PM, the biggest winner of the trust vote

New Delhi: After days of tense standoff over the Indo-US nuclear deal, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday won majority support in Parliament by a bigger margin than expected, shortly after three opposition MPs dramatically displayed wads of currency in the Lok Sabha alleging they had been bribed to abstain during the trust vote.

After more than an hour of utter confusion in the Lok Sabha when Manmohan Singh could not give his final response to the confidence motion debate because of disruptions by opposition MPs demanding his resignation, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee brought the curtains down on two days of acrimony in the House by announcing the final result: 275 MPs in favour of the UPA and 256 against.

But after a dramatic day, most politicos agreed that it was not as much a judgment day for the Congress as it was for Manmohan Singh who emerged as the biggest winner despite the Opposition targeting him on a personal level.

On the panel of experts to analyse the developments of the past two days were CPM’s Prasenjit Bose, Editorial Advisor of TOI Group Gautam Adhikari, senior journalist Swapan Das Gupta, political commentator and columnist Neerja Chowdhury, Congress Spokesperson Manish Tiwari and political commentator and columnist Prem Shankar Jha.

Left isolated?

The Government will now be going to the IAEA, it might even go for those reforms that the Left was against. On top of that, the Left is now with UP Chief Minister Mayawati who the CPM had once called casteist. She allied three times with the BJP and even campaigned for Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. So where is the Left today and what is its stand regarding allies?

Bose said that the Left will not give up its battle against the N-deal and is still willing to take their agitation to the streets.

“Even when we were voting on Tuesday we didn’t expect to topple this Government with just our votes. We all know how this majority has been mustered and makes us all remember how 15 years back Narasimha Rao had also saved his Government. So history has just repeated itself,” he added.

Bose then went on to say that the Left’s opposition to the nuclear deal remains. “All the arguments given by the External Affairs Minister and Rahul Gandhi are misleading and wrong. And the Left is definitely not isolated. The nuclear deal has brought a realignment of political relations in this country. We are now going to the masses in a very big way and we will explain how the deal is not good for the country.”

Rahul Gandhi said that Tuesday’s decision in Parliament was for the future of India. He also said that it was for a forward-looking mindset. Does his words make the Left look more backward in their thoughts? Is there disconnect between the Left and young India?

To which Bose said, “I think it is Rahul Gandhi who is removed from the reality of India. All this that has happened looks like the Congress’ version of the India Shining campaign. So let the Congress go to the people with this idea because then it will be easier on our part to expose the hype around the deal.”

PM, the biggest winner of the trust vote?

Has Manmohan Singh finally emerged as a politician that he has always accused of not being? The PM has always been charged with being a face to the Government that is run by the UPA Chairperson. But through this trust vote the nation has seen the way he was personally targeted by the Opposition. So has he emerged as a newer and more aggressive political leader?

Adhikari said, “I don’t know if Singh is king but he is certainly the new Singh. The way he walked, carried himself and spoke, his whole demeanor seems to have changed. He is by and large a quiet person who doesn’t like to project himself too much but he is finally being more assertive. People should rethink now because this man has come out as a pretty good strategist. He is a strong personality in his own quiet way. He has achieved a great victory.”

Agreeing with Adhikari, Das Gupta said, “There is a new demeanor. He has won a match. Unfortunately, we may find out that it is a case of match-fixing. But it has showed Manmohan Singh to be a skilful politician. All this has raised his stature but put him on a different plane.”

But will the Congress now bite the bullet and project him as the prime ministerial candidate for the upcoming General Elections?

“Now that is a million-dollar question,” said Chowdhury and then added, “But what the Congress will not be able to do is ignore him.”

“The deal will now go through so the party will deflect attention from inflation. So far his meetings have been in halls rather than rallies. Many also said that he is not a crowdpuller. But this time since he is the author of the deal and has pushed for it so he cannot be ignored. The Congress has go with him,” she explained.

Is this a tainted victory for the UPA?

For the first time in the history of Indian Parliament MPs went to the well of the House and showed wads of money and alleged that they were being bribed to vote for the Government. Some also alleged that there were many inducements like ministerial berths for ministers who face murder charges. However, the PM said that his party will work in accordance with the law in the cash for vote scam.

“Here is a man who stands on a high pedestal and talks about bringing India into the world. But he has done a greater disservice to the Indo-US nuclear deal by wrapping it in a certain amount of disrepute. A normal foreign policy issue is now all about duplicity, deceit and corruption,” Das Gupta said.

However, Adhikari said, “I wonder if the world will react in the same way as Swapan. It is kind of ridiculous when we say cash was exchanged. I mean come on, this has been happening for decades. It may have done in a dramatic manner but there is a thing called presumed innocence. There is a charge but let the authorities examine it. Till then let us not say that so-and-so is tainted or the victory is tainted. Give the PM a break, I mean he has won a terrific victory.”

The spectacle of money being poured out of bags in Parliament shows that may be this is something that is endemic to Indian politics.

“Yes, that is true,” said Chowdhury and then added, “I was sitting with a former MP in the Central Hall of Parliament when all this was happening and he got a call from his daughter and the first thing she told her father was that he should never fight another election again. So the perception of the people now is that this is the worse thing that one can be in.”

“Neerja is right. Perception is all important in this age of audio-visual media,” Adhikari said.

Experts on the show agreed that politics is floating on cash but they said that what the country needs to do is constructively establish transparency and accountability. There also needs to be an open procedure through which politicians can access funds.

“We have very outdated campaign finance laws. Campaign financing in this age of television is extremely expensive. Let us have transparent rules on that,” Adhikari said.

But Das Gupta said that the laws are not too bad. “In fact the law is quite generous. The problem is that we have too much of a cash economy. Fault lies in the public culture.”

