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Honourable exit

Sometimes there is greater wisdom in losing than in winning. In Jharkhand, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance has decided to play for bigger stakes by letting the Arjun Munda Government go. There was only one way the Government reduced to a clear minority following the resignation of four Ministers last week could have survived — by skulduggery. Aside from inviting public outrage, not to mention judicial intervention, such a course would have proved unstable. The BJP headquarters evidently decided to go for the high moral ground, preferring to transfer the burden of incumbency to a highly dubious successor regime. Now more fun and games seem guaranteed with the United Progressive Alliance camp pitching in favour of the independent Madhu Koda. Can the arrangement hold? The independents who form the mainstay of the new government have a record of multiple defections. Mr. Koda himself contested the February 2005 Assembly election as a rebel BJP candidate. Within a month, he returned to the NDA fold, pledging his support to the Munda Government in return for a ministerial berth. Today 18 months and much bargaining later, he has staked his claim to the highest elected post in Jharkhand as a nominee of the UPA! As though this were not enough, the final choice was preceded by a bitter wrangling for power among Mr. Koda, other independents, and the former UPA Chief Minister, Shibu Soren. But the story does not end here. The Congress and the JMM will prop up the new government from the outside — a sure recipe for disaster.

It is to the political credit of the central BJP leadership that it has opted to watch the tamasha from the sidelines. That Mr. Munda is an unwilling partner in this renunciation exercise is obvious. Indeed no sooner was his Government reduced to a minority than he boasted he would prove his majority. Just how he planned to pull off the impossible became evident with the ironic, if unsurprising, decision of the State Assembly Speaker, Inder Singh Namdhari, to hear long-pending disqualification petitions against three rebel MLAs — Ennos Ekka, Kamlesh Singh, and Stephen Marandi. All three had voted for the Munda Government on the floor of the Assembly in 2005 — Mr. Ekka and Mr. Singh in defiance of their party whips and Mr. Marandi in his disputed capacity as an independent (The charge against Mr. Marandi was that he had contested the 2005 Assembly election as an independent even though he was a Rajya Sabha member of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha at that time.). For all the 18 months Mr. Ekka and Mr. Singh were in government, the Speaker failed to decide on the disqualification petitions — for the simple reason he did not want the NDA Government endangered. In the case of Mr. Marandi he went one better, upholding his Assembly membership. Thanks to the BJP's top bosses, Mr. Namdhari has been stopped in his tracks. Now Koda and company take up from where the Munda-Namdhari duo left off.

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