All’s fair in race for power

The perks of being a regional player in coalition politics are immense. National parties care little about propriety to manipulate or mend fractured mandates with their support.

The perks of being a regional player in coalition politics are immense. National parties care little about propriety to manipulate or mend fractured mandates with their support.

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If the Congress used Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s (JMM) Shibu Soren to gain power in Delhi in 2004, it’s the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) turn now to demit the moral high ground it then took, to pick up governmental stakes in Jharkhand.

But why single out the JMM leader. In the past, there hasn’t been any paucity of political space for the likes of Sukh Ram and Buta Singh who have been courted by the ‘saffron’ BJP and the ‘secular’ Congress.

In that limited sense, the JMM-BJP tie-up is just another instance of a convenient political marriage. In the earlier UPA regime, their public spats left the Congress — notably Prime Minister Manmohan Singh —deeply embarrassed.

So much so that when Soren was on the run from the law as a cabinet minister, BJP veteran Murli Manohar Joshi questioned the prime minister’s absence in the Rajya Sabha through a shocking parallel: “The minister (Soren) is a fugitive from the law and the PM from the House.”

Singh watched the House proceedings on TV in his Parliament House office. So upset was he with Joshi’s remarks that he considered demitting office, causing panic among his advisers who somehow managed to have him abandon the idea.

In that early phase of UPA-I, a belligerent BJP unable to come to terms with popular rejection of its “Shining India” pitch, used the “tainted ministers” plank to prevent the PM from introducing to Parliament his council of ministers that included Lalu Prasad and some of his Rashtriya Janata Dal colleagues facing criminal and graft charges.

So where does its power-sharing agreement with Soren leave the BJP in the fight against corruption? The “party with a difference” has come across as being indifferent to the issue in its enthusiasm to prop up the JMM chief as the chief minister. A murder case against Soren is pending before the Supreme Court.

That apart, the saffron party will jointly rule the tribal state — eyed for its mineral wealth by leading corporate houses and mining syndicates — after a resounding rejection by the electorate.

Its tally of 30 in the outgoing assembly has been reduced to 18 in the new House.

The big question: if the BJP couldn’t rein in the mining mafia in Karnataka, how will it save Jharkhand from the plunder the Maoists cite to justify their violent movement. Some even accuse the saffron party of sharing power not with Soren but with the ultra-Left that helped the JMM recoup ground in the recent polls.