M), Forward Bloc and the CPI(M-L) are unsparing of the Congress and have issued statements calling the November verdict one for change and against the RJD, the CPI(M) is demanding the ouster of Paswan from the UPA since it thinks Paswan engineered the division of secular votes. "The division among secular and democratic parties has made a major contribution to this result," said the CPI(M) Politburo in a statement after winning one of the 11 seats it contested with RJD support. Yechury goes as far as insisting that Sonia ought to rethink about the UPA's engagement with the Lok Janshakti Party. Amid the gloom, left leaders are happy that following the defeat, Lalu's clout within the ruling alliance may diminish but a larger section also feels that losing Paswan would not augur well for the UPA's long-term goal.

Take the Congress. Its General Secretary Digvijay Singh appears to have made a habit of eating crow. After the drubbing he received in his home state over the issue of development, he should have known better. But he made the Congress stand by Lalu as if the Muslim-Yadav vote bank was the only thing that mattered, and charged Special Observer K.J. Rao with being a communalist. At the end of it, Lalu's caste superstructure has been broken to pieces and Paswan has retained his vote share which is twice that of the Congress, while Rao has been universally recognised as the driving force behind a successful, clean and peaceful Bihar election. Despite his acknowledged cunning, Digvijay has been unable to read the writing on the wall that the Indian voter has progressed to development. Caste still matters but development is the collective priority.

- -with Neeraj Mishra and Satarupa Bhattacharjya

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