Commentary/T V R Shenoy

Kesri's unleashes 'friendly' PROs to doctor poll lists

What is the full form of the abbreviation 'PRO'? Ordinarily, it means public relations officer, somebody whose job is to make others say good things about the boss.

In contemporary Congress parlance, however, it has taken on another significance. At the All India Congress Committee headquarters PRO means Pradesh Returning Officer, a representative of the high command whose job is to oversee the orderly conduct of organisational polls.

Or is it? I have said it before and I say it again: the Congress is not a political party, but a money-minting corporation. In which case, of course, the abbreviation 'PRO' must be read in the appropriate context.

So it proves. The current crop of Congress PROs have shown precious little interest in fair elections. Their object is to get people to praise their employer -- Sitaram Kesri.

It has been a very long time since the Congress went through the turmoil of internal elections. So long, in fact, that they have forgotten it used to be the Congress Working Committee as a whole that selected the PROs. In 1997, Chacha Kesri made it a presidential prerogative.

(Laloo Prasad Yadav, a fellow Bihari, is a mere novice before the experienced Chacha. He permitted working president Sharad Yadav to select the Janata Dal PROs. See what happened!)

Those handpicked PROs have done their best to choose delegates who will change Kesri's current provisional status to a permanent one. I invite you to see some of the results.

S S Sangla -- a name unfamiliar even to the majority of Congressmen -- was entrusted with Bihar, the second largest state in the country. Jagannath Mishra, the Congress strongman in these parts, has long been an outspoken critic of Kesri. But Sangla did his job so well that a disgusted Mishra was forced to bow out of the contest.

Nagendra Jha was sent to conduct polls in West Bengal. The party's most visible face in the state is the fiery Mamata Bannerjee, no fan of the party leadership. But Jha managed what even the Communists couldn't -- silencing Mamata Bannerjee.

Digvijay Singh, Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, has been silently stoking dissent against Kesri. But even he, head of the largest state still ruled by the Congress, could not resist Kamaluddin Ahmed's wiles. Madhya Pradesh showed a clean sweep for Kesri.

I have mentioned only three PROs of the thirty-two appointed by Kesri, but you get the picture. They were handpicked to do a job, and they did it.

What was their task exactly? As it happens, we have an example in the shape of Kerala. Here, the infighting reached such heights that the PRO couldn't contain it. The result of all the mud-slinging is that we know precisely how a PRO operates.

Kishore Chandra Doe was the man Kesri sent to Kerala. His job was to appoint block returning officers, who in turn would engineer the election of loyal candidates. The appointment of the BROs is done on a quota basis, thereby hopefully ensuring that each local chieftain gets enough.

Deo decided to split the BROs in a ratio of 6:6:2. That is, for every six of A K Antony's men the K Karunakaran group would receive an equal number, and the rest would make do with two.

The result was chaos. Poor Deo quit in disgust, fuming over his treatment by Karunakaran. But I am not going to comment on that just now.

The point to note is the way Congress defines the democratic exercise of elections -- pre-determined quotas leading up to a pre-determined result. The only real contest is the tussle over the appointment of a 'friendly' PRO.

Once that is settled, anything goes -- especially, I must add, bogus membership lists. In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, it seems the Congress has enrolled 670,000 members.

What is wrong with that? Simply this -- the Congress couldn't poll that many votes in the last election! In the next general election (not too far away) it will be instructive to compare the actual votes in the Congress' favour with the nominal membership, constituency by constituency.

In the debate on the motion of confidence moved by I K Gujral, the Congress vociferously made the point that a general election was unwelcome. Well, now we now why -- no handpicked PROs on the job and no bogus electoral rolls!

Tell us what you think of this column