The Rabri Devi government has been held responsible for the Jehanabad massacres and the President, or so it seems, has been served with a fait accompli in the shape of a recommendation which he had earlier rejected. The BJP government does not have enough proof of the indifference of the Bihar governmens regarding the law and order situation and in fact, has now opened itself up to the various permutations and combinations that necessarily constitute its politics. Already, wide scale transfers and new appointments of top bureaucrats are taking place in Patna and the political affiliations of these new incumbents are obvious. There is naturally a devious game being played and the first victim of this will be Indian democracy.

The former chief minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav, has been arrested for defying prohibitory orders and the Assembly has been kept in suspended animation since the orders imposing President's Rule need ratification by Parliament which is currently not in session. This also throws up a major question. Since the party lines in the Rajya Sabha are evenly divided, a Congress silence over this issue would tantamount to allowing the BJP free reign over the events. The question facing the nation now is whether the political brains will see only as far as their eyes can see in this one dismissal which can prove to finally create a new history of the nation.The plot had been thickening for a long time now. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had himself, on assumption of office, said that his government would ensure that the Bihar Government is sacked; not one year has passed, and this has become a reality. The sending of hardcore RSS man, Sunder Singh Bhandari, to Patna as the Governor was also done with a dishonest intention and it is public knowledge that the Raj Bhavan had become a hub of political activity for quite some time now. In September last year, the Centre had recommended president's Rule in Bihar; the President quite wisely had rejected it. But this time, his hands were tied; it was constitutionally binding on him to sign the papers. The manner in which the Government has gone about its task smacks of a dangerous fascist trend.

The nation is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the BJP government. The Bengal chief minister, Jyoti Basu, has asked Laloo Prasad Yadav to go to court. Quite sensibly, actually, because the more the plot is unveiled, the greater does the non-tenability of the entire situation become apparent. Protests and rallies have marked the dismissal and the BJP could be finding itself into a corner if it does not set a major wrong right immediately.