Kamal Ghorui
Suvendu, Vijay have particularly tough jobs to do
There was a meme doing the rounds that Bengal’s waiting a resignation letter, Tamil Nadu’s waiting an appointment letter, and Kerala’s waiting to see who’s appointed. Now one is done – Suvendu Adhikari, frontrunner for Bengal CM’s post, has the job.
The second is on the boil – Vijay is Tamil Nadu’s CM-designate, with support from Congress’s 5, CPI’s 2, CPM’s 2 and others, taking the total, with his party’s 107 seats, to over the halfway mark of 118. The third’s still work-in-progress, some Tweedledum Tweedledee, as Congress tosses and turns on neta names and Delhi-Kochi games.
Adhikari’s primary task, and challenge, is to ensure peaceful transition in the days ahead, as he grapples with dismantling a political infrastructure shaped by a culture of political violence.
The mandate for BJP was a vote for change, an antiincumbency vote. How that is imagined in terms of jobs, education, health infra, will be key. Peace and stability are essential if investors are, at last, to hop on to the Howrah Express.
As for Tamil Nadu, investors are holding their breath. It’s never quite done, until CM is in the chair. And sometimes, even then, it still isn’t done. As debutant Vijay is finding out. Governor, controversially, had put him to the primary test – get the numbers. Now that he has passed that, he must pass a floor test, vote of MLAs’ confidence, which, sometimes, can be slippery, going by experience across states.
Once Vijay has the House’s confidence, he’ll need to get down to, what is, any minority govt’s primary task – consensus building and collaboration, to turn the wheels of good governance. Leading a minority govt is hard work, never done-and-dusted. A tough challenge for political veterans – for a newbie, it’s truly baptism by fire.
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