The threat to the Mufti government, which could be seen amidst all that was going on, has disappeared. PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, who was prepared to sacrifice her government, can now concentrate on improving her party’s prospects in the Lok Sabha elections. The Congress will also have much explaining to do for its about-turn on the Bill. The controversy is unlikely to die with parties like the BJP trying to exploit it for its electoral advantage. In any case, the drama enacted in Jammu shows that politicians of all hues are only bothered about their own interests. What happens to the interests of Jammu and Kashmir’s daughters is not their concern.

But the issue is simple and clear. Taj Television, which owns TEN Sports, secured in 2002 the telecast rights for all international cricket matches to be played in that country for the next five years by paying $14.5 million to the Pakistan Cricket Board. Given the usually hostile relations with that country, nobody had then anticipated such a high-pitched match to be played in Pakistan so soon. That is why the babu-run Prasar Bharati, showing lack of imagination as usual, did not evince any interest in the business deal and TEN Sports struck a goldmine. But now the government channel, on the pretext of public interest, is trying to arm-twist TEN Sports into sharing its exclusive telecast rights. The latter is willing to do so, but only in low cable connectivity areas. However, Doordarshan demands a share in the revenue from advertisements also.

For quite some time, Ms Banerjee and Mr Sangma have been facing a lot of problems. Because of dissension in her Trinamool Congress, she was unable to take on the Left Front government in West Bengal in the manner she wanted to. Her plans to become the Railway Minister so that she could use the portfolio to subserve her political interests had gone awry. She is now known more for her tantrums than for her dogged fight against the Left Front government. In the process, she lost her clout with the NDA government at the Centre.

The charter of fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India inter alia guarantees freedom of association. Under Article 19(C), any group of Indian citizens can get together to form associations or unions of their choice subject to the laws of the land and reasonable restrictions in the interest of national security, etc.

Until the enactment of the Fifty-second Constitution Amendment Act, 1985, which added the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution, there was no mention of political parties. Even now, there is no specific law governing the setting-up or functioning of political parties or regulating their conduct.

The Election Commission maintains a register of political parties. Any association or body of citizens wishing to participate in the electoral process by putting up candidates gets itself registered as a political party with the Election Commission under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, by furnishing the required documents and data about the party. Thus, a few hundred political parties are registered with the commission.

Those parties that secure a certain percentage of votes in a minimum number of states or a number of seats in Parliament can be “recognised” as national parties. Those parties that are confined to a particular state or states can be recognised by the Election Commission as state parties. The recognition by the commission is solely for the purpose of allocation of symbols and is governed by the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order 1968 (as amended from time to time).

So far as the Election Commission and the Representation of the People Act are concerned, a party may be recognised as a national party or as a state party. There is no provision for the recognition of a political organisation as a regional party.

Ideally, parties with a national agenda, a nation-wide appeal and a wide support base are considered national parties, and parties confined to only certain areas and having only local or sub-national agendas are called regional parties as opposed to the national parties.

It would, however, be wrong to think that all the so-called regional parties are not national or that all those recognised as national parties are, in fact, not regional. For instance, the CPM and the CPI, which are among the parties formally recognised as national parties by the Election Commission on stretched technical grounds, are largely confined to West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.

Also, the appeal, the agenda and the orientation of some of the parties denied recognition as national parties transcend geographical regional boundaries.

Under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order of the Election Commission, political parties may be categorised as “recognised” or “unrecognised” ones. Of the recognised parties, recognition may be either as a “state party” or as a “national party”.

To be recognised as a state party, it has to be in existence for five years, have a certain number of members elected to the House of the people or the State Assembly, or it should have secured a certain percentage of votes during the general election to the House of the people or the Legislative Assembly of the state.

Only a party which is treated as such in not less than four states or has certain number of members elected to the House of the people shall be recognised as a national party for purposes of allotment of symbols.

Notwithstanding the technical and legal positions in regard to the categorisation of parties, it is also necessary to consider the matter from the perspective of the needs of political stability, good governance and the unity and integrity of the nation. It needs little argument to assert that on all these counts as also if democracy and freedom have to survive, we need the emergence of two major national parties or alliances.

Small parties with appeals to narrower caste, communal or regional identities and parochial interests are an affront to national unity and integrity and, in the struggle of power politics, sometimes become parties of brinkmanship, bluff and blackmail. It is well known that both at the Union and states levels wherever no single party or pre-poll alliance with a common programme is returned with a clear majority and an unprincipled coalition is put together merely to share the spoils of power, all the energies of the leading alliance partner and/or the leader have to be devoted to the struggle for survival in power. It is so whether the party is the Congress or the BJP.

From the perspective of the citizens’ interests, it would be ideal if one of the two national parties — the Congress or the BJP — is in power and the other is in the opposition. That will be the surest guarantee for political stability, good development-oriented governance and national unity and integrity.

Three such souls now stay in my memory in the years of long illness and twilight.

These three souls (all gone to the other world in the last nine years or so) walked into my life, suddenly, unawares, as it were. What they have meant to me and my wife is hard to describe. For, all three persons had one thing uniquely common — the gift of happiness, a happiness they radiated as if some inner energy had lit up their spirit.

First of all the late R.L. Wadhwa who when I came to know him was perhaps I.G. Police, Punjab Government. Later, he was elevated to the rank of Director General, and as I wrote a requiem at the time of his passing away, he was “a saint in uniform”.

