With Rahul Gandhi’s outburst, ordinance dead
On Friday, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi stunned his party-led Union Government by slamming an ordinance which the regime had forwarded to the President for assent, and which seeks to protect convicted MPs and MlAs. It must be “torn up and thrown away”, an agitated Mr Gandhi said. That may not be needed; the Government has virtually decided to withdraw the shameful document after this flare-up. Mr Gandhi must be complimented for being brutally honest. There is no doubt that the ordinance was ill-thought out, ill-timed and mala fide in nature. It also did not have the approval of the opposition parties and, therefore, contributed to increased friction between the Government and the Opposition. When the Government came under attack on the issue, its spin doctors began to spread the canard that the Bharatiya Janata Party had been taken on board over the provisions of the ordinance. But the strong protest that the BJP registered — with senior party leaders meeting the President on Thursday and requesting him to not sign the document — exposed the regime's lies. let alone having secured the BJP's consent, the Congress-led Government did not command the support of quite a few of its own Ministers and party leaders who were jittery at having to defend the indefensible. Congress MP Milind Deora and senior party leader Anil Shastri, to name just two, openly opposed the ordinance on the ground that any move to protect convicted leaders would go down unfavourably with the voters and that the Congress would suffer as a consequence in the coming electoral battles. But Mr Gandhi's eruption of anger on the issue, days after the Union Cabinet endorsed the ordinance and passed it on to the President for his signature, leads to several interesting questions. First, had the Manmohan Singh Government consulted the Congress high command before crafting the ordinanceIJ Second, did the regime get the high command's green signal before the Cabinet approved the ordinanceIJ Third, did the Government coordinate with the party leadership before dispatching its senior Ministers to the President in a bid to persuade the latter to sign the ordinanceIJ
It is difficult to imagine that Mr Singh’s Government had bypassed Mr Gandhi while resorting to the ordinance trickery. Even assuming that the Government had suddenly developed spine — though for the wrong cause — the Congress vice president could not have been in the dark as the Cabinet's endorsement of the ordinance and the document's journey to Rashtrapati Bhavan has been public knowledge. Mr Gandhi's late realisation must be seen as an attempt at damage control. The Congress stood completely isolated over the ordinance and did not have a fig leaf to hide behind. It could neither dispel the growing public impression that the move was designed to save its allies nor could it point to any ‘extraordinary' constitutional situation to justify the ordinance.
If only Mr Gandhi had spoken out earlier, the Government would not have had egg on its face and his outrage would have sounded more credible. The episode leads one to wonder if the disconnect between the Manmohan Singh regime and the Congress has reached a tipping point.