A messy affair is kind to no one. The entire sequence of events from the serving of the arrest warrant on Ms Uma Bharti, then chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, by the Congress-led government of Karnataka, headed by Mr Dharam Singh, to the present confusion over her date of release has been a mess of one kind or another. It is surprising that the Congress high command took quite so much time to remember that the politics of vindictiveness has never worked in India. It failed with the Shah Commission after the Emergency, and it failed again when Ms J. Jayalalithaa, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, decided to arrest her political rival, Mr M. Karunanidhi, the leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, in a midnight raid. And these are only two examples. By backtracking, with the plea that it has decided to stand by the state government’s 2002 decision to withdraw all cases against Ms Uma Bharti, the Karnataka government has merely managed to look foolish, without redeeming the party high command’s situation in any way. The arrest warrant, served on the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister for inciting violence during a flag-raising ceremony in 1994, was enough for the Bharatiya Janata Party to jump into action. Ms Bharti’s resignation and her much-hyped surrender to the Hubli court were grist for the mill of martyrdom, and the BJP played it the right way. Together with the Veer Savarkar episode, the BJP then had adequate ammunition to thunder into the Maharashtra assembly polls in October with a good chance of winning on a nationalist platform. The Congress started pulling back soon enough, but some damage had been done.

The BJP is not very much better off. It would have gained a great deal had the Congress persisted in its folly: Ms Bharti would have been busy with her case and not shot around like a “loose cannon”, as she will do once she is released. More important, the party would have had a real issue to go to the polls with. As things stand, Ms Bharti has to be given something to do. Mr Babulal Gaur probably cannot be asked to vacate his chair, apart from the fact that partymen in Madhya Pradesh were growing a little weary of Ms Bharti’s high-handed functioning. Her supporters are hoping to get her the BJP chief’s chair. These are the BJP’s problems. Meanwhile the Congress needs to do some quick thinking to compensate for its moment of folly.