ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

To survive, the NCP has to go with BJP-Sena

Belief in the infallibility of Sharad Pawar's political acumen has taken a beating after the recent election, when his party ended up with a meagre six Lok Sabha seats even as compatriot Mulayam Singh, in whose company the Maratha strongman hoped to make a fight of it in Delhi, reinforced his own political sagacity and relevance.

What is worse, since the time the results have been announced, to the dismay of the NCP which has not fared half as well as Pawar expected it to, either in the assembly or the Lok Sabha elections, the man who challenged Sonia Gandhi's credentials for the top job in the country seems to have lost it further.

If not, what can explain his attempt over the last few days to cobble together a working arrangement with the Congress, the same party against which his outfit had fought the elections in Maharashtra and in a few other places.

In doing so, Pawar willy-nilly has demonstrated that his party is nationalist only in nomenclature, and in character is entirely Maharashtra-based, a belief shared in private by a few of his own senior colleagues.

If it was otherwise, then surely Pawar knows that the route to the growth of his political party lies with the Bharatiya Janata Party alliance, and not with the Congress party, unless he believes that Sonia Gandhi is no more a threat to his own prime ministerial ambitions or that in the foreseeable future he will be returning to the Congress party.

To understand Pawar's bumbling ways, one needs to recall the nature of his revolt against Sonia Gandhi, a revolt that more than anything else led to her outdoing Sitaram Kesri in the recent election. A united Congress party would have wiped out the Shiv Sena-BJP in Maharashtra, in both the assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

The political space that Pawar was coveting on his expulsion from the Congress party, at least in Maharashtra, was the same as that occupied by the latter. The votes that his party received, at least in Maharashtra, were from those who did not want to vote for the Congress. Pawar's party did not divide the Sena-BJP votes in the state but the Congress', although the biggest beneficiary of this was the saffron alliance in Maharashtra.

The way the Trishanku assembly is structured in Maharashtra, there are only two options before Sharad Pawar's party: to go with either the Congress alliance or the saffron alliance. Let us take a look at the deals that can be possibly struck by him with the two blocs.

The delay in an elected government taking over in Maharashtra is only due to the tussle over chief ministership. The Congress and the NCP each wants the post for itself, and neither is willing to compromise. For both, it is a question of political survival in a crucial state. Given that the Congress party has more assembly seats than Pawar's party, he can at best expect deputy chief ministership. This is an arrangement that will benefit the Congress party more than Pawar, since the resultant confusion in the rank and file of his party -- which was made to believe that it was taking on the Congress -- would finish off any chances the NCP may have in the future elections.

With the Sena-BJP too, Pawar's party can at best hope for deputy chief ministership, but the crucial difference is that he can seek accommodation for his party at the Centre as well, which is something the Congress will not be in a position to give for a long time to come. A central berth is not to be scoffed at, not when one has pretensions to being a national party as the Nationalist Congress Party does.

This is the prism through which P A Sangma, the other heavyweight from the NCP, is seeing things, which explains why he has taken a diametrically opposed view from Pawar's own on the question of forming the Maharashtra government. Pawar, for long a regional satrap, has shown he is unable to break out of the straitjacket despite his stints as central minister.

The governor's role through all this has been most interesting. Though it is three days since the state assembly has been constituted, no indication has come from Raj Bhavan as to which way the wind is blowing. Even more interesting is that in 1995, when the Sena-BJP alliance had fallen short of a simple majority, it was the same incumbent in the governor's residence who had called the partners, and not the Congress which was the single largest party even then, to form the government.

This time, it is unlikely he is going to breach his own precedent. In all probability, it will be the Sena-BJP that is going to be invited to form the government and to prove its majority on the floor of the house. With Sangma and former Maharashtra chief minister Sudhakarrao Naik indicating what they feel about the stalemate in the talks with the Congress, Pawar faces a very likely chance of his party splitting and a rump aligning with the Sena-BJP.

If that were to happen, Pawar will be like a king who has lost his kingdom even before the coronation rites have begun. He has once shown that his vaunted finger on the pulse of the people did not help in seeing the writing on the wall; another disaster, and he won't find any space even in the footnotes of history.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy