One of the most remarkable events in our recent politics is the claim that after Left Front leaders met the Prime Minister earlier this week, he had agreed to keep his forthcoming discussions with George Bush within the parameters of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP). I do not think even the tiniest, least significant banana republic in the world has ever attempted to trivialise its engagement with the world like this, or to demean its legitimate chief executive in this way. If all the functions of this government, from economics to foreign policy are to be run by a 24-page, half-literate pamphlet, where is the need to have a prime minister? We can be run by a permanent caretaker government, helped along by a decent cabinet secretary who recites the key covenants of the CMP along with the Hanuman Chalisa, or whatever prayers he prefers at the start of an onerous day at work.
Frankly, Manmohan Singh’s problem is not what the CMP confines him to. The law it lays down on his engagement with the US is a masterfully pithy and vague example of bureaucratese. I can quote all of it (para 3, page 23 of the Holy CMP) here: “Even as it pursues closer engagement and relations with the USA, the UPA government will maintain the independence of India’s foreign policy position on all regional and global issues.” This is ALL it says, or, for the sake of absolute clarity, I can also quote the preamble which may be relevant: “The UPA government will pursue an independent foreign policy keeping in mind its past traditions. The policy will seek to promote multi-polarity in world relations and oppose all attempts at unilateralism.”
All it adds up to is one-and-a-half platitudes, and restricts the Prime Minister from doing or saying nothing that he might wish to in the national interest. The harm, however, is done by the constant highlighting of this not being a full-fledged government with negotiating flexibility needed in a world bristling with opportunities. It is now being projected ‘ quite deliberately and systematically ‘ as a government captive to the CMP and the Left. Worse, it is made to look so desperate to hang on to power, which it got only fortuitously, as to swallow daily humiliation and censure by its own allies.
Some of the more astute people in the Congress have begun to see through this. They see a game-plan unfolding clearly. The Left, which is not only their adversary in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura but also nationally in terms of key economic policies, would keep on rubbing their noses into the ground, making them grovel, swallow their pride, take their decisions back and look like a completely ineffectual government anxious to cling to power at all costs. Then, after it is safely settled in power after elections in Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram next year, the Left would pull down the UPA government at the “right” moment, on some high populist issue, and then put together a third front-type coalition after another election.
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It may look improbable, but it is not impossible. In fact, it would have been possible even in this Parliament. All that saved India from that disaster was personal antagonisms in the heartland ‘ between Laloo, Mulayam and Mayawati ‘ which transcend all reason and ideology. Those blood feuds will endure, but if strategists of the Left are convinced that a humiliated Congress will be reduced to just around a hundred seats in a late-2006 election, a third front would become a possibility. That’s the kind of government the Left may be willing to join, as it partly did under H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral.
Some of this logic fell in place in the course of a conversation with former Prime Minister Gowda in Bangalore earlier this week. How was it that some of the reforms the Left now wanted to turn the clock back on, it was directly party to in Gowda’s Third Front government? Gowda proudly pointed out to me that two of the most significant reforms, the dismantling of the Administered Prices Mechanism (APM) for petroleum products and setting up of the Disinvestment Commission, were both done by his cabinet that included CPI stalwarts like Indrajit Gupta and Chaturanan Mishra. There was never any problem, he said, and while he had his problems first with Kesri and then with 10 Janpath over the Jain Commission (but mostly with Ram Krishna Hegde), interference from the Left was minimal. Left parties, in fact, were model allies. Then, you could dismantle the APM, today you have to ask Abani Roy before adding 50 paise to the price of petrol.
So the same Left, which went along happily with more radical reform in Gowda’s brief tenure, including Chidambaram’s 1997 dream budget, today wants a decision as inconsequential as the sale of 10 per cent BHEL equity withdrawn even though it did not object to a similar sale in another navaratna, NTPC, just the other day. The Left is only playing to its own compulsions, the most compelling of which is to make the Congress look as bad as possible. Have you noticed, by the way, how comparatively muted their protests are when reformist steps are taken by non-Congress ministers? Laloo slipped in private players in the railway container business and there wasn’t a whimper. If a Congress minister had done it, the comrades would have forced the Prime Minister and the UPA chairperson to do a public apology and day-long recital of the CMP as prayaschit.
The bigger problem is, each time the Left drags one of the decisions of the Manmohan Singh cabinet to the UPA chairperson, it demeans not just the Congress but also one of the most honest, intellectually-endowed and selfless prime ministers in India’s history. Indirectly, it keeps reinforcing the main criticism of the NDA against this government, that real power vests not with the Prime Minister but with Sonia Gandhi which, we know, is not at all her intention. But she is also forced into this uncomfortable position every other day, cramping her own political space and making her government look like a joke.
Today her government is in a situation where Bills moved by it may not pass because its own allies would oppose them. At the same time she cannot ask the BJP for parliamentary support (just like the BJP did with the insurance and electricity Bills when in power because both parties agree on these broad reforms) because it might anger the Left. She is forced to treat the BJP as untouchable by the same Left that had no problems in joining hands with the Sangh Parivar to keep V.P. Singh in power at the Centre ‘ then, ostensibly, to ward off dynastic rule by keeping out of power her husband who had 197 seats.
For the Left, this is a dream. With just over ten per cent strength in this Parliament they can pretty much run this government, with no accountability. They may wince at my use of a brutal expression from the world of corporate high finance to describe their political conquest but I suspect in their private moments this may even make them smile a smile of success: isn’t it the exact political equivalent of a leveraged buyout? How else can you describe a situation where you have taken over a whole government on the strength of 60 MPs, but are leveraging your ability to keep it in power?
I know that some of the smarter Congressmen have begun to fidget. But they have two problems. One, the complacency caused by the chaos in the BJP. And second, a lack of confidence in their ability to improve their numbers in a fresh election, and you can’t blame them if you see the three-figure scores in some of the recent Assembly by-elections in Uttar Pradesh. But there are stirrings of impatience. These will grow, and soon enough, Congressmen, whether hard-boiled political ones like Pranab Mukherjee, Ahmed Patel and Digvijay Singh, or the selfless true-believers like Manmohan Singh, will have to make a choice: either to go and seek a fresh mandate on the basis of their own manifesto and core beliefs, including economic reform and secularism. Or, at least morally, to return to the people, in an open alliance with the Left, with the CMP as their joint manifesto. The central fact is, the people of India never voted for the CMP. A majority of their votes went to the Congress and the BJP whose manifestoes made very different promises. The CMP has been put together by adversaries who came together after the polls only to keep the BJP out. Like the Treaty of Versailles, it was always doomed to sink. Now it may take the Congress down with it too, unless the party wakes up fast.
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