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Three steps to mid-course correction

Harish Khare

The challenge is to convert the UPA arrangement into a maximal concord, which will re-design the polity as the facilitator of a forward-looking Indian state.

BY TOMORROW evening we should have a reasonably good idea of how various political parties have performed in the Assembly elections in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Pondicherry. From the Congress point of view, the best scenario would be the party being able to form a government in Assam and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-led alliance making it in Tamil Nadu; the worst case scenario is the party and its allies being shown the door in the four major States. Whatever the outcome, the Lok Sabha numbers will remain unchanged. And that is precisely why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi should examine the need for course correction. The United Progressive Alliance government has been in office now for two years and it is time for some kind of house cleaning.

The foremost reason for the course correction is the imperative to do something about corruption. The irony is that the country has one of the most honest Indians as Prime Minister but he is not in a position to do anything about the corrupt practices of his Cabinet colleagues. Everyone in the capital knows the names of the corrupt Ministers among the allies and in the Congress. Because the Prime Minister has not been able to throw the book at the errant Ministers from the allies, he has also lost the moral authority to act against corrupt Congress colleagues. Corruption is the very antithesis of good governance. Secularism, the very raison d'etre of the UPA arrangement, cannot be deemed to be a license for misappropriation of public funds or abuse of governmental office.

The second, and equally compelling, reason for course correction is that the UPA government has not been able to make it easier for the aam aadmi (common man). Whatever headline-garnering achievements may be getting recorded on the stock exchange, life has not been all that rosy for the poor and the lower middle classes in the cities and the villages. Admittedly, initiatives like the National Rural Employment Guarantee schemes do suggest a welcome sensitivity at the highest level, the balance of policies and programmes, however, remains in favour of the super-rich and the foreign investor. What is more, the UPA government has not been able to generate a shift in national thinking to acknowledging that there is an obligation towards the poor. Large sections of the judiciary are becoming decisively anti-poor, as are powerful elements in the media; and, the political leadership finds itself too often on the back-foot to speak up for equity and social fairness.

Ambivalence on both these counts — corruption and aam aadmi — flows from a reluctance to tap the moral potential of political authority. The UPA coalition is increasingly becoming a device for low-level politics. It was this reluctance to stand up to the Rashtriya Janata Dal's demands in Bihar that led to two successive defeats in the State. The Prime Minister would need to make it clear that the Constitution of India cannot be allowed to be distorted to serve very narrow partisan purposes.

On the other hand, the principal Opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party remains in total disarray. The much-touted Bharat Suraksha Yatras have conspicuously failed, and only Pramod Mahajan's tragic death has drawn attention from the political and organisational bankruptcy of those who authored and executed the Yatras. But it is obvious that neither the two "supreme leaders" nor the second-generation leaders have the imagination or the inspiration to take advantage of the ruling UPA's loss of direction. The BJP's new president is too cliché-coated; nor is the Advani camp allowing him to settle down. In any case, the country's mood remains remarkably unreceptive to the sangh parivar's medieval theology.

The National Democratic Alliance has ceased to be an operative entity. It comes alive only when there is photo opportunity for the leaders to make that all too frequent march to Rashtrapati Bhavan. At the same time, the Third Front proponents have lost steam; the true extent of the misgoverance by the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh has become obvious to one and all. In other words, the political matrix remains advantageous to the UPA.

Given this larger disarray and lack of imagination among the non-UPA forces, by sheer competence and commitment, the Prime Minister has made the best of an intrinsically limited political space. The civilian nuclear deal with the United States is a prime example of this competence; if the deal goes through, it will help India graduate into a new league. Even if the Bush administration is not able to push the deal through on Capitol Hill, the Prime Minister can claim the nationalist mantle: that he refused to make concessions that are not in our national interests. But it needs to be recognised by the Prime Minister and the UPA government that they have depleted their political capital on the nuclear deal, and any other foreign policy initiative will hinge on regaining the lost ground at home.

Common sense, then, should suggest that the Congress political establishment still has the elbow room to goad the UPA government out of its unexciting incrementalism. Three critical steps suggest themselves.

First, a re-assertion of Ms. Sonia Gandhi's authority over the Congress Party. It is not enough for her to get re-elected from Rae Barelli nor is it sufficient for her to distance herself from the party at the first hint of a crisis. She has unfortunately helped create an image of being above the party, rather than being at its head and its undisputed leader. Far too much energy is squandered on preserving and replenishing her moral authority, which is never used for doing the politically wholesome thing in or out of the party. Once she has put the office-of-profit controversy behind her, it would be incumbent upon her to attend to the party organisation. The crying need is to re-organise the AICC hierarchy; never before has there been so much institutionalised listlessness at 24 Akbar Road. Ms. Gandhi is the head of a modern, ruling political party, and she does not have the luxury of acting like an indulgent head of a straggling joint family.

The second critical step that suggests itself is the refurbishing of the prime ministerial authority. In the last few weeks, an impression has gone around that it is permissible for senior Ministers and party colleagues to try to embarrass the Prime Minister. Ministers have tended to function as if they are not part of a Council of Ministers but are, rather, autonomous quasi-potentates. Under the Cabinet system, the Prime Minister has to control and calibrate the government's agenda; there is no scope for individual enterprise. The Prime Minister has to find a way to put an end to unilateralism, whether it is the question of over-drive on the reservation issue or the definite dragging of ministerial feet on the wheat imports.

Thirdly, there is an obvious need to re-negotiate the National Common Minimum Programme. The Congress, the UPA allies, and the Left Parties seem to have very different ideas of what the NCMP stands for. Political wisdom demands a realistic understanding of what is achievable and what is not, what is feasible and what is not workable. With the West Bengal and Kerala elections out of the way, the CPI(M) and the CPI leaders as well as the Congress brass may find it worth their while to re-write the NCMP in the light of the experiences and difficulties of the last two years. The programme has to be both pruned and expanded.

There is a kind of organic linkage among the three steps. The coalition arrangement has to be mutually beneficial and mutually satisfying to the partners. It can be a minimal arrangement, based on the most partisan requirements of the allies; but, it can also become a source for aggregation of ideas, inspirations, energies, and constituencies. For the first two years the UPA alliance has functioned as the minimal model; the challenge is to convert the arrangement over the next three years into a maximal concord, which will re-design the Indian polity as the facilitator of a progressive, secular, forward-looking, and developing Indian state.

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