Back to the future

The New Year will be erected on the plinth  of the immediate past

Pt Prachand Sharma Delhi

Political prophesying isn't easy: ask any astrologer, or psephologist, how he has fared in predicting election results and he'll tie himself into knots explaining why his prescience bombed. Those who say they are right are so waffly and ambivalent in their assessments that they can, and do, claim they predicted any result. The truth is that most political astrologers arrive at their conclusions after reading newspapers and magazines and/or ingesting the gratuitous analyses on television. The pundits go wrong, and so do the crystal-gazers.

We at Hardnews, having taken mercy on this devil's legion of charlatanry and ignorance, are putting together what we think could happen in 2005, the end of the first half of the first decade of the New Millennium. Our predictions are based not on any reading of planetary transits, but on our ability to connect the dots.

We called 2004 "a hinge year" in our last issue, which means that we hope that the New Year will be different from what was undeniably, in Queen Elizabeth's vivid description of another year, annus horribilis.

In our visualisation, the Congress-led United Pro-gressive Alliance coalition government at the Centre could hurtle from one capitalist predicament to another Marxist one — not unlike the crisis of capitalism that Karl Marx predicted in his Communist Manifesto.

The first threat could come from Tamil Nadu. Isn't it the state that decides how politics unravels at the Centre? The Congress government in 1996 lost after it botched up Tamil Nadu. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition lost when it got its alliance wrong in Chennai in the 2004 Parliamentary elections.

This time, however, the reasons could be different. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa is forcing the pace of politics in an unprecedented manner, waiting for neither the Parliamentary nor the Assembly elections. The arrest of the Kanchi Shankaracharya in a murder conspiracy is an example. Making a direct appeal to the lower-caste Dravidian followers of the late Ramaswamy Naicker who detest muths and Brahmins alike, Jayalalithaa wants to annex the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's (DMK) constituency. Her next step could be arraigning DMK leader M K Stalin, son of party patriarch M Karunanidhi, over the "flyover scam". If she does, Karunanidhi would want the Central government to take action against Jayalalithaa, or else.

The other major event could revolve around Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. If Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Lalu's archenemy, senses electoral victory in Bihar, he might pull out of the United Progressive Alliance government and lead a campaign against the seemingly invincible Rashtriya Janata Dal leader. The Centre could be rattled and Lalu might turn unreasonable. A setback in Bihar could embolden non-Congress forces to take a shot at the Central government. Leaders like Subramanian Swamy are waiting to cobble together a challenge with disparate entities such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati.

If, touchwood, the Congress survives all this, many interesting things are in store for the Indian polity. First, a reshuffle: if Congress president Sonia Gandhi returns in good time from her vacation, she might undertake a big reshuffle ejecting some ministers who haven't measured up to the expectations of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi. Those who could get the chop include P M Sayeed, Jaipal Reddy and Home Minister Shivraj Patil.Will Sonia Gandhi replace Manmohan Singh? Watch this space for action in March.