PM may recommend dissolution of Lok Sabha on Monday
Prime Minister I K Gujral may recommend dissolution of the Lok Sabha on Monday
Sources close to Janata Dal president Sharad Yadav told Rediff On The NeT on Sunday evening that the prime minister will not reply to the
Congress -- as he had been authorised by the United Front core committee to do last week. Instead, he will meet President K R Narayanan and recommend that the Lok Sabha be dissolved and a mid-term election be called.
"There is no need for the prime minister to write a letter to Mr Kesri," Information and Broadcasting Minister and United Front spokesman S Jaipal Reddy told Rediff On The NeT, "since we have already made our position clear on dropping the DMK ministers from the government."
The two major Left parties asked
Gujral on Sunday to quickly dissolve the Lok Sabha and call a mid-term election.
However, divisions within the Front on this issue were evident when
Defence Minister and Samajwadi Party supremo
Mulayam Singh Yadav suggested that a ''mid way'' should be
evolved to save the 15-month-old UF government at the
Centre and safeguard the 'dignity' of the Congress.
Mulayam Singh, however, denied the possibility of some UF factions leaving
the coalition and forming a government at the Centre along with the Congress.
Yadav and his Samajwadi Party have been spoken of as one of the main candidates likely to leave the Front and align with the Congress. "The United Front will remain united," SP leader and Union Communications Minister Beni Prasad Verma told Rediff On The NeT.
Communist Party of India general secretary A B Bardhan saidsince the Congress was not interested in discussing the
Jain Commission report in Parliament, ''it is better to take the
matter to the people and let them decide.''
These views emerged following meetings among former prime
minister H D Deve Gowda, Bardhan and Communist Party of India
Marxist general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet.
CPI leader and Union Agriculture Minister Chaturanan Mishra told Rediff On The NeT that his party had advocated a snap poll because it did not want horse trading to take place. "The fight is no longer over the survival of the coalition government," Mishra quipped. "It is about who will lead the caretaker government."
The Left parties also shot down the proposal mooted by Congress
vice-president Jitendra Prasada for ''a non-BJP, non-DMK government,''
saying it was nothing but seeking the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's ouster from the United Front
government in a different way.
Surjeet said the DMK issue was not negotiable and that in the circumstances
a mid-term election was the only option left. The CPI central
secretariat described Prasada's proposal as a
crude attempt to divide the Front.
West Bengal Chief Minister and CPI-M veteran Jyoti Basu met President K R Narayanan on Sunday and is understood to have favoured
dissolution of the Lok Sabha to end the current political
uncertainty in the country.
Basu, who held extensive talks with CPI-M leaders before
meeting the President, gave Narayanan a detailed account of the political
scenario during his 30-minute meeting.
Surjeet said his party would have preferred a
discussion in Parliament on the political developments in Uttar Pradesh
first, but ''the Congress does not seem to be interested in
containing the BJP nor is it worried that national unity
is under threat.''
''Pressing for elections is not in the
interest of either the country nor of the Congress party itself,''
the Marxist veteran warned.
Even as he awaited Prime Minister Gujral's formal reply,
Congress president Sitaram Kesri held consultations
with party leaders throughout Sunday.
Reacting to the Left parties's suggestion
that the Lok Sabha be dissolved, Congress Working Committee member
Pranab Mukherjee said, "we are still
awaiting a reply from the prime minister."
Kesri, Mukherjee said, had not convened a CWC meeting and would only do so after
he received the prime minister's reply to the Congress demand that DMK minister be dropped from the United Front government. The Congress Parliamentary Party executive will meet on Monday morning before Parliament convenes.
Early on Sunday, Kesri met senior party MPs at
Parliament house to discuss the strategy to be adopted on the floor
of both Houses when the Jain Commission report comes up for
discussion. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the former Congress MP, briefed the
leaders about the Jain Commission recommendations and the line
party MPs should take during the debate.
Talking to newspersons after the two hour long meeting, Sharad
Pawar, the party's leader in the Lok Sabha, said the Congress
wants a full fledged debate on the Commission's recommendations. He,
however, parried questions whether Congress MPs would continue
to block the proceedings of Parliament on Monday as they had done on
Thursday and Friday.
Congress Working Committee member Arjun Singh says his party would not wait too long for the
prime minister's reply as ''we have a certain timeframe in mind
which we will disclose at the appropriate time.''
CWC member Kotla Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy told Rediff On The NeT that
"we cannot wait indefinitely for the letter. If the letter does not come, we will go ahead and withdraw support to the United Front government."
Arjun Singh added a new angle to the controversy on Sunday by demanding that former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao be examined by the Jain Commission, in the light of recent revelations that he had deliberately withheld sensitive documents on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination from the judge.
Syed Firdaus Ashraf, George Iype, UNI
The Congress Crisis, November 1997
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