The volte-face by Bihar leader Raghunath Jha, until the other day a close associate of Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Laloo Prasad Yadav, is unlikely to cause ripples in Bihar's pre-election scenario. Yet the fact that Jha has coolly attributed his shiftover to the Samata-BJP combine to the denial of a RJD ticket to him is another sign of the sharp deterioration in the country's political values. If Jha really did feel stifled in the company of Laloo Yadav, he should have left him when the former Chief Minister came under a cloud in the animal husbandry scam. Or, at the very least, when the CBI filed a charge-sheet against Laloo Yadav and the latter anointed his wife Rabri Devi as the chief minister of Bihar just before he went to the jail. Jha's explanation for his party-hopping amounts to a public confession that he is in politics only for personal gain.And what about the BJP-Samata combine, which has welcomed this self-confessed opportunist with open arms? By giving Jha a ticket for the Lok Sabha elections,Laloo's opponents appear to have completely abdicated the moral high ground from which they had claimed to wage a campaign against corruption and political immorality. True, neither is Jha the lone politician to have defected for personal gain, nor is the BJP-Samata combine the only political outfit to have rewarded a blatant opportunist. The case of Uttar Pradesh mafia don D.P. Yadav is quite illustrative. Yadav represented the BSP from the Sambhal Lok Sabha seat in the 11th Lok Sabha. Just a fortnight ago, he had quit the BSP and joined Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party with great fanfare, claiming that the move was aimed at strengthening secular forces. Now, on being denied a ticket to contest the elections, he has promptly abandoned the SP too and will now contest as the Jantantrik BSP candidate for the Sambhal seat with the support of the BJP.
The political entrepreneur in India has never been unduly bothered by considerations of ideology and party loyalty. The current spate of defections, however,indicate a qualitative change in the situation. In fact, it points to the undermining of the party-system itself. What is particularly disturbing is that not only do leaders of most political parties seem reconciled to this situation, they are more than willing to benefit from it. We have had a Mulayam Singh weaning away legislators from the parties which supported his minority government in UP during the 1994-95 period. The Congress had no qualms of conscience in engineering defections in the Gujarat BJP and in supporting the Shankarsinh Vaghela's government.
The BJP not only gave ministerial berths to all the defecting legislators in UP to save the Kalyan Singh government, but a `spotless' politician like Atal Behari Vajpayee openly exhorted Congress MPs to switch sides after the fall of the Gujral government. All this was supposedly done in the interest of the nation and the common man. Now that neither the country's virtuoso politicians nor any of its responsible political parties are concerned aboutanything apart from grabbing power, it is time for the people to assert themselves. They should give their verdict on this issue by turning out the turncoats in the coming elections, irrespective of their political affiliation.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
