A besieged PM

Last week, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh congratulated Rahul Gandhi on his 41st birthday and announced that he was now ready to become the prime minister of India. No one knows what made Singh say this. It could have been personal admiration for Rahul; it could have been a reminder that this was the age at which Rajiv Gandhi had become prime minister in October 1984. But the intelligentsia, and much of the public, read something entirely different into it. Was he signalling 10 Janpath’s displeasure with the prime minister’s  performance?  In a matter of hours, what had begun as praise for Rahul Gandhi was turned by the media into an indictment of Manmohan Singh. 

Agreed that there is much that is wrong with governance today: that a strange paralysis seems to have gripped it; that the government seems to have no policy for dealing with the threats that are accumulating on every front --inflation, slowing growth, rising unemployment, the Maoist challenge, the meltdown of the Pakistani state, China’s encirclement of India, the dangerous new axis China is forging with Pakistan, Nepal’s political paralysis and its renewed animosity towards India, the political pressure cooker in Kashmir and above all the burning issue of corruption.

But does it make any sense to put the blame for all of this upon Manmohan Singh? Have his ministers, his party members, his coalition partners, and the scores of hangers on at 10 Janpath and 24 Akbar Road, played no part in creating this paralysis? And what about  the intelligentsia and the media? Knowing  the dysfunctionality of  the Congress party, the venality of all but a few of its coalition partners, their utter lack of interest in national (as opposed to parochial state) issues of  security and welfare, should these powerful mediums not have filled the vacuum and at least tried to guide thinking in the country?

The answer does not even need to be spelt out. One has only to look at the 24/7 news and current affairs programmes on television  to realise that this is a nation whose newly minted middle class is solely devoted to play. Contentious national issues , from Kashmir to corruption, are only battlefields on which  political gladiators can fight to the death to assuage the blood lust of the public. The media is a mirror of today’s  middle class. And this class is looking for a scapegoat. 

Manmohan Singh does not deserve this treatment. In him we have a prime minister of unimpeachable  integrity, and great intelligence. In the first two years of his tenure he repositioned India’s foreign policy, signed the Indo-US nuclear deal, freeing India from the crippling and discriminatory technology restrictions and opened a sustained dialogue with the J&K factions. It is true that Manmohan Singh was unable to sustain the initial momentum.

Loss of courage

But the reason was not a sudden loss of courage. After decades in government he understood  that policies were most likely to endure if they were backed by a broad consensus, preferably within parliament, but at least within the Congress party, the bureaucracy and the public. But he soon learned that at the bare-knuckled pinnacle of power politics consensus is hard to find.  

He learned this first from his own party. By refusing  to become the prime minister and choosing to remain an eminence grise in the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi unintentionally created a diarchy in the power hierarchy.  Diarchy, real or virtual, has also broken the second weapon at the disposal of  the prime minister --the capacity to impose discipline through the threat of a cabinet reshuffle. Not only is Manmohan Singh the only prime minister never to have gone seven years without a major  cabinet reshuffle, but the one he announced with much fanfare last winter turned out to be a damp squib because one of the key ministers involved refused to go along with the proposed changes. Manmohan Singh’s  assurance that another reshuffle would occur soon, has still to be fulfilled. Coalition rule has completed the weakening of the prime minister. 

Today those who are finding fault with Manmohan Singh for not seizing the reigns of policy, not pushing out ministers who do not see eye to eye with him, not transferring  bureaucrats who put obstacles in the way of policy implementation, not bringing the security forces firmly back under control and not ‘getting  the country moving again’ are in reality expressing a vote of no confidence against Indian democracy. They may not be aware of it, but what they are yearning for is a benevolent dictator. 

India’s democracy may be in trouble, but it  is the only system that can hold such a vast and ethnically diverse population together. Thus critics of Manmohan Singh need to ask themselves why there is no longer even a tacit consensus on the type of country we want to build.

The answer is consensus on key issues of nation building are not built in parliament, where it is the opposition’s function to oppose. Nor is it built  within the bureaucracy, whose natural function is to ensure continuity in policy and smoothness of transition when these change.

A nation is given direction by its people, and that means by its media and civil society. We have seen an impressive example of it in the rebellion against corruption. But there are a score of other issues to which they need to turn their attention not in a mood of confrontation but cooperation. Singh’s hands would be immeasurably strengthened if there was a vibrant debate going on not only on the problems we face but the remedies that would work. That is noticeable mainly for its absence. Should Rahul Gandhi, or even God himself succeed  Singh, he too will face the same problem and need the same support.