Power politics on display amid pandemic

Maharashtra was not the only centre for a subtle game of political one-upmanship. The exodus of people who left their home states for jobs in urban agglomerates and were pushed out once the national lockdown extracted a cruel economic toll, eluding rational thinking and tentative solutions. Instead, states used it to earn plaudits over others. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were examples.

In a corner: With his nomination to the Legislative Council getting delayed, Uddhav Thackeray had to seek the PM’s intervention.

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior journalist

After the unsettling moments, Uddhav Thackeray is set to legitimise his constitutional position by getting elected as a member of the legislative council. It was not an easy passage for the Maharashtra Chief Minister to secure a place in the council as he battles hard to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in India’s worst-hit state.

Evidently, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), his ally of yore, has not forgotten that Uddhav had weaselled out of a long partnership just when the BJP was readying to anoint its former CM, Devendra Fadnavis, for a second term after the last Maharashtra elections. The Governor, BS Koshyari, sat on a recommendation from the state cabinet to nominate Uddhav to the council from his discretionary quota. Social distancing made it practically impossible to hold the scheduled elections and fill in the vacancies to the lower house of the legislature. With the deadline of May 28 for Uddhav’s nomination fast approaching, he had no choice but to seek Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention. The move resulted in an ‘order’ from the Election Commission to conduct the legislative council elections and pave the way for a berth for Uddhav, who had initially toyed with the idea of contesting an assembly seat and then abandoned it. For a while, it looked as though Maharashtra would plunge into an unwanted constitutional crisis. In normal circumstances, the BJP might have been tempted to muddy the waters, which its state leaders badly wanted even in the extraordinary circumstances of the present day, but evidently, better sense prevailed on the Central brass.

Power politics amidst a pandemic? What’s to stop parties from playing the sport? Maharashtra seems to be a favourite target any which way. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government was apparently caught off-guard when, on April 27, the Centre notified that the sought-after International Financial Services Centre Authority (IFSCA) will be headquartered at Gandhinagar instead of Mumbai, the original earmarked site. A take-in? Hard to tell. The preceding BJP-Shiv Sena dispensation had been persuaded to forfeit the land set aside for the IFSCA for a bullet train terminal. Birthed in 2006 by the Manmohan Singh government, Mumbai was chosen because its time zone was uniquely positioned mid-way between those of the two major IFSCs at London and Singapore. Bankers and economic analysts estimated that the authority could have created at least 100,000 jobs in the primary financial sector and an equal number in the tertiary. The IFSCA will be a unified authority to regulate financial service centres in India, including banking, the capital markets and insurance that are currently monitored by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Insurance Regulatory an Development Authority of India.

The MVA could do nothing except register a token protest because Uddhav’s election became an over-riding consideration. However, the critical decision that empowers the IFSCA to administer financial products (securities, deposits, insurance contracts) and financial services and institutions was interpreted in political quarters as the product of a historical legacy: the Maharashtra-Gujarat rivalry, sowed by the demand for a separate state of the Gujarati-speaking population. It resulted in the carving of Gujarat from the bilingual Bombay Presidency in 1960. Gujarat had to live with the ‘ignominy’ of ‘ceding’ Mumbai (originally Bombay), India’s financial capital, to Maharashtra in return for getting the tribal-dominated Dang region.

Maharashtra was not the only centre for a subtle but inescapable game of political one-upmanship. The exodus of people who left their home states to seek employment in urban agglomerates — and were literally pushed out once the national lockdown extracted a cruel economic toll — eluded rational thinking and tentative solutions. Instead, states used it to earn plaudits over the others. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were examples.

Nitish Kumar, the Bihar Chief Minister, mulishly refused to open his state’s borders to the throng of migrants desperately wanting to return home, after walking or cycling back thousands of miles. His apprehension was that they were potential Covid-19 vectors although there was no hard data to prove that those who were fortunate to come back had transmitted the virus. Health management was evidently Nitish’s bane because his government was severely critiqued for failing to stem an encephalitis outbreak in 2019. This time, he had to contend with not just a huge population of the working class and the poor but students from Bihar who went to study in Rajasthan, Karnataka and other states but were left high and dry once their places of learning closed indefinitely. He was unmoved by their plight as well. Pressure exerted by the BJP, his ally, did not work.

Trust politics to play here as well. The BJP was afraid that its middle-class base in Bihar would be angered if the students, from relatively well-off families, were left hanging. It used its chief ministers, Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh and Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, to beam a signal to their Bihar counterpart. Adityanath and Chouhan organised buses to ferry back the students stranded in Rajasthan’s Kota. That message too was not picked up by Nitish who wouldn’t budge from his stated position. He reiterated that the Centre’s enshrined guidelines, drawn from the Disaster Management Act, did not allow inter-state movement during the lockdown. Finally, he was compelled to relent after the Union Home Ministry amended the norms and allowed the migrants to travel back through specially requisitioned transport.

Madhya Pradesh paid a huge price for the power politics on display after the Congress government was dislodged for a BJP-led one by engineering defections. The spectacle was staged when the pandemic had begun ravaging India although MP was not among the first casualty. The failure to constitute a cabinet — Chouhan ran a solo show until recently — and the bureaucracy’s apathy caused an unforeseen spike in the Covid cases in MP. Mercifully, Maharashtra escaped a similar fate.