Generation Ex

File photo of India parliament building | Bloomberg

Finally, in this session we have begun to see glimpses of some of the old-style parliamentary brilliance. First, there was the debate on Volcker between P. Chidambaram and Arun Jaitley, both so good they made you wonder why, indeed, do we in the media not focus on such high-quality stuff rather than hunt for easy headlines in walk-outs and that three-decade favourite of headline-writers, pandemonium.

But my favourite moment for a long time will be CPM’s Sitaram Yechury’s response when mocked by JD(U)’s Digvijay Singh on why does the Left only bark and not bite. This was when the BJP and the Left found themselves (as they often do in this Parliament) together in opposition to the UPA’in this case on the EPF interest issue. It was a particularly clever crack, play as it did on Yechury’s by now famous threat once that comrades don’t just bark, they can also bite. If the BJP was waiting for the comrades to “bite” so they could return to power, he said, they would have to wait for five years.

Maybe it took a taunt from the BJP to provoke Yechury into revealing the Left’s true, and from the point of view of the Congress, honourable intentions. But even if the Congress takes him at his word, is it ready for the challenge of 2009? How is it preparing for the next battle, whether it is in 2009 or, if somehow the comrades do not keep their promise, or some malevolent Third Front virus erupts again, any time between the summer of 2006 and 2009? Again, whether it is 2006 or 2009, where is the team the Congress will go to the people with?

With its senior counsels still savouring the fruit of a fortuitous stint in power, there is insufficient evidence so far the party is even thinking of that. Maybe its president is, and if that is so, we will see some evidence of that forward thinking in the coming Cabinet reshuffle. But if she does not bite the bullet it will be an opportunity lost. It will also disappoint both Congress supporters and those mainstreamers who believe, as I do, that for India’s politics to have a stable centre of gravity, the Congress and BJP between themselves must have at least 350 seats. Only then can you have meaningful coalitions rather than the hugely compromised ones where even a Ram Vilas Paswan, with four MPs, can squat on two key economic ministries.

Everybody around the world, except perhaps the Indian political class, accepts that politics is now a younger person’s profession. We have today a world where Bill Clinton retires at 54 as a two-term president, Koizumi and Schroeder keep falling in love, Blair is producing babies, Musharraf plays a hard game of squash and Bush boasts a Bjorn Borgesque pulse rate of 48. The Chinese have brought about a generational shift, all of Europe, including, surprise of surprises, France, is going through the same change.

But here the only politician (if you can describe him as one) who has the honesty to acknowledge this is Manmohan Singh. And he is honest enough to also not harbour notions of a second term, unlike many others, into their eighties. He will also acknowledge that what he needs most of all is some young talent in his Cabinet. But ask many of the other golden oldies in his party’and Cabinet’and they think they can go on and on forever.

Politics in India has never been the profession of the young. In a society where experience is confused for ability and age for wisdom it’s been common for parties to make their brightest minds wait till they are well into their sixties before they are trusted with real responsibility. But this has to change now.

Today’s politics and governance are more demanding. They demand better, more modern, skills; a spontaneous connection with technology and understanding of the markets and, most important of all, a stake in the future. The time when a party could leave governance in the hands of a grandfatherly generation is now over. Around the world now, public figures are younger, fitter, more active. In contrast, ours routinely look outdated. Even if you look at this Cabinet, what are people like Arjun Singh (75, HRD), Sish Ram Ola (78, mines) and Mahabir Prasad (66, small scale, agro and rural industries) doing with three of the key portfolios on whose performance this government will be judged in 2009? In any case, will the party be able to take these same faces to the people in 2009 as it seeks a fresh term? At some point you have to tell people they have been rewarded enough for past services and now must yield to others who can build a future. In 2009, the people of India’their incomes nearly doubled from 2004 if even 8 per cent growth continues’will look at the claimants not just for experience but also for energy and talent.

If there is one thing the older generation of our politicians knows well it is how to squash the challenge of the young. The late Madhavrao Scindia once complained to me, rather philosophically, of how people in his party kept on telling him he needed some more experience. “I tell them, ” he said, “I am well above 50, and a grandfather.

So how much more experience do I need?”

I personally was witness to one of these most skilled golden oldies cut a young pretender to size. As I had lunch with the late Sikander Bakht (industry minister in the NDA government) his young deputy, Sukhbir Badal, walked in, talking of some public sector reforms. “Yes, my son, very good idea. Study this a bit more. I will tell some experienced officers to brief you…yes, yes, I am all for reform but learn patience from me…I am all for youthful exuberance but in politics you need a lot more experience”, and so on. By the end of a half-hour conversation I saw young Badal quietly retreat, tail between his legs, chastened and without having one idea accepted even for further discussion. In today’s Congress, the argument for keeping younger talent out is, if you give them government positions who will do the party work? This is cynical and self-serving and, in the long run, also self-destructive. Our politicians, including very old prime ministers, have combined demands of governance and political management with panache and to ask for a permanent separation of church and the state’and that too only for the younger partymen’is suicidal.

Whatever its compulsions, the party has to look at the generational change taking place around it. A change in the BJP’s top leadership is near and inevitable. Its general secretaries, Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Sanjay Joshi, and its key chief ministers, Narendra Modi, Shivraj Chauhan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Raman Singh, are all in their 40s and 50s. Even the CPM, the original hangout of the long marchers, has brought about a spectacular generational shift. Its most visible and powerful faces are now Prakash and Brinda Karat, Yechury, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Mohammed Salim, Nilotpal Basu, Dipankar Mukherji, and so on. The ministers from the southern allies, Dayanidhi Maran, A. Raja, Anbumani Ramadoss and even Chandrashekhar Rao are among the youngest members of this cabinet.

So, whether it looks right or left, or at the centre, the Congress can ignore this change at its own peril. A total generational changeover is in any case inevitable in the next Parliament, where almost nobody who is over 70 today will get elected again. No party can pass that opportunity if it has ambitions beyond 2009, and that is if Yechury stands by his word and the election does not come earlier. The coming reshuffle is perfectly timed for the Congress president to send out that message.