Is this a vote for the future?

Rahul Gandhi’s, in his speech, said let’s conquer fear and look outwards. Is this the end of hypocrisy with our relationship with the US?

Prem Shankar Jha said that there certainly has been some hypocrisy in the past. “If the deal hadn’t gone through,” he said, “we would have been trying for it. There are two giant benefits of the deal. One is that nuclear power door is now open to us, which is essential because under global warming very soon people won’t even be selling you coal. The other is that hundreds of industries have been held back. The most obvious areas in which you have been held back - where thousands of projects have been started and stalled because one key component was not available - was in defence projects.”

Swapan Das Gupta agreed with the fact that there was a change in new India as far as relationship with the US was concerned.

“That anti-Americanism is not on,” he said. “The Left talks a language which is anti-diluvium in many ways. Having said that, I don’t think there is any way in which the culture of the parliamentary debate, the victory, etc establishes the contours of the new India,” he added.

Congress Spokesperson Manish Tiwari, however, defended that India can move towards becoming new India only if it’s allowed to. “You have the dinosaurs of the BJP and the likes of the Left who are trying to hold India back,” he said.

He added, ”Essentially what this nuclear deal is also about is the new world order of multipolarity which is emerging. After almost 15 years of unipolarity, the world has started moving towards the semblance of multipolarity and the fact that India is being accepted as one of the poles in that emerging axis is the movement of new India. And if it wouldn’t be for our friends in the BJP, who haven’t been able to make even one convincing argument over the last two days as to why did they oppose the Indo-us nuclear deal and forget the Left whose thinking stopped developing the day the cold war ended, we wouldn’t have been in the situation that we are in.“

Neerja, however, sounded sceptical of the argument that India was moving towards becoming new India.

“What is this new India we are going into?” she asked. “What we saw today in Parliament, is that the new India we are going into? Two days ago, a report said 665 million Indians defecate in the open and half our children under the age of three are malnourished,” she said.

Countering that argument, Jha said, “Are you trying to tell me let’s not have power stations until we fix poverty? How are you going to fix poverty if we have no energy? I think it’s important for the Government, who’s taken care of the production future, to now start looking at the distribution future of the country”

Swapan added that endorsement of Indo-US deal was not necessarily endorsement of US foreign policies. “An indictment of the Manmohan Singh Government does not necessarily entail a rejection of the Indo-US deal. There are many facets of the Manmohan Singh Government, which are unappetising, particularly its lack of commitment to reforms in economic progress, its social policies and its profligate handling of the economy,” he said.

Manish, however, strongly countered that argument. “This is the most absurd switching of tracks that you could possibly ever see. Till yesterday the Indo-US deal was very bad. Suddenly it is a non-issue,” he said. “You have the BJP President say in Parliament that we are not even opposed to a strategic relationship with the US and suddenly you find the Government is being criticised for every ill that India has been afflicted with. This was a trust vote on nuclear deal, which the Government has won. Give the govt credit for that and as far as other problems of India are concerned, if you allow us to move ahead we’ll fix those problems also,” he added.

Jha pointed out that the even though the work on nuclear deal was started by the BJP, they should have taken gone out and taken credit for it. “I’m amazed at the number of historic errors the BJP is making. The work for this was started during their time. For a fact I know that Advani and Jaswant Singh built excellent relationship with the US, particularly with Bush, because they were moving towards the deal. They could have gone out and said they started this. They are destroying everything that they did,” he said.

Can the government now push for economic reforms?

Now that the Left is no longer stopping reforms, will the Government now push through all the various bills that are pending?

“Now that the Left is no longer supporting the Government from outside,” Manish Tiwari replied, “the National Common Minimum programme would be able to be revisited in a more proactive manner.

But can the Government do that especially as many say that it is now a dead government with so many disparate dead constituents?

Swapan said that the Government would have to show some progress on the reforms front before it faces the elections. “But on the other hand,” he added, “the average Congressman is wary of deregulation. They like populist schemes like the NREGA, loan waiver - that’s instinctive to the Congress culture. I think Manmohan Singh would have a very tall order as would Rahul Gandhi to be able to introduce a new culture of economic management into the country.”

Jha, however, emphasised the need to understand the way the public perceives the many big-ticket reforms as more sops to the already rich. “Income difference in this country is widening very rapidly. No government going into elections in nine months would want to do things that are going to reinforce this impression especially at a time when the economy is sinking,” Jha said.

Neerja too highlighted the election agenda. She said, “They Government has already hinted that they will have to give some pro-poor and pro-common man signals again especially as it goes to polls in nine months.”

Who is King: Manmohan Singh or Amar Singh?

“If you go back to 1991,” Manish said, “and track Manmohan Singh from there onwards, there has been one constant in his personality and that is if he decides to embark on something which is different and path breaking, he has the tenacity to persevere with it. This is the larger message, which emanates out of this trust vote.”

But what will happen to the Congress with its alliance with the SP?

Neerja said that the Congress and the SP would now have to stick together as they are both dependent on each other for electoral reasons. “But people will watch very carefully in the coming days whether Dr Manmohan Singh goes in for another cabinet reshuffle to keep the promises made, and what happens to the cases against some SP leaders and the nuclear deal. There maybe a limited dose of reforms also but it has also spawned new politics in the shape of Mayawati as a national figure backed by the Left. We are headed for tri-polar politics in this country,” she said.

Jha, on the other hand, sounded optimistic. “Congress was a diarchy. This whole thing has left the PM much stronger than he was before in relation to the rest of the party. That is a net gain for the Congress and for the country. Second good thing was to listen to some of the younger MPs Rahul Gandhi, Omar Abdullah, etc. There is a generation-shift taking place. They are constantly thinking of national interests,” he said.

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