| Dear Express Reader, Why did Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar suddenly resign at the end of the first working day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament? The question is riveting. But unfortunately, l’affaire Dhankhar allows us a very limited range of wondering. As Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman, and as governor of West Bengal before that, Dhankhar spoke the lines scripted by the Narendra Modi government, almost as if they had been written out for him. He took on the elected chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, every day, firming up a template for the disabling politics practised by other BJP-appointed governors in Opposition-ruled states. He loudly confronted the Judiciary and the Opposition at the Centre, and weaponised the Rajya Sabha rule book to stifle debate, not encourage it. There seemed to be little or no daylight between the positions of Dhankhar and the Modi government. Up till now. So, now that a crack is showing, wide enough for Dhankhar to have made his unceremonious exit, or for him to have been eased out abruptly — the health reasons he cited for his resignation are not being taken seriously — there is an opening. Perhaps, hidden in plain sight, Dhankhar had overplayed the hand he had been dealt by the Modi government, and a government that maintains a tight control over MPs/ministers as well as constitutional authorities, could not let that be. All the fevered speculation in the last week about why the former V-P quit boils down to this. The story of the V-P’s exit could have been more interesting. It could still be, arguably. It could have been that, to a third-term government with a messianic self-image that loses no opportunity to assert its absolute power absolutely, that gives no quarters to the dissenter and lays all opponents low, Dhankhar has done something that has not been done so far. He has spoken truth — or even better, the Constitution — to power, from within. It could have been that, having subdued the Opposition and its own MPs and Ministers, the government now came up against a pushback from the less bendable constitutional authority. That’s a tantalising possibility. But there is a problem here, and it is this: Nothing in Dhankhar’s very public record till now supports that particular theory. A level of publicness and transparency — missing from this episode so far — would also have been intrinsic to it. What we are left with, then, is an imagined drama of mincing moves on the chessboard of power and politics that ostensibly led to the V-P’s exit. It is set against the broader canvas of a newly reconvened Parliament. Here, large issues, from the recent Operation Sindoor to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, which has raised genuine fears of disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters, have lined up, and the House has yet to properly let them in. As the Monsoon session enters its second week, then, on one side is the shadow-play of Dhankhar’s exit, and on the other side an Opposition clutching at the smaller issue even as, on the larger issue, it does not seem to be getting a grip. Leaders of the Opposition have proposed to host a farewell dinner for Dhankhar, ostensibly to embarrass the government, twist the knife in. But on SIR, the Congress-led Opposition’s legitimate criticisms of the Election Commission’s impractical timelines in a poll-bound state are in danger of being clouded by its own disunity and Rahul Gandhi’s loose and lurching pot shots at the EC. In Gujarat, on Saturday, Gandhi reportedly said the EC was like a “cheating cricket umpire” and that Congress defeats in the 2017 and 2022 assembly polls in the state had to do with manipulated voter lists. For a leader speaking to party workers — Gandhi was addressing newly appointed Congress district and city unit presidents — there is room for some overblown rhetoric. But this sounded too much like Gandhi blaming the EC in a way that not only lets Congress off the hook, but which could also undermine the case he is making on the conduct of the SIR in Bihar against it. In Gujarat, Congress has failed to stanch the flow of Congressmen crossing over to the BJP camp, to an extent that voters distrust the Congress ability to hold its own in the state quite literally. As in many other states, it has failed to break BJP dominance through new ideas, or even through a new set of leaders. Its messaging has been inconsistent, lacking follow-up on the ground. And it has not been able to live down, or move ahead from, the shortcomings and mistakes of its own past governments. None of these issues can be fixed by turning the focus to voter lists. Of course, the ongoing SIR in Bihar is a different story, where the EC is fumbling visibly. But by setting up the fight so broadly, the party makes it more difficult to ask the sharp and pointed questions that need to be asked of the EC. Both the V-P exit drama about shadowy things, and the loose balls Congress is throwing at the EC, are part of the same story. For an Opposition still flailing to seize the initiative, the best hope is that, in its third term, the government’s cracks will start showing. Till next week, Vandita |
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