Sangma Emerges Big Player In High-Stake Politics

Speaker PA Sangma emerged on Thursday as a potent piece on the political chessboard, strategically placed and clearly willing to move aggressively. By admitting the Bharatiya Janata Partys motion to repeal the Uttar Pradesh governor, he deftly presented the United Front with a challenge to hang together or fall apart.

On the same day, he embarrassed the BJP by accepting East Delhi member of Parliament B L Sharmas resignation from the House after Sharma decided to withdraw it.

Most Congress leaders apparently had little idea about what the dimunitive Speaker, who was placed in the powerful job by PV Narasimha Rao, was planning. Yet, it is the Congress that can hope to gain from the byelection in East Delhi, if it fights as hard as the BJP did to wrest Chindwara from it a few weeks ago.

 

And, when the house votes on the BJPs motion on UP, the Congress will be projected as the stabilising influence while the United Front constituents sort out their differences.

The man who was just a minister of state until a couple of years ago has emerged as a bold and accomplished player of high stakes politics. When a senior politician asked Sangma some weeks ago if he was interested to be President or Vice-president, he replied with a laugh that he didnt want to divorce politics, that he had other things in mind.

Sangma, who turned 50 last September, has the advantage of being a tribal from the north-east at a time when the political centre of gravity has shifted to the social and geographical peripheries.

Plus, he has built a clean, efficient image, as chief minister of Meghalaya and as Union minister.

By admitting the motion on UP, Sangma has strengthened the office of Speaker. The splintered house was the ideal opportunity for the Speaker to become as active a player in influencing politics as the Supreme Court has been in the last couple of years. But it needed an astute political mind to see what was required.

He cannot be faulted for putting the 14-party coalition on the mat for taking the Lok Sabha for granted while they spoke in different voices on a serious issue like the law and order situation in the countrys biggest state.

The government had all of seven days to sort out its collective stand. The first notice of a motion under rule 184 demanding recall of the governor was submitted by BJP leader Jaswant Singh on February 27, a week before the Speaker announced his ruling on March 6.

While the three main players in the controversy, Home Minister Indrajit Gupta, Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, played the statements game, the Speaker has moved in to force them to function as members of a single government - or face the consequences.