Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Nov 26: In politics, they call it marriage of convenience when a relationship between the two parties, or partners, is essentially based on expediency and opportunism. In the modern day political spectrum, coalitions, alliances and electoral seat adjustments have become an incontrovertible reality or compulsion of the Indian body politic. That, however, doesn’t necessarily generalize things to suspect sincerity behind all unions—at least the one between the regional giant, National Conference, and the national number one of decades, Congress.
It is not nor nothing that the newspapers have viewed presence of the Congress party’s Bashir Ghulam Nabi Monga at the NC’s headquarters of Nawai-e-Subah the other day as “creation of history”. Cynics and skeptics have a spicy argument at hand to suggest that National-Congress Bhai Bhai has not stemmed from the realm of sincerity, goodwill and camaraderie between the two parties whose coalition for power is now nearing completion of four years: This sudden ‘yaraana’ is coming at a time when the coalition partners are compelled to ensure victory of all four of their nominees—two each from Kashmir and Jammu—at all costs.
Elections for the four vacant seats in Legislative Council, reserved for representation to the 33,000 Panchs and Sarpanchs, are scheduled to be conducted in the first week of December. Even as the Panchayat elections early last year have been held on non-party basis, all three of the mainstream political majors— NC, Congress and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP)—have been claiming maximum of the elected Panchayat members as their cadres and loyalists, respectively. This is easy for the fact that there is no scientific or credible systemic mechanism to prove one right or wrong in such claims.
Understandably, all the three parties have their stakes high in the current democratic process. Even the keen political analysts can not hazard a guess in the obtaining situation for a host of reasons. Firstly, this type of election is happening in J&K first time in the last 40 years. Secondly, the dicey electoral college—Panchs and Sarpanchs—has shown a highly blurred and confusing behaviour with mercurial gestures dictated by each significant and insignificant development in the last one-and-a-half years. Interestingly, the number of the resignations, as per paid advertisements published in the local newspapers, runs into 900 or may be a full one thousand till date, though District Development Commissioners (DDCs) and Block Development Officers, insist that not more than 100 Panchayat members had practically tendered their papers.
Notwithstanding claims of certain intellectually exuberant opposition leaders—who swear that the Government had already entrusted the task of influencing the Panchayat members to respective DDCs and BDOs—worries of the ruling coalition do not appear to have faded.
Significantly, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s newfound affinity with the Congress has come in days of his bold assertion at a conference in New Delhi where he declared that the coalition dharma was the biggest hindrance in eradicating corruption. Many in the state Congress have interpreted it as the Chief Minister’s tangential admission that some Ministers of his coalition partner indulged in corruption and that their party was permissive of their vice. Some people, in reaction, have gone to the extent of suggesting that Chief Minister should begin his noble mission of fighting corruption with cleansing in his own party.
Admittedly, this could be counted as the coalition head’s remarkable achievement that the kind of discomfiture and fighting witnessed between the Congress and the PDP ministers in 2002-07 period has not been a feature of the NC-Congress regime in any of its Cabinet meetings since January 2009. But, one could not totally ignore the tantrums of NC’s unofficial spokesman, Dr Mustafa Kamaal, and some others in Mr Omar Abdullah’s party, who have been washing their dirty linen publicly on leaders and Ministers of the Congress party.
Newspapers have quoted Dr Kamaal having publicly differed with Chief Minister’s cosmetic camaraderie with the Congress. Dr Kamaal, in fact, has been hitting all and sundry in “Congress, Delhi and Army”, including Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Saif-ud-Din Soz, left, right and the centre. Even the party patriarch, Dr Farooq Abdullah, has, after slamming senior Congress leader and fellow Union Cabinet Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, gone public to lament that “some people in Delhi” were funding and mobilizing NC insiders to break the party. This, obviously, can not a grouse against BJP or the opposition NDA constituents.
Some leaders in NC have been heard rather audaciously referring to “our unwarranted sacrifices for the two Congress Ministers (Peerzada Mohammad Sayeed and Taj Mohi-ud-Din)” and demonstrating reservation to the idea of accepting Congress as an equal partner. “There’s a big difference: We have 29 MLAs, they have just 17”, one of the top rung NC leaders observed. He claimed that the prospects of NC-Congress alliance in 2014 elections were “pretty bleak” at this stage as nobody in the two parties could assert in favour of such an arrangement at this stage in absence of a structural discussion between the two leaderships, more so in the NC’s grass-root levels. He, nevertheless, admitted that it was a compulsion for both in the wake of PDP eyeing and wishing fissures in the coalition.
Would the bonhomie really run long to the day of next Assembly and Lok Sabha elections remains a big question as the current coordination appears to be case-sensitive, or in other words, designed to ensure victory of the four coalition candidates in Legislative Council elections.
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