DNA Edit: Gathering Storm

The first day of the Budget Session of Parliament forebodes an eventful time ahead. Fresh from the N-E defeats in Tripura and Nagaland, the Congress will be keen on swerving the political debate from its dismal performance to the Nirav Modi orchestrated fraud on PNB. Simultaneously, the BJP will not dither in raking up the sore-spot issue of Karti Chidambaram, who has been arrested by the CBI on charges of demanding a bribe for regularising an illegal investment via the agency of his father and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Karti Chidambaram was arrested at a time when the pitch against BJP’s purported complicity in PNB scam was taking centrestage. With Karti’s arrest, the BJP might have put off the heat emanating from the banking mess for some time but it will have to decisively quell the issue or the field will be Congress’s for the taking.

Also, if more bones tumble out of the PNB case, the media will be more than eager to club the BJP as a plutocratic government, no different than the UPA regime. For the BJP, undoing the optics of the PNB fraud case remains a major challenge. Unlike the Vijay Mallya case, the BJP government cannot completely wash its hand of the scam and pass the blame onto UPA. Worryingly for the BJP, the scam holds the potential of considerably denting the lofty promise of a corruption-free governance riding which the BJP came to power in 2014. Unfortunately, Nirav Modi fleeing the country puts the BJP on the same pedestal as the Congress, although in the case of BJP, there are next-to-no serious charges that can be levelled against its ministers.

In the coming days of the Budget Session, the BJP will have to hijack the public imagination with explosive details of the INX media case. The Congress, predictably, will be voicing the hackneyed defence of the BJP starting a vendetta. But replies like these hardly have any deep public interest coded in them, nor are the people so naive to believe that the Congress has never waged one against ministers of the Opposition.

Meanwhile, MPs from Andhra Pradesh are raising the pitch on their demand of grant special-category status to the state. Andhra Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has gone on record expressing his displeasure with BJP, its ally at the Centre, for not meeting the promises made by the Congress when it bifurcated the state in 2014. Reportedly, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and BJP President Amit Shah will be meeting the Andhra Finance Minister and a TDP delegation to assuage their concerns.

However, one suspects that the meeting might not amount to much, given that YSR Congress party chief Jaganmohan Reddy has already threatened to move a no-confidence motion in Parliament on the issue of special-category status. Failure to resolve this dilemma will mean that the BJP will lose another of its ally to disenchantment. Earlier in January, the Shiv Sena had declared publicly that it will not align with the BJP in the next state elections and 2019 general elections.