Adani issue puts Opposition unity to test

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist

BOFORS was the last major financial shell game with profound implications for the country’s security to shake up and eventually unseat a powerful ruling party, the Congress, and its leader Rajiv Gandhi. The over three years between the signing of the Rs 1,437-crore deal on March 24, 1986, with AB Bofors, a Swedish arms manufacturer, for the supply of 400 155-mm Howitzer guns for the Army and the Congress’s downfall in November 1989 were bestrewn with dramatic developments which foreshadowed the denouement.

On April 16, 1987, a Swedish radio channel alleged that kickbacks were paid to sweeten the deal. That was enough of a spur to an Opposition — that had been squeezed into one corner of the Lok Sabha after the Congress earned a record mandate in the 1984 elections — to go for the jugular with whatever resources it had. The Opposition persistently clamoured for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to investigate the charges.

Then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was unyielding to begin with and on April 20, 1987, he informed Parliament that no bribes were paid and no middlemen were involved. On August 6, 1987, the government relented and set up a JPC under former Union minister B Shankaranand. In February 1988, Indian investigators landed in Sweden to probe the issue. On July 18, 1989, the JPC submitted its findings. Soon thereafter, the CAG drilled the final nail in the Bofors coffin, questioning the process of selection and purchase of the gun. The last straw for Rajiv Gandhi came when Opposition MPs, including those from the BJP and the Left, resigned en masse, prompting Socialist leader Madhu Dandavate to indulge in hyperbole. “Now we need Comrade Vajpayee and Pandit Namboodiripad to work together to oust Rajiv,” Dandavate remarked.

It is useful to chronicle the Bofors saga from a political perspective because the events proved that even a thundering popular mandate could wound a party irreparably and claim its leader. Maybe 1989 was a black swan event, like that of Indira Gandhi’s ouster in 1977.

The Congress and Rahul Gandhi tried hard to implicate the Narendra Modi government in the purchase of 36 Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation before the 2019 elections, but the charge of receiving huge bribes came unstuck. The Congress stood isolated in its campaign against Modi because there were no takers in the Opposition.

There are harbingers that the Gautam Adani-Hindenburg issue — which principally concerns the alleged and overt patronage extended by the Modi government to Ahmedabad-based industrialist Adani whose spectacular rise and entry into the global club of who’s who provoked the West’s attention, interest and investigation — could regroup the Opposition in Parliament.

Two factors have apparently catalysed the situation. One, even regional parties that were considered ‘pro-Centre’ and ‘pro-Modi’, notably the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), find themselves pitted on their turfs against a rejuvenated BJP. In Telangana, for example, the BRS has Modi as its principal adversary and not a regional BJP leader or the Congress even in the Assembly election this year. Likewise, Mamata Banerjee, no friend of the BJP, is pitted against Modi in West Bengal. As much as Rahul and the Congress, provincial leaders, too, have looked for an opportune moment to corner Modi and they believe that the Adani case has given them the context to launch a campaign against the PM.

Two, Rahul Gandhi, in a vastly amended — and some say refurbished — version of his old self after his Bharat Jodo Yatra, played his cards in Parliament tactfully. He ensured that Congress president and Rajya Sabha Opposition leader M Mallikarjun Kharge mobilised the Opposition parties before and during the now-adjourned Parliament session and stayed in the background so that nobody could call him an ‘entitled legatee’. However, he articulated the Congress’s views on Adani-BJP in his speech in the Lok Sabha and asked searing questions on the businessman’s alleged close relations with Modi that went unanswered. It appeared as though the Opposition, including the BRS and the Aam Aadmi Party, otherwise antagonistic towards the Congress, was happy to pass the baton of the attack on the BJP and Modi to Rahul. There were no suggestions that Rahul was feckless and inattentive towards Parliament. Of course, the question of allowing the Congress and him to helm an Opposition front closer to 2024 is another matter and one riddled with complications.

Apart from assailing Modi for his alleged nepotism, the Opposition picked on the money invested by the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the State Bank of India — two traditional sources of financial security for the middle class — in the Adani group as examples of ‘cronyism’ at the cost of jeopardising the interests of the vulnerable salaried sections. The stress on the middle classes was significant, considering that they formed a strong support base of the BJP. Indeed, the Union Budget was billed as a bonanza for the middle-income groups. It has to be seen if the Congress and the Opposition sustain the momentum they generated in Parliament in the interregnum before the next leg of the Budget session.

The Opposition cannot function as a cohesive entity sporadically, especially a year before the next Lok Sabha polls, if it is to take on the BJP/NDA. The endeavour of bringing the parties together into a front seems impossible right now because it entails swaps and trade-offs, which the Congress is not willing to transact with the regional forces.

The outcome of the elections that follow this year will demonstrate if the political messaging from the Adani controversy has percolated down to people the country over or if Modi and the BJP have retained popular goodwill and support.