How Jaitley made sure BJP, Modi will still gain from Telangana

The final days of the 15th Lok Sabha have witnessed what is easily the biggest irony of the UPA1 and UPA2 regimes taken together. After ten years of sustained acrimony, the ruling Congress and principal opposition party BJP suddenly buried the hatchet. From zero communication they went to establishing close backroom rapport and excellent floor coordination in both Houses of Parliament, to achieve the last-minute political agenda of the Manmohan Singh government, creation of a separate state of Telangana. The way the two rivals, engaged in a bitter Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi battle, worked in tandem in Parliament to pass the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill invited taunts of “fixing” from the CPI (M). Congress-BJP Bhai Bhai, Congress BJP Hai Hai, those were the slogans from the Trinamool Congress. Current NDA allies Shiv Sena and Akali Dal took contradictory positions too. The BJP leadership surprisingly didn’t seem to mind, even risking, at least for now, alienation by some potential allies such as the TDP, YSR Congress, TMC and  BJD. The question many within the BJP are now asking is what the party gained by backing agenda that was intended to give Sonia Gandhi hero status. The move could even help Congress cut its losses in Andhra Pradesh. The BJP leadership’s stance is not very convincing, but senior BJP leaders are pitching for two gains, one moral and the other guided by realpolitik. One is that the party stood by its “principled commitment” on the creation of Telangana, no matter how distasteful the process was. The second is that the next government, which they hope to form, will not have its honeymoon period marred by the baggage of Telangana versus Seemandhra. [caption id=“attachment_1400647” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Protests in the Rajya Sabha over Telangana: PTI[/caption] Those lower down the order in the BJP don’t understand this. Meanwhile, the Congress is celebrating.  The 15th Lok Sabha has been the least productive session since Independence, but in the last two sessions the Congress has successfully turned Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi’s “dreams”, the Food Security Bill and the Land Acquisition Bill, into reality. On Telangana too, the Congress played its cards well vis-à-vis the BJP. They continued negotiating, making the BJP leaders commit too far but keeping them guessing till the last minute, with a surprise element of timing in moving the bill for passage and making it virtually impossible for Opposition leaders to retreat. The Congress now has the potential to sweep polls in 17 LS seats in Telangana, especially if the Telangana Rashtra Samiti merges with it or even if the two strike a pre-poll electoral understanding. Developments indicate that though the TRS is hailing Sonia, it is no longer inclined to merge with the Congress and is currently non-committal on even entering into an alliance with the Congress at this stage. The gains for the Congress, with or without the TRS, will still be substantive simply because the party would otherwise have drawn a blank in Telangana as well as Seemandhra. This would have been particularly embarrassing because the Congress won 29 seats from Andhra Pradesh in 2004 and 32 in 2009, the highest from any state. It was this contribution from Andhra Pradesh that  made UPA1 and UPA2 possible. How did the BJP buckle on Telangana? Sources in BJP told Firstpost that ahead of the final session of Parliament of the 15th Lok Sabha, the Congress started back channel negotiations on Telangana. Seemandhra leaders simultaneously began to meet BJP leaders. Arun Jaitley privately held the view that the contentious Telangana baggage need not spoil their prospective government’s honeymoon. In any case, the party had in the past stated that they would create Telangana in 100 days of their coming to power. Though Advani held that the NDA should come to power and give Telangana statehood in style, other leaders including Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Narendra Modi came to subscribe to Jaitley’s original view. Second, the BJP’s most prominent face from South India Venkaiah Naidu may belong to Seemandhra region, but the party’s Andhra Pradesh unit comprises mostly leaders from Telangana. So, from a long-term perspective, the BJP and the RSS actually have an interest in the creation of a separate Telangana state. In fact, during the NDA regime, the party had proposed to create Telangana along with Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, but dropped Telangana because the TDP was bitterly opposed to the idea and because the TDP’s outside support was critical for the survival of the NDA government. Third, according to one senior leader, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj may have been caught off guard when the Congress made a determined push for the Bill on Tuesday. She may have miscalculated the rival’s strategy, assuming that the Congress was merely posturing on the statehood promise to keep both sides happy and also to blame the BJP for double-speak if it backed off using some procedural alibis. She had committed too far to relent when the Congress made the actual move amid the din on the floor of the House. Sushma’s decision to continue supporting the government even when it blacked out live proceedings on Lok Sabha TV, bulldozed dissenting voices, threw out Seemandhra MPs and refused to let anyone but her speak has earned her a great deal of criticism even within the party. The same night Venkaiah Naidu issued a written statement saying he is “angry with the process of introduction and passage of the bill”. To be  seen as politically correct, he added, “Congress is solely responsible for this.” He told his party colleagues that he would not let it pass so easily in Rajya Sabha and would insist on amendments. Arun Jaitley too was of the same opinion. They had to salvage the party’s reputation from the damage done in the other House, even if it meant going and meeting the Prime Minister to make it clear that specifics in the financial package had to be inserted and that the live telecast must not be stopped. Though there had to be a natural time lag between the passage of the bill in the Lok Sabha and its introduction in the Rajya Sabha, the delay in its introduction in the Upper House (including five short adjournments) was actually on account of these protracted negotiations. The Government succeeded in sticking to its guns that no amendments could be made, for this meant the bill would have to go back to the Lok Sabha for ratification. Insertion of an additional financial package in the bill would also start fresh procedural processes, including taking prior assent from the President. The BJP could finally extract an intervention from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about making certain commitments for Seemandhra on the floor of the House and have some kind of debate even if there was a din in the House. Whether or not those commitments were actually deliverable without their insertion in the AP Reorganisation Bill or whether a Constitutional amendment will still have to be brought in at a later stage, what was important for the BJP was to be seen as fighting for the rights of both, Telangana and Seemandhra. “Justice for Seeamndhra people” may or may not have been achieved, but the BJP in the Upper House at least got something to show to TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu and impress upon him that the BJP should not be treated as untouchable. Party leaders believe that with Modi’s charisma and with the BJP’s pitch for a package for Seemandhra, the PM candidate could get the required add-on punch to help take on YSR Congress. Between the two Leaders of Opposition in Parliament, Jaitley has earned fresh admiration from his peers. Sushma has earned admiration among Telangana supporters outside of the party. If Sonia is amma, Sushma is chinamma, If Sonia is Mata for Telangana, Sushma is Mausi. Even Congress MPs from Telangana spoke on these lines in the Rajya Sabha. If some churning was going on in the BJP, internal dynamics in the Congress too was undergoing a change. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh, one of the topmost aides of Rahul Gandhi, emerged as the new troubleshooter, a worthwhile interlocutor between the Congress and the BJP. His name has come up frequently among BJP leaders in the past fortnight, when he was meeting BJP leaders, writing letters to them on behalf of the government and the party and carried the backroom negotiation momentum forward. It is clear that Jairam Ramesh had this mandate from beyond Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. So much so, even during chaotic proceedings on Telangana in Rajya Sabha, senior BJP MPs Venkaiah Naidu and Ravi Shankar Prasad asked Jairam to intervene to make a commitment from the government’s side, beyond what was committed by Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde.