It was a virtually foregone conclusion that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav would win the vote of confidence which he himself initiated in the state Assembly to counter the Congress’s campaign for his dismissal. And win he did—convincingly, for the 22^nd time in 3½ years!

Indeed, his victory became inevitable once the Bharatiya Janata Party walked out of the Assembly, and the Congress and the Rashtriya Lok Dal decided to stay away from the Assembly session. Mr Yadav won more than 210 votes—well beyond the 168 from his own core support-group, consisting of 152 Samajwadi Party MLAs, 14 Independents, and 2 Loktantrik Congress members.

Mr Yadav’s victory can be explained less by his actions and manoeuvres, however crafty and Machiavellian, than by his opponents’ moves, including the Congress’s ineptitude, the BJP’s stupidity, and the Bahujan Samaj Party’s decision to get all its MLAs to resign just days before the confidence vote. Mr Yadav can comfortably stay in power—if that’s the right term, given his fraught relationship with the State Governor—until the Assembly elections are held in an unprecedented seven phases.

The confidence vote marks the collapse of the Congress’s misguided strategy to topple Mr Yadav’s government. The party has emerged badly injured from the UP crisis, a crisis it precipitated despite the CM’s victory in an earlier confidence vote, on January 25.

Nothing is going right for the Congress these days. The fiasco in UP, the election results from Punjab and Uttarakhand, where it was trounced, and the detention of Mr Ottavio Quattrocchi in Argentina in the Bofors payoff scandal, are all major setbacks for the party which only two months ago rode high on its popularity ratings in different polls.

While the Punjab and Uttarakhand results were more or less expected, the margin of the Opposition’s victory exceeds its own expectations. It demonstrates how damaging internal factionalism in the Congress can be along with an indifferent record of governance and a total failure to address the agrarian crisis, unemployment and rising prices.

The UPA government’s handling of the Bofors issue shows the Congress party in the worst possible light and fuels popular suspicion of its motives in shielding a key figure in the scam involving a Rs 64 crore payoff. It’s hard to believe Central Bureau of Investigation director Vijay Shanker’s claim that Mr Quattrocchi’s arrest on February 6 at an obscure airport in Argentina was communicated to the Bureau in Spanish, and that its translation into English caused the 17-day delay in the government’s announcement of his detention.

Several newspaper reports suggest that the Indian embassy in Buenos Aires told the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi about the arrest three days after it took place—through an English-language communication. The translation issue arose later, in respect of documents sent from Argentina to New Delhi pertaining to Interpol’s Red-Corner notices against Mr Quattrocchi.

The conclusion is inescapable that the Congress is trying to cover up the Bofors scandal with foul means. The party’s culpability is enlarged by the fact that the government which it controls failed to report his arrest to the Supreme Court while it was hearing a litigation pertaining to the de-freezing of two of Mr Quattrocchi’s bank accounts in London—at the behest of Law Minister H.R. Bharadwaj.

The CBI is now called upon to secure Mr Quattrocchi’s extradition for criminal trial in India. It has only a limited window of opportunity, till March 5. It’s far from clear that the CBI will do its legal homework meticulously and construct a unassailable prima facie case, which can withstand the scrutiny of another legal system. If past experience is any guide, this may not happen—not only because of political pressure to “weaken” the case, but out of sheer incompetence and sloppiness in framing the right charges.

It bears recalling that of all the hundreds of alleged criminals living abroad, including terrorists, against whom the Indian government claims to possess strong evidence, it has been able in all these decades to secure the extradition of Abu Salem and Monica Bedi alone. This too happened not so much because the government presented a compelling or water-tight case to a court in Portugal, but because the Portuguese government pulled its weight in India’s favour. India, then under the Vajpayee regime, had also lost its case for Mr Quattrocchi’s extradition in a Malaysian court in December 2002.

Bofors is a 21 year-long story of evasion, lies and cover-up attempts—and the repeated failure of official agencies, even under non-Congress governments, to unearth the truth. Thus, in 1993, Mr Quattrocchi was allowed to flee India, when Mr Narasimha Rao was in power. In 2004, the UPA government all but closed the Bofors case by not appealing against a highly questionable and logically contradictory judgment of the Delhi High Court, which wrongly concluded that there was “no evidence” of bribery in connection with the purchases of the howitzer from its Swedish manufacturer.

Equally deplorable was last year’s intervention by the UPA in a London court, to deny that there’s a link between Mr Quattrocchi’s bank deposits in question and the Bofors payoffs for which he faces a Red-Corner notice. The Congress will further damage its image if it plays any more devious games in the Bofors case.

If the Quattrocchi issue is a reminder of an ugly feature of the Congress’s past, its plans to have the Mulayam Singh government dismissed under Article 356 of the Constitution testifies to the persistence of an arrogant and authoritarian trait in its character. Mr Yadav is no angel who desists from raiding and splitting parties. But the recent Supreme Court judgment disqualifying 13 BSP MLAs for defection in August 2003 does not render his government illegal, illegitimate or unconstitutional, or reduce it to a minority.

Congress spokespersons wrongly extended the Court’s ruling against the 13 MLAs to another 24 who left the BSP 10 days later. The Court itself treated them separately and said a new petition would have to be moved before the UP Assembly Speaker for their disqualification.

That apart, it’s ludicrous to demand that Mr Yadav must be dismissed and not be allowed to remain as caretaker CM when elections are held next month. It’s an established convention that even a leader who losses his majority shortly before an election is allowed to stay as caretaker. This was followed at the Centre in 1991, 1996 and 1998, and in many states on countless occasions. At any rate, the Election Commission’s announcement of the polling schedule should put paid to the Congress’s misconceived move.

This doesn’t argue that Mr Yadav has not used unscrupulous means to stitch together a majority, but only that the SP is not alone in doing so. In UP, all the major parties have indulged in tod-phod ki rajneeti (splitting parties). Their culpability has to be established under the Anti-Defection Law. The UP Opposition has failed to do so in the present case.

Mr Yadav shouldn’t be sacked. But that doesn’t mean that his record of misgovernance should be condoned. To put it bluntly, the SP-led government has elevated cronyism to the level of a credo or sacred principle. Mr Yadav has doled out huge favours and patronage to his buddies in industry, realty and entertainment—at public expense. He has privatised sugar mills and a number of public services.

Crime thrives in UP on a scale that makes a joke out of the SP’s favourite poster featuring Amitabh Bachhan, which claims “UP mein dum hai, kyonki yahan jurm kam hai” (UP goes strong because there is very little crime here). The criminalisation of UP, as the Nithari case shows, is inseparable from intimate police-politician links.

Mr Yadav has wooed and patronised all manner of bahubalis (practitioners of strong-arm tactics, typically, with a criminal record), especially from upper-caste groups like the Rajputs. Most disturbingly of all, he has been hobnobbing with the sangh parivar. As noted in this Column at the end of January, he provided lavish hospitality to the BJP’s national council leaders. Last month, his Cabinet sanctioned Rs 2.52 crores in support to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s third global congress, at Allahabad on February 10 to 12.

All this is likely to dent Mr Yadav’s image as a bulwark against communalism and cost him an erosion of Muslim support, crucial to the SP’s base. The Congress can still put up a fight in UP if it projects itself as a staunchly secular party and seals an alliance with other Centrist or Left-of-Centre parties to form a sizeable bloc in the Assembly.

The Congress has no choice but to gather the pieces. But it risks suffering yet more losses—unless it radically rethinks its policies, and realigns its strategy and tactics, while resisting the temptation of seeking shortcuts to power.