Gujarat Congress MLAs' defection: Resort politics is well-chronicled weapon of choice in India, party affiliation notwithstanding

The Gujarat Congress on Saturday airlifted its MLAs in Gujarat to Bengaluru to guard them from being “poached” by the BJP,  after six Congress legislators quit the party ahead of the crucial 8 August Rajya Sabha polls. This, the party claimed, was to protect its MLAs from the money and muscle power of the ruling BJP, which it said was harassing the legislators to cross-over.

Rattled by the resignation of half a dozen MLAs, which apparently took party’s central leadership by surprise, the Congress approached the Election Commission seeking a high-level probe. The grand old party accused the BJP of murdering democracy as it decried the saffron party’s “blatant abuse of government machinery” for engineering a defection within the ranks of opposition parties. The BJP, on the other hand, slammed Congress, with Union minister Prakash Javadekar adding that the Congress party’s allegations were like a “a thief attacking a cop,” as quoted in  Hindustan Times . 

However, a precursory glance at the past shows that neither of the political parties have a clean track record, as far as shepherding legislators to faraway resorts, in process reducing the elected representatives of people to commodities, that they fear could be traded up for cash and power. Both BJP and Congress have been guilty of indulging in ‘resort politics’ an and when it suits their political interests. The premise of could be as different as safeguarding seats in Rajya Sabha, as in this case, or ‘protecting’ MLAs from opponents ahead of trust votes crucial to save and/or install a particular party’s government.

The BJP that is crying foul over the “kidnapping” of Congress legislators right now had herded Rajathan BJP MLAs  to a resort in Jaipur in June 2016, ahead of the Rajya Sabha elections. BJP’s excuse then was that it was taking the MLAs for a technical workshop on how to vote, according to  The Times of India . However, the notion of ‘resort politics’ is not one of recent vintage.

In fact, as this  Firstpost  article pointed out, Karnataka — the location of choice this time again to stash away legislators — has emerged as the “epicentre of resort politics,” going back to as far back in history as October 1983, when Indira Gandhi decided to topple the Janata Party government led by Ramakrishna Hegde in Karnataka, spurring the chief minister to conceal his MLAs to protect them from “Congress vultures.”

The next year, Hegde’s valuable services of MLA protection were sought by his Andhra Pradesh counterpart, NT Rama Rao whose Telugu Desam government was pushed to the verge of revolt by an intra-party rebellion spurred by his close confidante Nadendla Bhaskar Rao. Then too, the MLAs were transported away to Bengaluru — before being shepherded off to New Delhi — with Karnataka once again emerging as the hub of resort politics. Ironically, the advisors and facilitators of the TDPs act included (now former) BJP leader M Venkaiah Naidu. It was the saffron party that had organised transport for the MLAs at Delhi and also fixed an appointment with the president for the two-year-old TDP, according to this  Firstpost article_._ 

NT Rama Rao again faced a similar crisis in 1995 — this time a rebellion spurred by his own son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu. Sensing that NTR’s mere presence around the MLAs could foil the otherwise smoothly orchestrated family coup, Naidu shifted all MLAs supporting him to the Viceroy Hotel in Hyderabad, as reported in  The Indian Express . 

In a more recent example from February 2017, when the AIADMK was threatened by a split after J Jayalalithaa’s death, the Sasikala camp loaded all MLAs into buses and packed them off to the Golden Bay resort near Kalpakkam, effectively sequestering them so that they would not go over to O Panneerselvam’s faction.

“Resort politics was revived by HD Kumaraswamy, son of HD Deve Gowda, then the arch-rival of Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Party in 2006,” a previously published  Firstpost  article states. As the report recapitulates, Kumaraswamy at the time brought down the Congress-JDS coalition government in 2006 by taking his MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru.

“Kumarswamy has repeated this performance with remarkable consistency since then,” the article states, referring to the subsequent political crisis of an year later when Kumarswamy refused to hand over power to BS Yeddyurappa, the deputy chief minister in the JDS-BJP coalition government ayear later he overthrew the Congress-JDS government.

States as far up north as Maharashtra too have trooped their MLAs to the southern Indian state of Karnataka in the face of a political crisis. The two-year-old Democratic Front Government, was in the middle of a political crisis in 2002, as the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh shepherded as many as 71 Maharashtra MLAs to Mysore, according to The Hindu . Although the MLAs were allowed to visit tourist places, the report said that each of the three buses that brought the MLAs to Mysore also carried 12 party activists to keep a watch on them.

In June 2016, the Congress party in Karnataka whisked away 9 independent MLAs to Mumbai, who were expected to back a Congress nominee in the Rajya Sabha polls, according to  The Hindu .

The popularity of Karnataka, especially Bengaluru comes off as rather surprising in the political context. The politics of Northern and southern stretches of the country don’t share many things in common, and yet, Karnataka remains the destination of choice for ‘safeguarding’ the MLAs against prowling political opponents.

Probing the reasons, a  Firstpost  article speculates that a number of remotely located luxury resorts which guarantee privacy and controlled exit and entry conditions. “The most most reported name in Karnataka’s resort politics is the super luxury Golden Palms Hotel and Spa, owned by actor Sanjai Khan, about 40 km from Bangalore. Because of its strict entry and exit barriers, political leaders in the state find it safer. It also has seven star luxury amenities to keep the politicians engaged and happy,” the article states.

The current abode of the 44 Congress MLAs in Bengaluru, the Eagleton Golf Resort, too has been a popular haunt for MLAs needing protection in the face of political crisis. According to a report in The Indian Express , the resort — touted to be one of the earliest world-class golf resorts in the country — played host to Kumaraswamy’s supporters in 2006-07, following a move by a group to align with the BJP after breaking away from a Congress-JD(S) coalition.

Another article in The New Indian Express, quoted senior Congress leader VS Ugrappa who attributes the choice of destination to the pleasant weather, which apparently helps to keep the MLAs’ morale high in face of political crisis.

“The climate in Bengaluru and Karnataka is good which everyone love to experience. When NTR and team came to Karnataka, Hegde, who represented Janata Dal supported NTR because both the parties were part of the Third Front. During Deshmukh and team’s visit, Congress was in power here with S M Krishna as CM. Now too Congress MLAs came to a Congress-ruled state,’’ he said, referring to the Gujarat MLAs staying in Bengaluru.

The advantages of resort politics have yielded enough political benefits for various political parties in the past. It has saved governments, dethroned opponents, helped chief ministers facing graft charges install their loyalists on throne, and helped parties secure Rajya Sabha seats. The benefits of the practice, conceptualised in the pre-anti-defection law era, far outreach the expenses of an all-expense-paid luxury trips that the parties have to endure.

A resolute poll panel has arguably been able to clean up the country’s polls to some extent, bringing in tough anti-defection laws. However, horse-trading, which remains at the root of the ‘resort politics’ popularity is still an area that remains out of reach of the central agency.