The present rumpus involving the Congress and the DMK is the fallout of their devious policies. First, the Congress allowed the DMK to appoint ministers like Andimuthu Raja despite their dubious record and then turned a blind eye to their shenanigans to keep the DMK in good humour. This is the basis of the so-called coalition dharma, which the prime minister has tried to justify by suggesting that any adherence to the straight and narrow path in such circumstances will lead to elections every six months.

But, in trying to avoid elections in quick succession, the Congress has succeeded in besmirching its own reputation to such an extent that it must be scared of facing the electorate in the near future. The compromise with venality which the coalition dharma signified has boomeranged to cause grievous damage to the party’s reputation. The DMK, too, has been hurt although no one will know how badly till the electoral verdict in Tamil Nadu is out in the middle of May. There is little doubt, however, that outside of Tamil Nadu, the octogenarian patriarch, M. Karundanidhi, with his two wives and squabbling sons and daughter has come to represent the worst aspects of Indian politics.

For the Congress, with a longer and more glorious history, and the hope it still inspires about the pursuit of inclusive policies, the mud on its face will be difficult to wipe off if only because it confirms that the party has never been too serious about fighting corruption. The taint is not the result of the Bofors saga alone, even its more recent endeavours to buy the support of Shibu Soren and Co. to remain in power and the subsequent accommodation of Soren in the cabinet in UPA-I despite the murder charges against him, showed that the party was rarely guided by ethical considerations in choosing its allies. All that mattered to it was to remain in power by hook or by crook.

Till now, the Congress had managed to pursue this cynical objective successfully because of the charisma of its leaders, the weakness of the opposition and the reluctance of the judiciary to probe its wrong-doings too closely. It stumbled only once in 1975 when Indira Gandhi fell foul of the law. But she solved the problem by imposing a semi-dictatorship because neither she nor the Congress could conceive of being out of power.

But, now, it is different. First, the charisma of the party’s leaders has waned. Secondly, the opposition parties have become much stronger even if their spread across the country is uneven. But so is the Congress’s. And, thirdly, not only has the judiciary become a lot more active, the media, too, is no longer willing to crawl when asked to bend as during the Emergency.

The way in which the Congress has landed in its present troubles, it appears to be unaware of these changes. It still thought that it could bypass moral imperatives and that no one would notice. Perhaps the ease with which it avoided being legally trapped in the Bofors affair (although it couldn’t evade the taint) and could not prevent a suspect, Ottavio Quottrocchi, from escaping although an income-tax tribunal has branded him as guilty, emboldened the Congress. It thought it could pull off the same Houdini trick in the spectrum scam, too.

But just as Narendra Modi has discovered that the Supreme Court will not let him off the hook where the 2002 riots are concerned, similarly, the Congress has found that references to coalition dharma will not save it from the illegalities of the scandal. The Congress’s legal difficulties have been compounded, of course, by political ones because the DMK, seemingly less concerned about its image than the Congress, does not see any reason why it should not play hard ball to intimidate the latter, as it did throughout the period of UPA-I and up to recent months.

But even if Mulayam Singh Yadav bails out the Congress in the event of a rupture with the DMK, as Jayalalitha had promised to do earlier, the Congress has learnt the vital lesson that coalitions do not justify winking at corruption. Most people would have thought that this wasn’t something that needed to be learnt by decent individuals. But, as the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are “different” from ordinary people, so are the politicians. (IPA)