PRIME Minister H.D. Deve Gowda was remarkably cool under the circumstances. But he was willing to go to any extent to mollify the Congress delegation that came visiting on August 4. All press reports that P.V. Narasimha Rao's residence was under surveillance and that about a dozen leaders' telephones were being tapped, he assured them, were pure fiction.
S.B. Chavan, Union home minister under Rao, was convinced about the Gowda Government's innocence even before the official denial came. He even blamed "over-enthusiasts" in his party for the "plants". Many took his word and the hullabaloo showed signs of dying out. Gowda, still, ordered a CBI probe.
That the Congress wouldn't stop short of putting him in a spot every now and then was something Gowda was reconciled to right from the day it extended "unconditional support" to the minority UF Government. Sure enough, it happened rather often. In fact, whenever the Congress desired its pound of flesh—Cabinet status to Rao, poll-eve governorship to Romesh Bhandari in Uttar Pradesh, march orders to an unfriendly Intelligence Bureau Director D.C. Pathak. Gowda obliged.
Intermittent allegations from the Congress irritate Gowda no longer—he seems to have learnt the art of compromise and, by implication, the art of survival. He has wised up well to his new work ethic: that his success will lie in managing contradictions. The sporadic bouts of trouble on the Congress front he has learnt to survive. He even nipped the bud of dissent within his party (Janata Dal) by expelling nuisance-maker Maneka Gandhi and guru-turned-foe Ramakrishna Hegde without wasting time on preliminaries.
But for all his artful dodging and boomerang-like policymaking, even Deve Gowda can't outguess events. His newest worry comes from unexpected quarters: the 13-party UF convenor and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, who has threatened to pull out of the coalition if Gowda favours homestate Karnataka on the Krishna waters-sharing issue. The Centre, Naidu alleges, has sanctioned Rs 200 crore to Karnataka for the speedy completion of the Almatti dam, at more height than earlier envisaged, enabling it to store more water for Karnataka at the cost of Andhra Pradesh.
"Gowda is acting more as a Karnataka CM," decried Andhra Irrigation Minister Kodela Shivaprasad Rao, adding the episode only shows how "devious and characterless" the Prime Minister is. The clarifications came post haste. "Inter-state water problems are highly emotive issues and difficult to sort out even at the best of times," says UF spokesman Jaipal Reddy, clarifying the Centre had made no such allocation for Almatti.
And it's not just the Krishna waters that might lead Gowda to a political whirlpool. He knows that while coalition constituents like the Left parties diverge on fiscal policy, the five regional parties participating in the Government would aggressively assert themselves. That means walking a tightrope whenever the question of distributing natural resources arises—specially when its water and UF-ruled states are involved.
Gowda's homestate Karnataka is itself a party to two disputes involving other UF-ruled states—Tamil Nadu and others over the Cauvery issue, Andhra over the Krishna waters. And the chief ministers, this time, were expected to have a different tactic. That is, instead of going hammer and tongs all the time, playing safe, occasionally blaming New Delhi and hoping to extract a better bargain than possible from a 'neutral' Centre. But Naidu went beyond Gowda's calculations when he shot off a letter making withdrawal of the Rs 200-crore allocation a condition for the Telugu Desam's continued support to the UF.
On August 9 morning, with predictable alacrity, Gowda called Naidu and, according to sources close to the Prime Minister, even offered to step down if the Front constituents didn't have even this minimum faith in him. Then, he invited Naidu and his Karnataka and Maharashtra counterparts for a meeting the next day to sort out the tangle. But the scars of distrust were difficult to heal.
Not that the record otherwise has been blemishless. It's been a trail of embarrassment for Gowda: both his ministers and leaders of the 13 UF constituents are frequently afflicted by the foot-in-mouth syndrome. The protagonists are often experienced and senior to the Prime Minister himself. And as they aired their views in public on issues pertaining to policies or key appointments, it was only natural for Gowda to lose patience—as reflected in his conversation with Naidu.
First, he came under fire from Left leaders H.K.S. Surjeet (CPI-M) and Indrajit Gupta (CPI) on Bhandari's appointment. They charged Gowda with bypassing the steering committee. Gowda soft-pedalled the issue, knowing the two could not be treated like Hegde. Nor did he succeed in persuading Mufti Mohammad Sayeed to stay back when the former home minister and V.P. Singh supporter quit the party on the eve of the Kashmir elections.
