Ironically, after years of confrontation, the Congress leadership is now pinning all its hope on BJP’s support to get this critical bill passed in a hurry.

With just seven working days left in the final Parliament session of the UPA2, there is no clarity yet on how the Telangana bill will be treated. Nobody is even certain if it will be an ordinary bill, a money bill or a Constitutional amendment bill and whether the Congress leadership will be able to tame its MPs when the bill, in whatever form, is finally tabled in Parliament. In fact, the proposed state of Telangana is perhaps the biggest manifestation of the Manmohan Singh government's ad-hocism and rudderless decision making.

After days of embarrassing chaos, the only thing that the government has realised is that a bill to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh may be introduced only in Lok Sabha and not in Rajya Sabha as initially attempted. The bifurcation of a state has severe financial implications and as such it amounts to a money bill that should thus originate from the Lok Sabha. With that late realisation has come a host of complications, unending rounds of formal or informal meetings, new queries, fresh drafting and rushing of files back and forth from the Rajya Sabha secretariat to the Parliamentary Affairs ministry to the Home ministry, to PMO, to Rashtrapati Bhavan and to the Lok Sabha secretariat.

Incredibly, introducing the Telangana bill in Lok Sabha, the UPA's biggest electoral gamble, is going to be the biggest challenge this government has so far faced. And that is so not just because the emotive quotient of the Seemandhra MPs including those from the Congress is so high but also because of the arguable legal, technical and detailing flaws the bill contains in its present form.

What happened in Lok Sabha on Wednesday was shameful: Four union ministers, K Sambasiva Rao, D Purandeswari, K Chiranjeevi and Kotla Suryaprakash, all belonging to the ruling Congress, trooped into the well of the House and shouted slogans against their own government and disrupted proceedings. No one really cares if Railway Minister Mallikarjun Kharge missed out on his moment of glory and was forced to cut short his maiden rail budget speech. But it was reflective of the abysmal failure of the ruling party’s strategists and floor managers in disciplining its ministers. It also speaks volume of the total erosion of the Congress high command’s authority, at least with regard to the Andhra Pradesh unit that sent the highest number of MPs to both UPA1 and UPA2.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was quoted saying to a group of MPs by an informed source, "My heart bleeds at what is happening in the house. It is a sad day for democracy that such things are happening after all the appeals for calm." But who is to be blamed for that? His own cabinet colleague, Tourism Minister K Chiranjeevi, blamed the government for the situation. After his unresolved lunch diplomacy with top BJP leaders LK Advani, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley on the subject, Singh also chaired a Cabinet meeting in the evening to sort out some glaring lacunae in the bill. How far these issues have been addressed would be known only after it is tabled in Lok Sabha, possibly today.

Ironically, after years of confrontation, the Congress leadership is now pinning all its hope on BJP’s support to get this critical bill passed in a hurry. For the ruling Congress, the core issue is 17 Parliamentary seats in the proposed Telanagana, where the party can cash in on popular sentiment if it finally succeeds in creating the new state. A virtual obituary of the Congress has already been written in the rest of Andhra. If it fails to create Telangana, then it will be routed in both Seemandhra and Telangana.

The BJP realises that by supporting the passage of the bill it will be actually benefitting the Congress in the Telangana region and wishing away whatever little goodwill Modi has generated in Andhra and whatever small organisational base it has created there through years of toil. But the party has committed “too far, too much, and for too long” on Telangana to be seen to be retreating from there. A BJP leader from Andhra Pradesh told Firstpost: “The sign of Congress’s cremation in Andhra Pradesh is visible everywhere and known to all. Now if the BJP goes out and supports Congress on the bifurcation of the state, another pyre will be lit alongside the Congress’s. It will become instantly untouchable to voters and also to potential allies such as the TDP and YSR Congress. In Telangana region it is the Congress and TRS which will walk away with the credit, at least in the short term. The BJP may only gain in medium or long term.”

Therefore there is a need to read the fine print carefully when senior BJP leaders speak publicly. LK Advani for instance believes that this is the worst form of law-making that he has seen and has reportedly told a delegation of TDP MPs that the BJP will not support the Bill in its present form. “Congress was proposing the defective Bill deliberately knowing that the opposition parties would spike it," Nama Nageswar Rao, the TDP parliamentary party leader, quoted him as saying.

At the Prime Minister’s lunch, the BJP leaders told him that their stand on Telangana has not changed and asked the government to “put its own house in order” first as Congress MPs were in the forefront in disrupting Parliament. The BJP’s argument is that theissue will need long hours of threadbare discussion and government’s ability to take care of the amendments moved by various parties and leaders and also put that to vote. A most difficult if not an impossible task for the government to perform.

Sources said the demands that the BJP leaders placed before the PM included categorical insertion of financial package and provision of infrastructure support to the Seemandhra region, clarity on the status of Hyderabad, control of law and order subject and converting the bill into a Constitutional amendment if the Governor is to control the police and law and order in Hyderabad. There is also confusion with relation to the continuance of the existing Legislative Council of Andhra Pradesh.

The most glaring technical flaws in the current bill relate to giving power of policing, law and order of Hyderabad, the joint capital, to the Governor without any existing provision in the Constitution. The BJP and IUML are arguing that giving any such powers to the governor would require a Constitutional amendment, which in turn requires the majority of the total strength of the House and of two-thirds of those present and voting. Under the current circumstances, passage of a Constitutional amendment bill is almost impossible.

Congress leaders are also raising queries about this provision. The Constitution provides that the governor can be in charge of law and order in a UT or in Fifth Schedule Areas (for protection of Scheduled Tribes) or when a state is under President's rule. Since the proposed bill says the governor is to go by the advice of the state Cabinet on all other matters, whether the Governor in the joint capital would follow the advice of Telangana Cabinet or Seemandhra Cabinet is a big question and may be a source of everyday tripartite tussles. Various leaders are set to move amendments to this effect when the bill is brought for discussion.

Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley maintains that “the BJP has categorically stated that it is in favour of creation of a separate state of Telangana. We have, additionally, requested that the legitimate concerns of the people of Seemandhra should be addressed. Reconciliation of both these efforts is neither difficult nor impossible. Regrettably, the UPA has not taken effective steps in this direction. There are also lingering doubts about whether the UPA is following, legally and constitutionally, the correct course in an effort to create the state of Telangana. I have a lurking suspicion that the UPA is prolonging the issue. Is the eventual intent of the UPA to make the issue of creation of Telangana infructuous in the present session and consequently in the UPA rule?”

BJP leaders privately say that the task of fulfilling Telangana dream and working out a reasonable package for Seemandhra was going to be left to the next government at the Centre, which they hope to form in next three months.

The UPA’s challenge is to put its own house in order and pass a bill in seven working days that have been left (two of which would be marked for private member and one day for the vote on account) that took them 10 years of UPA1 and UPA2 to formulate.