It was this possibility which induced her to oppose the nuclear deal since she feared that the government would fall if the Left carried out its threat of withdrawing support if the deal was signed. In the event, the backing received by the Congress from the Samajwadi Party helped the government to survive. But Sonia’s opportunism was evident even with regard to a measure such as the nuclear deal, which ultimately enabled the party to win last year by enlisting the support of the middle classes.

The same expediency was again seen when she virtually forced the government to include the enumeration of castes in the census operations only to keep Lalu Yadav, Paswan and Sharad Yadav in good humour. She turned a deaf ear to the murmurs of protest from even within the Congress to the opening of a Pandora’s box by boosting the aspirations of the new configurations of castes as the result of the fresh count. To overturn an eight-decade-old ban without a thorough assessment, and when the prime minister was clearly against it, merely to maintain the party’s majority underlines short-term electoral calculations.

The same expediency apparently explains why Andimuthu Raja was first inducted in the Union cabinet in 2009 even when the telecom scam had already surfaced, and why he was allowed to continue for more than a year despite mounting evidence of wrong-doing in his ministry. The sole reason why the clamour for Raja’s resignation was ignored was to retain the DMK’s support and enable the government to remain in power. Yet, as is now obvious, in all the cases where the Congress bent over backwards to mollycoddle its allies, it miscalculated the latter’s importance.

The Left, for instance, has been steadily losing ground since 2009 while the political impotence of Lalu Yadav and Paswan was exposed in the Bihar elections. Even Sharad Yadav has withdrawn into the background because of the rising stature of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, his colleague in Janata Dal (United). The DMK’s reputation, too, has been tarnished so badly by Raja’s antics that it is no longer supporting him by claiming that the telecom scam was a conspiracy against the Dalits.

It can seem, therefore, that Sonia’s failings relate not only to the absence of principles, but also to an inability to assess the worth of an ally. If, to start with, she had stood by Manmohan Singh on the nuclear deal, she might have been able to dissuade the Left from pursuing such an aggressive course considering that people within it, such as Jyoti Basu, and sympathizers outside, such as Amartya Sen, were against the communists withdrawing support from the government.

Similarly, if she had been to persuade the DMK at least six months ago that sacking Raja was the best option, then the Congress might have been able to avoid the current storm it is facing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s and the CAG’s indictments of Raja. In the context of these mistakes in aid of the so-called coalition dharma, it is difficult to believe that the Congress’s feverish attempts to shake off the charges of corruption by proposing fast-track courts to deal with such cases will restore its credibility.

Besides, there is a wide gulf between wishful thinking and actual implementation. For one, the setting up of the fast-track courts will take time. For another, there is no certainty that the CBI and other prosecutors of the corrupt will be given a free hand considering how these agencies have been manipulated by the ruling parties. If the Congress is serious about checking corruption, it only has to ensure that the Supreme Court’s 2005 orders to provide functional autonomy to the police are carried out.

If the police and the CBI adhere to the rule of law and not the dictates of politicians, then all the courts will follow a fast track in punishing the guilty. But a restoration of their professionalism will require a dramatic change in the political mindset with the shedding of feudal and colonial habits. (IPA Service)