Another battlefront opened with the CBI director's post. Janata Dal President and Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav sulked when Gowda vetoed his choice for the CBI director's post. It's another matter that Gowda couldn't afford to comply because Laloo faces a CBI probe into the fodder scandal. His problem is, there is constant pressure from quarters who expect him to be indulgent.
Unlike the Janata Party of 1977, the Front came into existence with more autonomy for the regions it represents as its motto. Each member of the motley crew, while trying to expand its individual base even at the cost of its allies, also bears the onus of keeping the Government going. As Prime Minister, Gowda is entrusted with the much bigger responsibility of keeping each of them.
The CPI-M registered its dissent in the select committee of the Rajya Sabha when the Government brought forth the pension bill, diverting employers' contribution to the provident fund to the new pension fund. "We're opposed to any move to the private sector coming in insurance," says CPI General Secretary A.B. Bardhan. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's divergent opinion on the matter, is well known.
The litany of Left's complaints is long. The CPI-M scuttled the Foreign Investment Promotion Board proposal to allow a tie up between daily Business Standard and Financial Times , London, relaxing the 1955 Cabinet clampdown on such media alliances. The Left parties have also opposed the new disinvestment commission, which proposes to divest Rs 5,000 crore in the current finan-cial year. Almost as amends, Gowda named former finance minister Madhu Dandavate, a socialist and much closer to the Left on economic issues, deputy chairman of the largely toothless Planning Commission.
"The coalition is intended to provide a secular polity against the BJP. And the Common Minimum Programme was intended as a pragmatic policy document," says Bardhan. But the CPI-M—which, unlike the CPI, is not a component of the Government—has asserted its right to go against it in UF fora as well as in public if it pursued "anti-people" policies. "We'll certainly take up issues like price rise, rural unemployment. If necessary, through agitation," says Sitaram Yechury, politburo member. The CPI-M had decided at its April '95 Chandigarh congress to launch a nationwide agitation on such issues. Its line now is: being a supporter—from the outside—of the ruling Front in no way affects the decision.
But all these will snowball into a crisis only when anti-BJPism ceases to be the key unifying factor. There are many factors gnawing at this anchor: the BSP-Congress alliance, the growing cosiness between BSP sup-remo Kanshi Ram and former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, and the widening rift between Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and the Janata Dal in Uttar Pradesh.
Gowda quickly withdrew his trusted Cabinet aide and party colleague C.M. Ibrahim from the seat adjustment talks with the BSP in UP after protests from Mulayam. The UF steering committee too disapproved of the initiative and made it clear that the present equation within the Front should not be disturbed without mutual consent of its constituents. Gowda was then embarked on a hands-on job in UP, and making himself visible in Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Mahendra Singh Tikait's home turf Sisauli in western UP was part of the strategy. After the steering committee's chides, he promptly entrusted the job to CPI-M stalwarts Surjeet and Jyoti Basu, which is tantamount to jettisoning the move altogether. The two comrades recognise Mulayam as the principal challenger to the BJP in UP. And, therefore, the question of a tie up with the BSP should be considered only with his concurrence, they feel.
The fact that Kanshi Ram has been restricting his overtures to non-Front parties indicates the electoral battle in UP—which has a direct bearing on the future of the UF Government—will have the BJP, the UF and the BSP-Congress and its allies pitted in a triangular contest. Simple arithmetic shows the dice loaded in the BJP's favour. "The UF is only a temporary phenomenon in Indian politics. Those who want a social change will rally round the BSP and those opposed to it will find the BJP umbrella over their head," says Kanshi Ram. The words can't sound more ominous to Gowda—he knows the implication of a UF debacle. That's why he has been more than willing to accommodate the Congress.
Given the Front's heterogeneity and con-flict of interests, Kanshi's assessment may not be quite off the mark. Yet, so long as Gowda doesn't lean too much to one side, and displays fairness on emotive issues like water-sharing, he will be safe. Some things are beyond his control, though. Internal Congress politics, for instance. There are 141 MPs in the Congress whose behaviour will impinge on his survival chances. The Congress won't withdraw support so long as it fears an eclipse in the next election—the UP poll results will be crucial. If the alliance with vote-catcher Kanshi Ram helps it effect a quantum jump from its strength of 28 in the last assembly, that should put more creases on Gowda's wide forehead than the occasional squabble within.
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