For electoral gain, regional leaders hype pretence to PMO
NEWDELHI: Are leaders of regional parties serious while laying claim to the prime minister’s office in a non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition after the 2019 polls? Are pretenders unlikely to get more than 30-40 seats in the Lok Sabha being realistic in harbouring such ambitions?
A minister in Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, Suvendu Adhikari, has pitched for a Bengali PM without specifically naming his leader: “People of West Bengal want a Bengali PM. It is high time we had one from Bengal.”
Such parochialism is not unknown to our polity. At times, it’s blended with ethnic, caste, and linguistic pride; at others, with the idealism of women’s empowerment. Then there’s that all-season social justice plank which could place Mayawati way ahead of Mamata in the prime ministerial race.
In a Bengali versus Dalit woman contest, the dice will be loaded in favour of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader. If Mamata has been CM for two successive terms, Mayawati has four times ruled Uttar Pradesh that sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha compared to West Bengal’s 40-odd.
In a way, the competition between regional leaders eyeing the PM’s office is for the second largest party position after the Congress. That propelled perhaps Adhikari’s forecast of Trinamool sweeping the 42 seats at stake in the state. The objective is similar to the BSP’s plan to also contest seats in states other than UP, notably Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where primacy belongs to the Congress. Showcasing themselves as prospective prime ministers, they hope to win a larger number of seats.
Past precedents fuel such ambitions. Regional leaders have been prime minister earlier; they can be prime minister again in a federal setup, goes the argument.
Four prime ministers were surprise occupants of the chair between the 1970s and 1990s. They rose to the high office with minuscule numbers of their own and on the strength of the Congress’s outside support.
The first tragic story of a short premiership was that of Charan Singh. Sworn in as the country’s fifth prime minister after the fall of Morarji Desai’s Janata Party government in the 1970s, he faced the ignominy of being the only PM who never faced Parliament. The Congress withdrew support to his regime a day before he was to take a trust vote in the Lok Sabha.
History repeated itself in the case of veteran socialist and former Congress Young Turk, Chandrashekhar. He resigned in about four months following differences with the supporting party. HD Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral served longer, but were ousted in less than a year.
In terms of direct support, none of them had bigger backing than the 60-odd MPs with which Charan Singh walked out of the Janata Party. As a tall leader of north India, he was among the aspirants for the top office in the 1977 polls. Desai got luckier after the election when Singh and Jagjivan Ram, a Dalit who was Jayaprakash Narayan’s first choice, cancelled each other out.
In the run-up to the 1989 polls, Chandrasekhar, too, was a challenger to VP Singh, who had quit the Congress to lead an anti-graft movement against Rajiv Gandhi. That wasn’t so in the case of the Gowda-Gujral duo. They were compromise candidates amid unrealised choices ranging from VP Singh to Jyoti Basu, Mulayam Singh Yadav and SR Bommai.
The Charan Singh case study furnishes the correct historical parallel for Mayawati’s and Mamata’s quest for the coveted office. Like them, his mass base matched his ambition, not to mention the difficult temperament.