Since the Sikh militancy was yet not spent, and was fairly active in some pockets of Punjab, he always had a couple of bodyguards with sten-gun as he drove to our house in Sector 11. In a few weeks’ time, our two families became close friends, and he started asking my advice regarding a novel he had written on the Partition holocaust of 1947. He also was a poet, and I had his volume of verse in English published by P. Lal (Writers Workshop, Calcutta). But alas, a domestic, fraternal fraud regarding the ancestral property in Meerut caused a massive heart-attack, and he died that evening. That 3-4 year association with him is one of our treasured memories now.

Soon after his death, or around that time, I had a severe neurological collapse which has disabled me now for over 10 years. And then, Mr Wadhwa’s surrogate, as it were, one evening stood framed in our living-room door. He was Mr H.S. Kwatra, a retired Chief Magistrate and then living in Sector 11 with his frail wife. He would call at us each evening come rain, come storm. Again, a face of deep spiritual charm. He blushed whenever he saw a love-scene on our TV. Innocent beyond measure, and a man of compassion beyond belief.

And when in 1999, he too died, I felt desolated, and even wrote a poem on him, and also a long essay. One thing he always emphasised was the theme of ingratitude. He had suffered from some close family members and friends, and he was prepared to consign such persons to the lowest circle in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

There were a few tense moments for Pawar and friends till the Election Commission's ruling last Monday awarding the symbol to Pawar's faction of the NCP. "We had spent five years popularising the symbol across the country," beamed Pawar after the EC's ruling. Party sources say there was a contingency plan to come up with an alternative symbol to fight the polls despite there not being enough time to make it popular among voters.

In the five years since Pawar, Tariq Anwar and Purno Sangma wrote their famous epistle to Sonia Gandhi questioning her credentials to become India's Prime Minister, the clock embossed on the tricolour has sprouted across Maharashtra. Pawar, in whose famed memory rests the name of every local level Congress Party leader, has been busy encashing his IOUs from old colleagues.

The old Congress Party retains its strength only in pockets of Maharashtra with even some of its top leaders indebted to Pawar. The families of Chief Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and Pawar have been quite close for years despite the uneven nature of their political relationship. Even before the Congress Party leadership decided to tie up with the NCP, both Shinde and Pawar had already begun discussing a pre-election alliance.

With Shinde backing the move at the highest level, Sonia Gandhi has agreed to let Pawar lead the battle in Maharashtra. Both parties have amicably carved up most of the 48 seats among themselves. Pawar has also got the small restless partners in the Democratic Front government to stay within the fold so that their votes are not split to the benefit of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party combine.

Still it is early days yet and the saffron combine is feeling for loose chips on the edifice that the DF is building. BJP General Secretary Pramod Mahajan and his brother-in-law former Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde scored a significant victory by wooing the Maratha Mahasangh, a caste-based outfit in the state.

The Mahasangh, which aims to turn the Maratha community into a major votebank in Maharashtra, has so far thrown in its lot with the Congress and the NCP. According to Shashikant Pawar (not related to Sharad), president of the Mahasangh, the community accounting for 30 per cent of the population in Maharashtra has not gained anything despite contributing successive Chief Ministers to the state.

The Wednesday coup was the second victory for the saffron duo having bagged the proponents of a separate Vidarbha state last week. The Vidarbha region of Maharashtra was seen as a bastion of the Congress till the nascent Vidarbha Aghadi allied with the Sena-BJP. Farmers' leader Sharad Joshi and local industrialists like newspaper baron Banwarilal Purohit have floated the Vidarbha Aghadi to work for a separate state to be carved out of Maharashtra.

The Vidarbha region has 11 Lok Sabha seats and the BJP, by aligning with the Aghadi, hopes to split the Congress-NCP votes. The Shiv Sena, which has been vocally opposing the proposal to carve Vidarbha out of Maharashtra, is keeping quiet on the issue. "The BJP will be giving a few seats to the Aghadi from its quota," says a Shiv Sena leader. Till the Aghadi came into the picture, the BJP was to contest 26 seats, leaving the rest of the 48 seats in Maharashtra to the Sena.

But the biggest trump card Mahajan and Munde hope to play is the fake stamp paper racket masterminded by forger Abdul Karim Telgi. In all 65 people, including former Mumbai Police Commissioner Ranjit Sharma, are in jail for links with Telgi. Former Deputy Chief Minister and NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal had to quit after fingers were pointed at him for alleged links with Telgi.

While the Sena and the BJP are planning to make Telgi a major campaign plank in the cities, they have other issues like unremunerative prices to cotton and sugarcane farmers for their rural constituents. Both parties have been leading protests and agitations in rural Maharashtra in the hope that elections to the state legislature and the Lok Sabha would be held simultaneously.

However, their campaign seems to have dulled considerably with the DF government not dissolving the House despite tremendous pressure brought on it. The term of the Maharashtra legislature is due to expire in November this year and Shinde insisted that his government had the mandate to last out the term. The Election Commission also chose to skirt a minefield, though barely six months would remain in the life of Maharashtra's current legislature after the Lok Sabha poll.

Meanwhile, the Shiv Sena is going about its election exercise quietly. Balasaheb Vikhe-Patil, its MP in the 13th Lok Sabha, joined the Congress thereby giving the Sena a jolt in Ahmednagar. Undaunted, Shiv Sena leader and heir apparent Uddhav Thackeray is quietly looking at strong candidates to take on the Congress-NCP alliance.

The Shiv Sena is likely to field its Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Nirupam against Congress MP Sunil Dutt in Mumbai North-West while former minister Leeladhar Dhake may take on former Maharashtra Chief Minister Abdul Rehman Antulay in Raigad.

Shiv Sena sources say the party may field several new faces.

The coming elections will also see parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party trying to play spoilers. Leaders of both parties have indicated that they would contest more than half the seats in Maharashtra.