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The end for Vajpayee appears to be nigh

Eighty million voters are lining up to cast their ballots as I write this column.Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram and Rajasthan are going to the polls. By the time you get to read these lines, the fates of the contestants would be sealed in the boxes. Many areas where the votes are being cast are so far-flung that it is going to be quite a while before the boxes are gathered together, brought to a central location and readied for the counting. So, it is not till Saturday, 28 November that the process of counting will begin. The results should be out that evening.

Less than 48 hours after the results are announced, Parliament is convening for its regular winter session. The timing could not be more unfortunate for the ruling coalition. For, by most accounts, the BJP is in serious difficulty. During the election campaign itself, its allies have let fly one after the other at the titular leader of their fragile coalition.

Jayalalitha was first, with a round condemnation of the wholly bogus accord on the implementation of the quasi-judicial interim award of the Cauvery Tribunal which the BJP has been touting as one of its two great achievements (the other being the nuclear blasts at Pokhran in May -- another electoral damp squib, no one is voting for the Bomb). She has flayed the agreement for neither having worked out how to measure the flow of the Cauvery's waters from Karnataka into Tamil Nadu, nor even where to measure it, the twin sticking points at which the first-ever meeting of the implementation authority (the PM and the two chief ministers) ended in a total impasse.

This has been followed up by loud lamentation over the home minister's failure to honour his alleged word to her over dismissing the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, an issue which acquires the highest urgency by the Supreme Court's recent order that the special courts constituted by the state government to try her on a whole series of corruption charges are perfectly in order. Her plea that arch rival M Karunanidhi be similarly tired on the charges he has been indicted for by the Sarkaria Commission 20 years ago have fallen on deaf ears, provoking her even further.

Next to fire her guns was Mamata Banerjee. She walked out of the coalition's central coordination committee protesting the BJP's failure to call a meeting of the committee to discuss the overwhelmingly priority issue of the prices of essential commodities. Prices of onions, potatoes, tomatoes, lentils, cooking oil and even salt have spun so drastically out of control that inflation has become the central issue of the campaign, virtually to the exclusion of everything else. The reason officially stated for refusing convene the committee is even more revealing. There could, it was said, be the voicing of criticism by its own partners of the government's failure to act.

If the coalition partners are themselves so critical of their government's failures on this front, it leaves little for the Opposition to say. Mamata has also declared that her party, the Trinamool (or "Grassroots") Congress, will be observing December 6, the anniversary of the day the BJP and its cohorts brought down the Babri Masjid in 1992, as "Black Day".

The Samata party of George Fernandes, defence minister in the coalition, is livid over the assassination of their candidate in the Delhi constituency of Nangloi Jat. The police have arrested five persons but the Samata party remains sceptical and unconvinced. They are persuaded that the BJP is involved in the murder and have described the arrests as an attempt to cover up the political angle which may involve the family of the former BJP chief minister of Delhi, Sahib Singh Verma.

The Shiv Sena of Balasaheb Thackeray, partners of the BJP in both the state government of Maharashtra and the Centre, are up in arms over Prime Minister Vajpayee's assertion that the central government will insist on a visit by Pakistan's cricket team proceeding on schedule and extending to the team full protection. The Shiv Sena is not only objecting strenuously to the team being invited to India but also threatening to disrupt the match in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena stronghold.

The Akali Dal too has its share of grouses. First, they are still to be fully reassured that the Terai district of Udham Singh Nagar, which has a large Sikh farming community exempted de facto from the state's land ceiling laws, will, in fact, be exempted from merger with the proposed new hill state of Uttarakhand (which the BJP, for quixotic reasons best known to themselves, intend to call Uttaranchal).

More immediate, however, is the problem of the rice farmers of Punjab, the state which has, in effect, fed all of India these last thirty years since the onset of the Green Revolution. Compounding a host of post-Green Revolution issues which are increasingly becoming the central political and economic reality of contemporary Punjab, there has been massive post-harvest crop loss owing to untimely rains after the harvested crop had reached the markets.

The Punjab government of the Akali Dal has demanded compensation to the affected farmers in the amount of Rs 7 billion, a humungous sum which the cash-strapped BJP government will find it almost impossible to provide. As of now, no compensation has been announced. This delay adds fuel to the fire.

Meanwhile, the Biju Janata Dal of Orissa, yet another of the coalition partners, has split. Both factions swear loyalty to the BJP but spew hatred at each other. It is only a matter of time before the central government says or does something which pleases one faction and annoys the other, thus signalling the time for the departure from the coalition of the displeased faction.

Knowing all this, alas only too well, the prime minister early in the campaign announced that the assembly poll could not be regarded as a referendum on the performance of his own government. Of course, it is not. But whether, in a technical sense, it is a referendum or not, the fact is that a significant reverse in the assembly poll will persuade a shaky coalition already riven by internal dissension that the time has come to jump a sinking ship.

Therefore, while Vajpayee draws what comfort he can from assertions by his partners of continued support, the end for him appears to be nigh. The winter session coincides with nine months of his government. It looks as if full term will lead only to abortion. We have ahead of us here in India a long, hot winter.

Mani Shankar Aiyar