The just-concluded budget session of Parliament is one of the shortest budget sessions witnessed in recent years and that despite the stated objective to increase the number of Parliament’s annual sittings. It is not that the budget session was curtailed because of the UP assembly election. The fact, it appeared, is that the government did not have enough agenda to run the session. In a way the myriad reasons that forced adjournments so frequently during the session could have actually helped to cover-up for the lack of a business agenda.
As it marks the completion of three years in office on Tuesday, the curtailed duration of the session is symptomatic of a prolonged phase of depression in the ruling coalition. On Sunday, Rural Development Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar might have made the critical remarks about the UPA’s commitment to its aam aadmi plank out of some frustration over his having been unceremoniously dislodged from the petroleum and natural gas ministry. But there is no denying the fact that the Manmohan Singh Government has fallen between two stools. On the one hand, it has been as committed to pushing forward the economic reforms while on the other it has also sought to establish its aam aadmi credentials.
On the reform front, Prime Minister Singh’s Left partners have dug their heels in after they had briefly walked out of the UPA-Left coordination panel on the eve of the UPA’s completion of two years in office last year over BHEL disinvestment. Ever since that stand-off with the Left, all disinvestment proposals have been put on deep freeze. Reforms plans in such other sectors as pension, insurance, banking and labour too have been stalled.
But the inability to pursue reforms would not have hurt the political credibility as much as the situation on the price front over the last 12 months. It is not about mere statistical figure of an inflation rate hovering around the 6 per cent mark. If statistics alone is the factor, the government has also achieved on the positive side an annual GDP growth rate of over 8 per cent over the past three years. What has hurt the government’s aam aadmi political plank is the unusually high price of foodgrains, pulses and vegetables in the past several months. If this has hurt the common man who has been the focus of the government’s attention, the measures taken to curb high prices has hurt the middle class, which really was the factor that had helped the Congress to get the better of its arch rival, the BJP, in the 2004 parliamentary elections. Just one instance of what is hurting the middle class is the rising interest rate on housing loans.
A common wisdom is that the third year, being the mid-year of a full-term of five years in office, is the year to take all harsh decisions that a government would like to take during its tenure in office. The situation being what it has been during the course of the third year, the government was either seen in a fire-fighting role or just doing a holding-operation. The government’s SEZ policy initiative is ridden with unending controversies. Even on such land-mark deeds like the Right to Information Act, the government is being seen more as blocking its meaningful implementation at a time when it should have been taking credit for its success.
It is then not surprising that there won’t be any enthusiastic celebration on Tuesday to mark the completion of three years. Nor would there be a report card to the people. The Prime Minister, earlier this year, had skipped a proposed “national press conference” as well.
Of course, while the Prime Minister is the pivotal force of any government, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has the most vital bearing on the performance of the coalition dispensation. But Ms Gandhi appears to have been weighed down by the Congress party’s electoral reverses that have come one after the other since the UPA and the Congress lost Bihar. The party has lost Uttaranchal, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, crucial municipal elections in Delhi and Mumbai and it appears to be keeping its fingers crossed as it faces assembly polls in Goa next month and Gujarat later this year.
The erosion of the credibility of the Congress’ aam aadmi plank has weakened her political backing to the government, more so in the wake of the poor showing in UP where she had fielded son Rahul Gandhi for the first time as the party’s star campaigner. With political demoralisation creeping in steadily, confidence is in short-supply as the UPA looks ahead to completing the remaining two years of the five-year term available to it. If UPA has not yet pressed the political panic button it may be more due to a still battered-looking opposition which lacks punch. The situation would suggest the imperative need for a major course correction. But that can come only if the leadership emerges out of its demoralised mood and shrugs off its inertia manifested in comments like this one by a top PMO official: “we have completed three years; we will complete the remaining two years.” Complete it might; but that might also be the end of the road for the 2004 experiment.