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Bee in Sonia' bonnet The battle for Fort      George and William Views from the other      side Thus goes the Congress The silence of Dr Singh

Deeper sinks the Congress

'Does K Karunakaran have the guts to leave the Congress (I)?' sneered a Congress leader. Well, it is an interesting question -- one which raises a couple of queries of my own.

First, Karunakaran has been a member of the Congress since before Sonia Gandhi was born. (If I remember correctly, even Narasimha Rao lacks his seniority.) Why would he want to leave the party -- unless the Congress has degenerated so far that any difference of opinion with the 'Family' is taken as the equivalent of treason?

Second, I think the original question should be stood on its head. Does Sonia Gandhi have the guts to expel the veteran from Kerala?

Once upon a time, the conventional wisdom went that any Congressman who left the party was doomed to a life in the political wilderness. This is simply not true any longer. And it would be a very brave Congress president who would dare to try to prove the contrary.

Let me begin by pointing to Andhra Pradesh. By general acclaim Chandrababu Naidu is said to be the best chief minister in India. How many people remember today that he was once a member of a Congress ministry? When N T Rama Rao formed the Telugu Desam, his son-in-law was actually on the other side of the fence.

How about Tamil Nadu? Narasimha Rao broke with Moopanar and Chidambaram because they refused to accept his chosen strategy of aligning with Jayalalitha. Yes, today, the Tamil Maanila Congress has eaten humble pie and accepted its role of playing Jayalalitha's footstool. But, what of the Congress itself?

If the Tamil Maanila Congress is the footstool, then the parent party is little better than a moth-eaten rug under that stool. Jayalalitha is so openly contemptuous about Sonia Gandhi Ltd that she refuses to talk directly with India's oldest party. Instead, and as a well-chosen snub, she insists that the Congress use Moopanar as an intermediary!

Need I mention West Bengal? Sonia Gandhi refused to accept Mamta Banerjee's strategy of taking a harsher line with the CPI-M. Today, Mamta Banerjee is the accepted leader of the anti-Marxist forces in the state. The Congress must now content itself with contesting barely one-fifth of the seats in the assembly election.

Yet, if I had to choose just one state to demonstrate how well people do after leaving the Congress, it would be neither Tamil Nadu nor West Bengal, but Maharashtra. Sharad Pawar did not leave the Congress on a difference of opinion over alignments. No, he was expelled because he attacked Sonia Gandhi herself, the ultimate heresy in the party.

It is true that Pawar has not had as much success as he had once anticipated. But his revolt ensured the success of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance in the last Lok Sabha election.

Following which, the Congress was forced to negotiate with him in order to capture power in the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha. Nor has this last fact taken the edge off Pawar's castigation of Sonia Gandhi -- something the Congress party must grin and bear in silence.

The message is clear: anyone who leaves the Congress has a better than even chance of forcing the parent party to come to terms. Karunakaran can do far greater damage to the Congress than it can do to him.

By the way, that does not hold true for other parties, or at least not for cadre-based organisations such as the Bharatiya Janata Party and the CPI-M. Kalyan Singh was once chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the tallest leader in India's largest state. Where is he now that he has left the Bharatiya Janata Party?

Come to that, what is the status of the redoubtable Gowriamma now that she has left the Marxist ranks? What has happened to Nripen Chakravarty in Tripura, and to Saifuddin in West Bengal? I admit that they have immense potential to do mischief, but one cannot say that they have prospered after leaving the party. In fact, some question whether they can even win their own seats today!

The Congress party is paying the price for its decades-old obsession with ruling in Delhi. It was for this that Indira Gandhi cut a deal with Karunanidhi back in 1971 (in which she surrendered every single assembly seat in Tamil Nadu.) It is the same mirage that her daughter-in-law is chasing today, wooing not just Jayalalitha but also the Marxist leaders in West Bengal. If she wants to put up a viable alternative to the Vajpayee ministry, she needs the support of all the other small groups.

The Congress president knows how she failed to reach the magic figure of 272 in the Lok Sabha after pulling down the ministry in 1999. And do not forget that her position is actually weaker today; she has thirty fewer Congress members of Parliament now than she did in the twelfth Lok Sabha. (The expulsion of Sharad Pawar probably accounts for twenty of those missing seats!)

There is, of course, no guarantee that her new allies -- the AIADMK, Trinamul Congress, Tamil Maanila Congress -- will continue to back her once the votes are cast in the assembly election. The first two were once allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the third split over the issue of backing that same party.

In any case, it makes sense for any chief minister to be on good terms with Delhi. (No, I am not saying that either Jayalalitha or Mamta Banerjee is sure to become chief minister!)

Let me come back to the point where I began: Karunakaran's defiance of the party high command. The question is, and has always been, 'Can Sonia Gandhi dare to expel Karunakaran?'

T V R Shenoy