The Hindu : New Delhi News : When coalition dharma gave in to pressure

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Wednesday, Nov 17, 2010
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When coalition dharma gave in to pressure

Smita Gupta

OUT:A. Raja

New Delhi: A cornered Congress leadership, already reeling under the Commonwealth Games and Mumbai real estate controversies, was compelled to force A. Raja's resignation as Union Telecom Minister to counter the politically damaging — and escalating — publicity generated by the corruption charges levelled by a belligerent Opposition against the United Progressive Alliance government.

Emphasising this, Congress sources told The Hindu that the party also needed to retain the moral high ground it hoped it secured for itself after it had sacked Ashok Chavan as Maharashtra Chief Minister and Suresh Kalmadi as Congress Parliamentary Secretary last week, within hours of U.S. President Barack Obama's departure from the country.

Once the Congress realised, these sources said, that Mr. Raja was rapidly becoming a political “liability” for the UPA government, thanks to his allegedly controversial role in the allocation of 2G spectrum, it began to pressure DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi for dropping him from the Ministry.

Things came to a head after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from the G-20 meeting in Seoul: a senior Cabinet Minister stressed on Monday that “it was at the insistence of the Prime Minister, given his sensitivity on such matters” that Mr. Raja was forced to step down. This came after a meeting in Parliament on Sunday morning attended by the Prime Minister, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Ms. Gandhi's political secretary Ahmed Patel. It was after that meeting that Mr. Mukherjee called up Mr. Karunanidhi, conveying the Congress' conviction that Mr. Raja had to go. Initially though, after excerpts from “leaked” copies of the Comptroller and Auditor-General's report surfaced in sections of the media on November 10, apparently “indicting” Mr. Raja, the Congress took a hands-off line, with party spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan pointing out the need to adhere to the coalition ‘dharma', as Mr. Raja belongs to the DMK. That day, she also rubbished reports of the CAG putting the loss due to the 2G spectrum scam at Rs.1.76 lakh crore: “It is a leak from the draft report, there is no official version we have come across. The draft report goes to many departments, after which it is finalised and then presented to the government and Parliament. We cannot go by the information.”

Indeed, the Congress effort, instead, was to train the firepower on the Opposition, particularly the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been leading the charge against the government, to say that the BJP-led NDA's record was nothing to write home about.

A day later, the party position, articulated separately by Congress media chairperson Janardan Dwivedi, Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Bansal, was that there was a case pending in the Supreme Court and that the CAG report, after it is tabled in Parliament, would be examined by the Public Accounts Committee and action could be taken thereafter. It was also underscored that since the PAC is headed by a senior Opposition leader — the BJP's Murli Manohar Joshi in this case — the Opposition could have its say. The Congress also ruled out the setting up of a Joint Parliamentary Committee, saying the PAC was a “permanent” JPC.

Simultaneously, that day the Union of India fled an affidavit before the Supreme Court saying there was no wrongdoing of any kind in the allocation of 2G spectrum licences: “The DoT has throughout acted in the public interest on the basis of policy determined by the Government of India.”

But even as the Congress — and the government — seemed to be defending Mr. Raja against the Opposition onslaught, there was a faint hint of something else on Thursday.

The party line was beginning to shift, with Mr. Dwivedi also saying that day that it was for the DMK to “ponder” Mr. Raja's future as he belonged to an allied party, not the Congress.He was responding to questions on the demand that Mr. Raja be dropped from the government. The Congress was finding it hard to explain why the standards applied to Mr. Chavan and Mr. Kalmadi could not be followed in the case of Mr. Raja. That was also the day when a senior Congress leader admitted to journalists that Mr. Raja was becoming a political “liability” for the government, even as Mr. Karunanidhi's daughter — and Rajya Sabha MP — Kanimozhi met Mr. Mukherjee to discuss the subject.

So, from the initial legalistic position the Congress initially adopted — that Mr. Raja had not been officially indicted, and talk of keeping in mind the coalition dharma — it was pressuring Mr. Karunanidhi to drop Mr. Raja, lest the government get too deeply embroiled in the controversy. Finally, after the Prime Minister returned from Seoul, the final decision was taken, even though a section in the party is of the view that the Congress should not have been seen to be succumbing to Opposition pressure but should have chosen its own moment to deal with the Raja affair.

With Mr. Raja's exit, the Congress hopes — even though the Opposition remained adamant on Monday on the setting up of a JPC, something the government is unwilling to concede — that the BJP and other parties will run out of steam by November 18, when campaigning for the last phase of the Bihar Assembly elections ends.

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