Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget is the third of the significant developments over this week that, in their own different ways, mark the coming of age of UPA-II. Or, at least, the unveiling of the contours of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s and his government’s politico-intellectual approach to their second term.
The other two are the resumption of dialogue with a foreign adversary, and the rejection of a truce offer from a domestic one. So what common strand can we find between things as diverse as the Budget, talks with Pakistan, and Chidambaram’s firm no to the Maoists?
In each case, the government faced pressure not merely from the opposition, but from what is generally described as the party and its intellectual support base. But in each one, it backed its own convictions.
Less than six months after the so-called fiasco of Sharm el-Sheikh, when the Congress party had joined the opposition in condemning its own government over poor drafting of that joint statement, if not worse, the author of that allegedly disastrous statement has been appointed the national security advisor, and the policy of engaging with Pakistan in spite of terrorist provocations is back. This, for the prime minister, is a long-held intellectual belief, and he now feels confident enough to go with it, whatever the risks.
The rejection of the Maoist offer of talks also underlines a similar resolve to ignore all distraction and noise and go with what you think is right. The prime minister, home minister and other key members of his cabinet have clearly maintained a view that Maoists represent the greatest challenge to our internal stability and they will deal with them firmly, discounting all root causes theories put forward by their own intellectual supporters in the large leftist middle-ground, often patronised and pampered by the Congress leadership.
The armed Maoist power has to be first neutralised and talks can then follow. They are not a state within a state that can negotiate while maintaining an army of sorts and reserving the right to go back to fighting if talks fail.
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The Budget is the third and clearest evidence of this growing confidence. Some of us may criticise it for lacking bold reformist ideas or promises. But what it lacks in sound, it packs in substance.
If GST and Direct Tax Code are ushered in by the promised date, it will mark the most substantive reform carried out since Manmohan Singh’s Budget of 1991, and Chidambaram’s in 1997.
The increase in petrol prices is an act of courage, and doubly so as it comes in the wake of the fertiliser subsidy reform in the face of bitter opposition from the son of your most significant ally.
Of course, the government could make us all look like fools by rolling back a bit of this and a bit of that. But indications are that it has thought these moves through, chosen its time to make them, and will now invest time, energy and political capital in carrying them through.
This, as I have argued before, has by now emerged as Manmohan Singh’s political style. In each innings in power, he chooses one or more key issues, stakes his image, goodwill and his job, and invests his entire intellectual and political capital on carrying these through. This is how he approached the 1991 reform and the 2008 nuclear deal.
Now, with the luxury of a second term in a Parliament still far from perfect, but much better than the last one, he has decided to expand the reach and range of his risk-taking. He wants to build peace with Pakistan, knowing that another 26/11 might cause him enormous political damage.
It is a leap of faith more audacious than the nuclear deal. He has similarly decided that in this term, he has to settle the Maoist challenge and also resume the larger process of reform at a philosophical, even ideological, level rather than do a bit here and there by stealth, as was his fate in his last term.
It would seem that for all three of his big ideas, he has also chosen the right kind of allies: a quiet, conformist S.M. Krishna and a true-believer Shiv Shankar Menon on Pakistan, Pranab Mukherjee with his political weight, maturity and wisdom for economic reform and Chidambaram for internal security.
This flurry marks a welcome move on from a point where many, including this writer, had begun to wonder why UPA-II looked so out of sorts, even more frozen than its first edition, in spite of better parliamentary numbers, and getting rid of the Left’s shackles.
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One possible explanation was that unlike in its rather fortuitous first term, when it saw no real hope of a second term, the UPA was now encumbered by the prospect of a likely third term in 2014, and was therefore unwilling to take any risks.
Their functioning so far somehow reminded you of the caution with which a team, one-up in a series, approaches the last Test match, playing for a dreary draw from day one. That script, as we have seen happen in cricket often enough, tends to go wrong. Which, indeed, was the risk that UPA-II was courting.
It seemed a matter of time before some unanticipated catastrophe would hobble it, maybe a scandal like Bofors but with 2010 dimensions. Politics abhors playing for time as much as it abhors a vacuum. With its general inaction so far, this government had seemed to be drifting in that direction. These last seven, or maybe ten days, now mark a refreshing change.
Maybe its first tactical error was coming up with a breathless hundred-day agenda in the euphoria of its re-election. There was an interesting exchange between Pranab Mukherjee and Sushma Swaraj on a day of stirring Lok Sabha debate on price rise when the finance minister said his was a government elected for five years and not a hundred days and the leader of the opposition read out to him promises made in his own coalition’s hundred-day agenda.
Even for a single-party government, India’s system of political governance is too complex to yield any results in a hundred days. You do not even need a T20 approach to governance when you have been handed out a comfortable mandate for five years and when you have one of the wisest, cleanest and most selfless men in our public life as your prime minister.
These three unconnected developments over this week bring us evidence that this government now means business, and is willing to take audacious, but sensible, risks in pursuit of what it believes is good for India.
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