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Friday, Jun 16, 2006

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A Government and a party in combat mode

Vidya Subrahmaniam

Two years after Sonia Gandhi famously declined the crown, the man to whom she handed power remains the outsider in a party congenitally attached to the first family and unable and unwilling to accept the work division between a non-Gandhi Prime Minister and a Gandhi party chief.

THE CONGRESS' problems with its allies are evident enough; the untold story is about a Government and a party at odds with each other. Last week, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi once again came to the rescue of a Government and a party increasingly pulling in opposite directions — this time over the fuel price hike, which saw the Congress publicly join issue with the Government. That the two sides pulled back in time is entirely thanks to the big two, who, realising the damage potential of the developing row, facilitated a formula that met the party's needs without the Government having to backtrack.

How long will the truce hold? With the Left and its potential third front partners upping the offensive on the fuel price hike, inflation and other social sector concerns, and the luckless Bharatiya Janata Party only too happy to join in, the Congress is bound to feel more and more pressured to show off its own anxieties on these counts. The tensions are magnified by the peculiar nature of the Manmohan Singh Government-Congress relationship: The Prime Minister and the Congress chief head divergent departments that visibly lack in the warmth and chemistry apparent at the top. Two years after Ms. Gandhi famously declined the crown, the man to whom she handed power remains the outsider in a party congenitally attached to the first family and unable and unwilling to accept the work division between a non-Gandhi head of Government and a Gandhi head of party. It is a unique situation where a Prime Minister has simultaneously to run a coalition government, engage with the supporting parties, deal with the Opposition, and ward off attacks from his own party and his own Ministers — and do all of this within the constraints of a work allocation that consciously differentiates between governance and politics. The unwritten implication of this wholly unrealistic and untenable separation of powers is that the Government can and must run without a political vision.

The communication gap resulting from this structural flaw is made worse by the party's distrust of the chief executive. Take the fuel price hike. The first impression when the Congress protested the hike was that it was performing to a script. The Government would propose and the party would oppose, the seeming tug of war showcasing the latter's concerns for the aam aadmi and helping to deflect the blows from the Left and the BJP. But this was no play-acting. With the Prime Minister refusing to budge, the Congress was truly protesting — except this was the ruling party taking on the Government and the Prime Minister. The two sides did reach a compromise but typically after Dr. Singh and Ms. Gandhi met for consultations as they so often do. The meeting defused tensions, saved face for the party, and ensured the Prime Minister was able to stand his ground. Short-lived as the crisis was, it showed how much the two sides have come to depend on this one-on-one mechanism to resolve thorny issues.

The irony is inescapable. When Ms. Gandhi anointed Dr. Singh Prime Minister and took charge of the party, pundits took happy swipes at the arrangement. The illogic of separating governance and politics aside, there was much doomsaying around the "rival power centres"; the BJP ceaselessly sang the Prime Minister-Super Prime Minister song. Two years on, the relationship that no one gave a chance has proven to be strong and enduring with Ms. Gandhi betraying not the slightest insecurity and, if anything, making a fetish of her disinclination for power. It is clear that what holds Government and party together is the mutual accommodation at the top. This ought to have been reason to celebrate. Instead, it has become cause for worry. The obvious question to ask is: Can individual rapport become the basis for institutional interaction? Sound as the Prime Minister-Congress chief equation is, can it substitute for a robust Government-party relationship founded on agreed principles of engagement and evolving from a shared appreciation of each other's needs and compulsions?

Not that there are no formal structures for Government-Congress coordination. Every Friday a core group led by Ms. Gandhi meets the Prime Minister. The drill starts with a short meeting between the Prime Minister and the party chief and ends with an often longer one-on-one between them. The meet was intended as a feedback mechanism — for the Prime Minister to receive political inputs, for the party to understand policy imperatives and for both mutually to narrow down differences and convey the rationale of decision-making to those further down the line in Government and party. In practice, little of this materialised and it was always the Prime Minister and the party chief turning to each other — within the core group and outside of it. During the fuel price hike crisis, the Prime Minister and the Congress chief met at least four times. On the other hand, Ministers, party functionaries, and indeed even members of the core group have felt free to hold forth in public — on the India-United States civilian nuclear deal, on OBC reservation, on the Kashmir round table, and on the currently dominant fuel price hike.

Revert to the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. Through the George W. Bush visit and later, scepticism ran high in the Congress headquarters with phrases such as "sell-out" and "betrayal" freely doing the circuit. Congresspersons agonised that the deal had short-changed India and would lose Muslim support for the Congress just when the community was warming to the party. For much of this time, there was virtually no communication between Government and party; the more Team Manmohan hailed the pact as a spectacular breakthrough, the more the party shrank from the glory. As a consequence, the Government's "single biggest foreign policy achievement," attacked in the West for being too advantageous to India, and endorsed by India's scientific establishment, went unpropagated by a party convinced it was all to no good. By the time Ms. Gandhi went public in support of the deal via a signed column in the party organ, Sandesh, it was too late to alter perceptions hardened by visual images of Bush-Manmohan togetherness and extensive Muslim protests.

Complex situation

Admittedly, it is a complex situation. Most issues agitating Congresspersons are directly connected to voter sensitivities. India's increased engagement of the U.S. continues to be a sore point while the hike in fuel price threatens to push up prices already spiralling upward. There is no getting away from the fact that the Congress is fundamentally pro-poor and replaced a Government seen to court the upper crust. It was to underline the non-elitist, pluralist character of the United Progressive Alliance Government that the Congress and its allies drew up the National Common Minimum Programme with its strong secular-social thrust.

In seeming contrast to this, Dr. Singh brought to his work a liberal-reformist approach centred on what he was famously to describe as "enlightened national interest." However, it is not as if he overturned policy. The first reformist budget was presented under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by Finance Minister V.P.Singh. Colour television sets and computers, denounced once as symbols of affluence, are gifts from that era. P.V. Narasimha Rao further freed the market, irreversibly changing the direction of the economy. The man who executed the Rao vision is of course the current Prime Minister. So Dr. Singh was far from being an unknown quantity when Ms. Gandhi handpicked him for the top assignment.

Even if it is the Congress' case that party and Government are ideologically divergent, the key to bridging the divide can only be more communication and not less of it. It is unthinkable that a Gandhi-Nehru Prime Minister would have found it difficult to communicate to the party the constraints and compulsions of running a government. Nor can it happen that such a government would not be receptive to the needs of politics. If Indira Gandhi could turn garibi hatao into a potent political weapon, there is no reason why Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi cannot make the unique, rights-based National Rural Employment Guarantee Act the Congress' flagship project, its proud mascot. By now the NREGA ought to have been the rage. But just as the party was cold to the India-U.S. civilian nuclear deal, the Government is still to show adequate enthusiasm for the potentially vote-winning NREGA.

Part of the problem is a work division that demands that the Prime Minister show no overt political interest. The impasse can only get worse if Congresspersons undermine the office of the Prime Minister by unceasingly and deliberately keeping up the chant for Ms. Gandhi to take office. The Congress chief's handsome victory from Rae Bareli was a foregone conclusion. Yet Congresspersons read in it a message for Ms. Gandhi to assume Prime Ministerial responsibilities. This is less ideological opposition than plain sycophancy. As it is, the Prime Minister carries a disproportionate burden. Under the current division of labour, he takes the hard decisions while the Congress chief pursues the naturally more popular social equity agenda. This division is unsustainable without greater Government-party understanding and accommodation.

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