Dummy Declarations

The Telangana quitters of the Congress are merely using the party’s most overused attention-seeking device

Those hoping that the resignations of Congress MPs and MLAs of Andhra’s Telangana region would help destabilise the Central and state governments may not really have anything to cheer. The latest resignation episode may well be yet another drama staged to attract the party High Command’s attention, something Congressmen periodically resort to. Hypocrisy is not uncommon in Indian politics, but what is novel in this act of deceit is that it threatens to drag the constitutionally neutral office of the Speaker into the mess.

The nature of the drama can be judged from many offstage events that are not exactly ‘accidental’, even if one accepts an explanation offered by the Congress’ Warangal MP Rajaiah Siricilla for why his fellow Telangana MPs turned up late to submit their resignations to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar on 4 July. “The delay was accidental and not intentional. We are not against talks [with the Congress High Command to carve out Telangana], but we are committed to our resignation. We got delayed due to traffic congestion. We have got another appointment with the Speaker at 5.30 pm. We will stay here till then,” Siricilla told reporters waiting outside the Speaker’s office to watch the theatrics in Delhi that day. Indeed, Siricilla’s fellow quitters did join him a little later. They waited too, and left the Speaker’s office only after submitting their resignations at the re-appointed time, as announced. Except for one small detail. Not all of them were present. Together, seven MPs put in papers on behalf of nine MPs. This delays the acceptance of these resignations, since the Speaker must now speak to each MP individually before accepting or rejecting the same.

The Indian Constitution is clear on the matter. Under Article 101(3), a member of the House may resign his/her seat by addressing a resignation to its presiding officer (the Speaker in Parliament’s case); and once it is accepted, the seat is deemed vacant. At one time, the resignation was effective the moment it was rendered, but this Article was amended in 1974, and it now comes into effect only upon its acceptance. In other words, the presiding officer may refuse to accept the resignation—if s/he is not satisfied that it is genuinely voluntary, for example. This also means that the member can withdraw his resignation before the presiding officer accepts it.

In the current case, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha has already announced that she will talk to each individual MPs before taking a decision, which too would be announced only later during the next session of Parliament. There is thus more than enough time—until early August at least—for negotiations and withdrawals.

There are other ways to play poker with the rulebook. Take the case of Congress leader K Keshav Rao, a Rajya Sabha member who is at the forefront of the Telangana agitation. On 1 July, he threatened to resign his seat to protest the Centre’s delay on the issue. But, early on 4 July, instead of handing his resignation to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari in person, he turned his papers over to the chairman’s officer on special duty.

While the posturing in public goes on, such tactics give both the rebellious politicians and the party’s High Command enough space to strike a deal. Had Telangana’s MPs and MLAs turned in their resignations directly and personally to the presiding officers of their respective houses, political manoeuvres would’ve been that much more difficult.

No different is the sideshow in Hyderabad, the Andhra capital. Here, most MLAs of the Telangana region—the majority of them Congress legislators—submitted their resignations to Deputy Speaker MB Vikramarka, since the Assembly’s Speaker N Manohar was in the US to attend a function of Telugu-speaking NRIs. Although this event in America ended on 4 July, Manohar is unlikely to return to Hyderabad before

12 July. For, he is scheduled to attend the fifth conference of the Association of SAARC Speakers and Parliamentarians to be held in Delhi on 9–12 July. Moreover, the Andhra Assembly, having met for a few hours in the first week of June, need not hold another session until the first week of December. This technicality gives Manohar some six months to take a decision on the resignations.

In any case, sources say that most of the resignations have not even been drafted in the correct format, making additional space for rejections. Also, of the state’s 15 ministers from Telangana, 11 have submitted their resignations to the Chief Minister; this means that the Governor cannot step in until the CM forwards these papers to him. The twelfth minister (of textiles), Shankar Rao, was accompanying the Speaker on his US trip, so he faxed his resignation all the way from there to the Deputy Speaker in Hyderabad. If the drama needed its moment of absurdity, this was it.

Wrongly worded resignation letters addressed to the wrong person are not new. However, seldom has the office of Speaker—be it at the Centre or in the state—been used by so many for such brazen political opportunism. On most earlier occasions, legislators played their farce out through the office of the party president. In March 2006, for example, after Congress President Sonia Gandhi decided to resign as chairperson of the National Advisory Council (over the ‘office of profit’ issue) and as an MP, as many as 25 party MLAs from Madhya Pradesh together with Lok Sabha member Jyotiraditya Scindia turned in their resignations to her—in solidarity. Later, however, these legislators were ‘persuaded’ by Sonia Gandhi to withdraw their letters and resume work.

Likewise, days after Union Home Minister P Chidambaram announced on 9 December 2009 that the party would initiate the process of carving out a separate Telangana state, a total of 93 MLAs from Rayalseema and coastal Andhra Pradesh—all opposing the bifurcation of the state—submitted their resignations to the then Speaker N Kiran Kumar Reddy (who is now the CM). However, the one submitted by the Telugu Desam Party’s Ch Ramesh was the lone letter written in the prescribed format. The Speaker, therefore, announced his acceptance of only Ramesh’s resignation. The 92 others swiftly resumed work, satisfied that the Centre had set up the Srikrishna Commission to look into the matter.

This is not to say that the ongoing resignation drama cannot metastasise into a major political crisis at the Centre or in the state. Unexpected turns could always come about, given how surcharged the air in Telangana actually is right now. Popular pressure can sometimes turn even a travesty inside out. Yet, political gimmicks that drag constitutionally neutral offices into the fray do not serve the cause of democracy well. The sooner Congressmen straighten their act, the better.

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