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Reclaiming the public imagination

Harish Khare

Disquieting impressions are gaining ground. If these are not corrected, Manmohan Singh might be inviting dangerous challenges, not just to himself but to the interests of the Indian state.

JUDGING BY newspaper front pages and television headlines, it seems the Manmohan Singh Government no longer commands the public imagination. The Prime Minister himself rarely makes it to the headlines. The Government gives the impression of either not having an agenda or not knowing how to stay on top of it. On the other hand, all the unhelpful figures keep dominating the front pages. Sometimes it is a director of a medical institute, wanting to carve out an autonomous space for himself; sometimes it is the Chairman of the Oversight Committee, talking nineteen to the dozen; sometimes it is the inexplicable decision to field a candidate for the post of United Nations Secretary-General; sometimes it is the death of a private secretary of a prominent slain BJP leader; sometimes it is the Vice-chief of the Army, talking out of turn on the place of women in the defence forces; sometimes it is the bear run on the stock exchange. And so on.

This nobody-seems-to-be-in-charge-of-the-shop feeling contrasts with the over-activity among the Government's professed detractors and nominal allies. The petroleum price hike evoked the expected opposition from the Left and the BJP, and further depleted the Government's political stock. The Telugu Desam Party and the Samajwadi Party, the two groups that all these years provided aid and comfort to the saffron parivar, are now devising new ways of making things difficult for the United Progressive Alliance arrangement. Even the Nationalist Congress Party unblinkingly joined hands with the Shiv Sena and the BJP to send an industrialist to the Rajya Sabha, that too at the expense of a Congress nominee.

For all practical purposes, both the National Democratic Alliance and the United Progressive Alliance stand dissolved at the State level; only a semblance of unity and common purpose sustain the two alliances at the national level. Unless wiser leadership is displayed, the polity is in for a further meltdown.

All this could have been shrugged off as normal ups and downs in a vast country where party competition lacks ideological focus and many political leaders prefer personal aggrandisement over public good. And though professional destabilisers are at work, it can still be reasonably assumed that the Lok Sabha numbers will remain unchanged and that no other party or leader can cobble together a majority. Yet drift and uncertainty have combined to produce a cascading effect, distracting from the Centre's public esteem and administrative efficacy.

Perhaps nothing underlines this erosion more vividly than the failure on the food front. After three decades of national sufficiency in foodgrains, we seem to have come close to being dependent on wheat imports to maintain reasonably comfortable buffer stocks. The situation has been further confounded by the failure on the price front. Wheat, pulses, mustard oil are beyond the reach of the much-courted aam aadmi.

The mismanagement on the food front is doubly inexcusable because if at all there is one area where the Prime Minister's managerial leadership was expected to do the trick, it was in the economic domain.

It is possible to argue that the Prime Minister had no choice but to leave it to the Agriculture and Food Minister and his priorities and preferences. The Agriculture Minister may have his arguments and reasons for putting in place the polices he has but the soaring prices of food items are a stark reality, being felt — and resented — much beyond Sharad Pawar's Maharashtra sphere of influence.

Could the Prime Minister not anticipate the consequences of Mr. Pawar's polices? And could he not intervene with corrective advice and directions?

To be fair, the working style these last two years has been that Dr. Manmohan Singh presides over a coalition government and that, beyond a point, he is not prepared to assert his prime ministerial authority. That is the rub. Good intentions have become the enemy of good governance. By now it is obvious that this laissez faire approach to Cabinet Ministers is producing neither administrative innovation nor political coherence.

This prime ministerial reluctance to take charge of his own government has not only encouraged the non-Congress Ministers to pursue autonomous agendas, it has also induced near-defiance by Congress Cabinet colleagues. The reservation affair is a classic instance. The Government found itself having to implement a radical policy it had not thought through. Through the debate, the Prime Minister was never in control of the policy direction; the shots were being called either by the Human Resource Development Minister or by the UPA-Left coordination panel. But it is the Prime Minister and the Congress party that have to cope with the negative fallout and the political cost.

All these hiccups could have been dealt with adequately had there been better chemistry between the Prime Minister's Office and the Congress president's establishment. The two principals remain connected but there is no sense of shared purpose between their respective aides. This has encouraged certain elements, within the Union Cabinet as well as among the allies, to try to take advantage of this mismatch in political and administrative synergies. The Prime Minister clearly does not feel close to party affairs whereas the Congress president is content to be preoccupied with her political control.

What is more, this mismatch has definitely hampered both government and party from joining the battle for the public mind space. The Congress has been singularly inattentive to the need for cogently and persuasively making the political argument on behalf of the government. For months now, the Congress has not even had a full-time chairperson for its Media Department. The job of telling the government's side of the story has been left to individuals who themselves are rarely taken into confidence. All this adds to the perception of a distance — if not differences — between the government and the party.

Whereas the Congress' inadequacies in this area of shaping of public perceptions can be located in the overall matrix of organisational lethargy, there is no explanation yet for why the Manmohan Singh establishment has not been able to project the Prime Minister's preferences and policies. Dr. Manmohan Singh may be a shy and retiring person but no Prime Minister in this time and age has the luxury of letting the other side run away with the ball of argument. What makes the situation more piquant is that the "other side" is composed mostly of opinionated (and often compromised) media outlets.

This cultivated low-key style could become a source of strength if it produced policy and political coherence. It is not enough that the Manmohan Singh Government has managed to garner international respect and reputation. As and when the India-U.S. Civilian Nuclear Agreement gets sealed, it will undoubtedly enhance India's global standing. It may even accelerate the process of foreign investment. But the real battle is at home.

The Prime Minister and his government must re-engage the public imagination. To begin with, Dr. Singh needs to seize control of his own government. In concert with the Congress president, he must demonstrate that he remains the captain and has the right to set the field, make the bowling changes, and determine the batting order. He has to correct the impression that there is very little he can do about the senior Ministers who have over-stepped their autonomy or who have botched their briefs.

This is not simply a matter of style. After all, a Prime Minister needs to do more than preside over the Union Cabinet. He or she is expected to provide verve and panache to the entire Indian state. Perceptions about his assertiveness, images about his authority, and judgments about his control go into the calculations of friends and foes, at home and abroad. Disquieting impressions are gaining ground. If these are not corrected, Dr. Singh might be inviting dangerous challenges, not just to himself but to the abiding interests of the Indian state.

Admittedly there are built-in political limitations of the UPA coalition. The only way these shackles can be broken is for the Prime Minister to reinvent himself as the leader of a purposeful team. He has the calibre, the intellectual gifts, the perceptivity and the integrity to break out of what is beginning to be felt as stasis. He will have the support of the country and the people should he decide to be venturesome.

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