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Wednesday, May 11, 2005

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Strengths of a weak Prime Minister

Harish Khare

Weak or strong, a leader's job is to help society discover its creative impulses. Manmohan Singh has done just that.

STRANGELY ENOUGH leaders of both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress seem to be in agreement on one count: Manmohan Singh makes a weak Prime Minister, though the two sets of leaders reach the inference via different routes and for different reasons. The BJP leaders say it openly while the Congress leaders suggest it in the privacy of their drawing rooms. The BJP, in fact, has called Dr. Singh the weakest Prime Minister India has ever had; the Congress leaders remain unreconciled to the idea of having to acknowledge someone from outside the Nehru-Gandhi family as worthy of respect and deference.

The reasons for the BJP's indictment are clear. The party's ageing leadership has remained deeply frustrated since May 2004 when Sonia Gandhi declared that she was not going to be the Prime Minister of India. From 1998 onward the BJP leaders have predicated their politics and political manoeuvrings on the assumption that Ms. Gandhi would be the Congress party's prime ministerial candidate. They sought to tap the middle classes' discomfort on the "foreign origin" issue; and, rather complacently convinced themselves that, by contrast, in office Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani had acquired such a towering stature that a mesmerised electorate would cheerfully vote the National Democratic Alliance back to power. When on May 13, 2004 the votes were tallied the BJP leaders discovered the people of India had a different take on their claims and pretensions; and before the BJP leaders could recover from their shock, they were administered a second shock by Ms. Gandhi.

In one fell swoop, she smashed every single calculation and every single accusation they had worked on for years. Unable or unwilling to come to terms with the electorate's rejection, the BJP leaders devised a new fiction: Ms. Gandhi remains the super Prime Minister, while Dr. Singh is only the mukhota. And, for the first few months they believed the astrologers who predicted that Dr. Singh was going to have serious health problems by September-end 2004. Now, they have taken to rubbishing Dr. Singh as a weak Prime Minister, not at all in charge of his Government, perhaps in the hope that the good doctor would get fed up enough and would walk away.

The Congressmen, on the other hand, have a different problem. They have difficulty according to Dr. Singh the deference his office demands, just as they have difficulty in grasping that he heads not just a Congress Government but a United Progressive Alliance coalition, which means patronage and spoils have to be shared among allies and friends. Unable to have their way, the Congressmen take recourse to the familiar tools of court intriguers. They posit an antagonistic relationship between the party and the government. Ms. Gandhi has, by and large, been extremely supportive of the Manmohan Singh Government. There is nonetheless a lack of excitement in the Congress about Dr. Singh the Prime Minister.

How do all these political calculations impinge on his efficacy as Prime Minister?

The answer has to be a mixed response. He has yet to tap fully his office's potential, but these very weaknesses add up to his strength as Prime Minister. Not being overly burdened with the image of being a "strong leader," he has spared himself — and, more important, the country — the bogus trappings of a superman. Neither he nor his spin-doctors fancies him as a loh purush or a vikas purush. That means he is not a prisoner of the prejudices and expectations that go with such appellations. The elbowroom is quite big as each complexity is attended to on merit. In itself this frees the governing process from unhelpful mental and ideological delusions. This is a very welcome departure from the recent years when screaming, posturing and grating sound-byte became synonymous with governance.

Instead of a personality cult, quiet competence is at work. This very weak Prime Minister has achieved what otherwise strong leaders could not accomplish: we are at peace with ourselves. We are no longer fighting a civil war. The raising of internal tempers that was so cunningly calibrated since 9/11 had induced fault-lines, creating bad blood and distrust among communities.

Equilibrium rediscovered

One year of this weak Prime Minister has seen to it that the Indian polity has re-discovered its pluralistic equilibrium. He has not made any stirring speech nor has he staged any dramatic gesture of reconciliation, but by the simple virtue of going about the business of being a reasonable ruler he has helped the country calm down. No doubt being the first Prime Minister from a minority community has its own downstream soothing effects on the nerves of an agitated society; but there is no denying the fact that he has the gift of tapping our positive energy rather than keeping us trapped in our feudal resentments and misgivings.

As it happens this weak Prime Minister has exhibited strong leadership in the most vital area of national economy. He has eloquently articulated his strong belief in the country's economic potential but he has also indicated that he has learnt a few lessons on the importance of making economic reforms work for all. In 1991 when as Finance Minister he authored the paradigm shift, he had a Prime Minister to take care of the political costs of economic dislocations; in 2004-2005, as Prime Minister he has to ensure that the middle classes get the message that economic prosperity cannot be a sectarian project.

By quietly moving the country away from the officially instigated insecurities, Dr. Singh has helped rewrite the grammar of economic growth: opportunities, credit, policy breaks, must also be made available to the majority. He has used his reputation as an economist and his prestige as a fair administrator to drive home the point to corporate India and its middle class constituency that unfair economic policies can only yield unappetising political dividends. Without resorting to populism, it is possible to factor in popular aspirations and demands.

He has rather cleverly used his Government's dependence upon the Left for support and survival to renew the political constituency of economic reforms. The middle classes know it and have quietly fallen in line. From the political perspective, this reclaiming of the middle classes' affections has been the singular gain for the Congress; inversely, this defection of the middle classes signals the beginning of the dissolution of the "Vajpayee coalition." And the more the BJP leaders allow themselves to be driven by the "Manmohan the weak Prime Minister" calculus, the faster would be the complete disintegration of the party's middle class support base. A rather weak Prime Minister has achieved all this.

In the arena of foreign policy, a Prime Minister generally finds himself less encumbered by the exigencies of domestic politics. The pomp and pageantry of foreign visits make pleasing contrast to the domestic political contentions. But the foreign governments do have their own assessments of the extent and nature of a Prime Minister's domestic support and of his ability to "sell" a foreign policy initiative. In the beginning Dr. Singh had to tame quite a few of his ministerial colleagues who thought that the Prime Minister's Office should have no say in matters of foreign policy.

Once he acquired charge of his foreign policy, he went about putting his "weakness" to good use in negotiations with foreign leaders. For instance, in his first serious encounter with the Pakistan president at Hotel Roosevelt in New York he told General Musharraf that since he had limited support there were limits to what he could concede and what he could not concede. Moreover, being "weak" he has no pressing domestic compulsions to achieve a breakthrough at every international summit; and, in the case of Pakistan and China he and his Government have been careful to stress continuity, thereby leaving the BJP to be seen as engaging in irritating nitpicking.

It is not that this "weak" prime minister has solved every problem or that he presides over a super-efficient and coherent regime. He does not even preside over a corruption-free government. Beyond a point no state order can be more efficacious than the balance of domestic support and opposition would permit; but Dr. Singh has succeeded in demonstrating that a leader's civility and decency can be formidable assets and can help him overcome the polity's inherent capacity for conflict and confrontation. Weak or strong, a leader's job is to help society discover its creative impulses. Dr. Singh has done just that. In these uncivil and uncertain times, this is no small achievement.

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