silent—has the endgamgame begun?e begun?
18 June 2011
18 June 2011
Finally, there is unanimity on one thing in New Delhi: that this has become our most dysfunctional real government in three decades. Real, to distinguish it from the obviously temporary arrangements like Chandra Shekhar’s, Gowda’s and Gujral’s, described by the late Vithal Gadgil in his immortal phrase as ‘ten-day wonders’. It passes the buck to GoMs and EGoMs, which in turn only make news
for postponing their meetings. The government is too scared to raise petroleum prices, treating the three-figure Nymex and Brent quotes with suspension of disbelief. Indecision over coal mining is blighting power generation, and waffling over the Cairn–Vedanta and Reliance–BP deals is being
atched with dismay by foreign investors. Appointments of heads of the most important PSU giants like ONGC and UTI, of our most vital infrastructure organisation, NHAI, even the CVC are stuck. There is no progress on the ambitiously high-sounding National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), though the president promised it in her address to Parliament.
Our higher defence organisation is a mess, with chiefs speaking out of turn and an unedifying controversy over the army chief’s birth certificate which is not being set at rest one way or the other, thereby dividing the brass. Such is the state of paralysis that even members of this cabinet, senior leaders of the ‘party’ and definitely its furious coalition partners all acknowledge it with a shrug of helplessness. We have seen how devastating a government which is non-functional despite a majority can be in West Bengal in the two years under Buddhadeb since May 2009. Now to have a government like that at the Centre, and that too for three more years?
It is a frightening prospect. Businessmen are fleeing, taking their new investments overseas. The markets are usually the first to sense policy paralysis. The markets, languishing in the third position among the world’s worst performers in the past twelvemonths, have brushed aside Egypt to become the second worst. Given the mood of dismay in Dalal Street, Russians should be feeling threatened at the bottom.
The paralysis in the government is matched by the confusion in the Congress party. Its carefully
scripted strategy of distancing itself from all government decisions except the most obviously populist ones has now unravelled and backfired. While the government finally responded to this by suspending all decision-making on anything even remotely controversial, it is the party that is now getting the rap for all the scams, some real, some exaggerated and some (as a most eminent and honest scientist- entrepreneur, Kiran Karnik, explained in an interview with me, IE, 8 March 2011) mostly imaginary like ISRO/Devas. Over the past three weeks I have been stopped by ordinary people at airports, in shopping malls, at a petrol pump, in a spiritual ashram, at the national athletic games in Bangalore
and so on with a question that seems to have become a clamour: why are you in the media so scared of the Gandhis? Why is no one exposing their humongous stash overseas?
It is all bunkum, of course, and in any case the beauty of Swiss accounts is that nobody needs to go to Switzerland to do anything with them. But the Congress defends itself very poorly when it merely responds by calling those making such allegations deranged or RSS whisperers, as if the RSS is the new ISI. People of India are not stupid. They know who to trust and who to laugh at. But the Congress party steps on its own toes by treating even its top leaders’ travels as some kind of a national secret.
So far, the Congress has got away with treating its top leaders as some kind of an endearing, mysterious, aloof royalty. The use-by date on that self-imposed mystique is now over.
Ditto for the Gandhi family. The strategy of controlling politics and government from a distance ithout directly speaking to the people has contributed to the current paralysis. The Congress is not the Communist Party of China, where you had to face-read Mao or Deng to figure out what the party line was. In this increasingly young, aspirational India of 2011, leaders have to talk not just to their partymen but also to their people. Because if they don’t, the so-called civil society, hyperactive
udges and a hyperventilating media will grab that space.
If you see this peculiar party–government arrangement, it is a bit like you send out a nightwatchman* to play out the difficult half-hour at the end of the day, so your main batsman, some Sachin Tendulkar, can come and shine the next morning. That is the way the party looked at UPA 2, presuming it had already won 2014. But it forgot that five years of governance were not the difficult
last hour in a day’s play, but an entire innings. The main batsmen (in this case, Rahul) can no longer be hidden in the safety of the pavilion. He has to step out and speak up. So must Sonia.
This has been a remarkably unique period in our political history, where the three seniormost leaders of the establishment have not been speaking to us, the people, as a matter of policy and strategy. It is not working. The victory they had taken for granted in 2014 is now most certainly a fantasy.