The entire Congress-DMK break-up and make-up last week was bad politics and unnecessary on the eve of an assembly election and in the middle of a budget session. With the immediate crisis behind it, the Congress is putting the spin that the national party emerged on top and extracted more seats inthe sharing arrangement, hence the outcome of the episode has been positive. In reality, however, Congress leaders were deeply worried and dismayed when the DMK threatened to pull its ministers out of the UPA government.
In the end, it was another display of the Congress’s fundamental discomfort with regional parties and allies. So, although the party got its way in the short term, in the long run, the message its conquest of a vulnerable ally sent out did not go down well with the political class in the era of coalition politics. What would be interesting to watch now will be the seat-sharing talks between the grand old party and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress that is reportedly all set to vanquish the Communists in West Bengal. Mamata would like to contest a chunk that would keep the possibility of the TC getting a simple majority on its own alive; the Congress would like her to be dependent on them. Some squabbling is certain, although Mamata is in a stronger position to call the shots than the DMK was.
Which is why, in the case of the southern ally, the Congress managed to get three more seats than were being offered; it’ll now contest 63 of the 234 assemblies (the DMK will contest 121, the PMK, 30). But MPs from Tamil Nadu say the stand-off has certainly vitiated relations on the ground between the two parties. So were the three seats worth the price paid for in the image crisis of an unstable (and scam-ridden) government, four days of political uncertainty, further breakdown of trust between two allies and fire-fighting by the top Congress managers? “We are facing anti-incumbency, the charge of family rule, the scandal of 2G spectrum and DMK cadres were already angry over the treatment meted out to A. Raja. Now there is a perception that the Congress has played big brother and this always works badly in a state like Tamil Nadu,” says a senior Congress leader.
Why did things go so wrong between the Congress and the DMK? The 2G scam and Raja’s arrest certainly put a strain on the relationship and it is no secret that a vocal section in the Congress state unit would have preferred a tie-up with Jayalalitha. But, according to sources in the Congress, the ambitions of Union home minister P. Chidambaram and his son Karthik also put a spanner in the works. The father-son duo have been trying to expand their base in areas that are seen as the strongholds of M.K. Azhagiri, the eldest son of DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi. Chidambaram had been insistent about Congress candidates being promoted by his son getting winnable seats from the DMK quota. And while the home minister may be very articulate, he has never been known for tact or diplomacy. Many Congress leaders who do not like his style of functioning blame him for mishandling the Telangana issue and now, apparently, Tamil Nadu. Eventually, it was the usual party firefighters—Pranab Mukherjee, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ahmed Patel—who sorted out the mess. Chidambaram, in fact, was kept out of the parleys with Azhagiri and Dayanidhi Maran in New Delhi.
Peacekeeping force Azad with Dayanidhi and Azhagiri
What also became clear is that the tough line with allies and regional parties is endorsed by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi as well. The Gandhis believe that for the Congress to ultimately reclaim its pre-eminent position, it will have to grow at the cost of established regional players, and hence the boundaries will always have to be pushed. Sonia is believed to have told the DMK leaders that “the prestige” of the Congress had been hurt by the party’s threat to withdraw its ministers and that they could go ahead and do so but not expect the Congress to come crawling.
The DMK caved in for several reasons. First, a tie-up with the Congress is critical to its arithmetic against the fairly formidable tie-up the AIADMK has sewn up with actor Vijayakanth. More crucially, the DMK needs some backing at the Centre given the barrage of corruption cases, the scrutiny and possible interrogation of Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi and his wife Dayaluammal. And, in case the DMK loses power in the state, then given the great feud with Jayalalitha, the Karunanidhi clan is certain to be hounded. In good times, the 18 DMK MPs in Parliament are leverage to extract great favours from a dependent Centre, but in bad times those same MPs can be their protection against greater disasters.
And it was not as if the Congress was sitting pretty. When the DMK threatened to pull out its ministers, the initial calculation was that the UPA would survive with the backing of other regional parties like the SP and BSP. Privately, though, Congressmen admitted it would be a disaster. The party has been trying to build its base in UP, due for elections in 2012, and considered critical for Rahul Gandhi’s ascent. The UP project would be sunk were the Congress held hostage to the demands of a Mulayam Singh Yadav or a Mayawati.
A beaming Mulayam, in fact, told Outlook on the day the DMK threat was looming large, “All options are open in politics.” The same day, however, SP MPs proceeded to repeatedly disrupt the discussion on the railway budget in Parliament because they claimed persecution by the Mayawati regime which they insisted should be dismissed. Later, parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Bansal said “this was a state issue on which the SP was disrupting a debate on a critical national policy”. They certainly gave the Congress managers a dose of what it would be like to chase them for passage of legislation in the House. When Bansal was told he would be running after Mulayam and Mayawati were the DMK to ditch the alliance, he just smiled and shook his head. Another Congress leader quipped, “Were the DMK really to quit, Bansal would have the worst job.”
Given the image crisis the Manmohan Singh regime is currently facing, a break with the DMK would have edged it further towards the precipice. For, politics today is ultimately about numbers and surviving in power.
