Go, or get going

The risk Congress does not want to be taking going into 2014 is going into an election with the 'longest-lasting lame duck' in India's history.

File mage of Congress president Sonia Gandhi with Rahul Gandhi | Atul Yadav | PTI

Here is a three-question quiz for the top leadership of the Congress party. One, do you want Rahul Gandhi to become prime minister replacing Manmohan Singh during the term of this Lok Sabha? Two, if not, do you still want a change of leadership, nominating yet another partyman as prime minister to run the government until 2014? Three, do you want to dissolve this parliament some time soon, and seek a fresh, and hopefully a fuller mandate?

If the answer is a yes to any of these three, then you have no time to lose. If Rahul has to lead, he must be given time to settle in the job and go back to the voters in 2014 with a real report card. If it is someone else, he would still need time because no incumbent can go to the polls after a short-term prime ministership. And if you have to seek a fresh mandate, why prolong everybody’s agony by having your government just hobble along?

But if the answer, as I surely believe, is none of the above, then you have to do a few new things, and also make a course correction. You have to speak to your government and your hand-picked prime minister to focus back on governance, to fix the power and performance of its cabinet, and you have to help them do so. Because the risk you do not want to take going into 2014 (or even earlier if the party is encouraged in case there is a spectacular performance in Uttar Pradesh in 2012) is of going into an election with the longest lasting lame duck in India’s history.

And here are five things that you specifically need to ask your government to fix:

1. It has to fix, first of all, the cabinet. Over the past year we have seen the government evolve in an unprecedented manner where, it seems, ministers (particularly some senior ones) have begun to function like bureaucrats. All responsibility is avoided and decisions are put in orbit with that catch-all excuse, party-government disconnect. That bluff has to be called. The way to do it is to drop the non-performers. Going by sheer performance, at least six senior ministers in this cabinet have been hopeless non-performing assets. They must go in the next reshuffle. That will, by itself, bring in the additional benefit of fixing the average age of the cabinet. Look for those who are in the cabinet not because they bring any special skills, value or experience but who are there to balance the politics of some state, or faction. Those that consider their tenure in the cabinet as time-pass while they plan and plot their return to the state where real power is. You can count six like that in one minute, so please do not ask me for names. The Union cabinet cannot be a sinecure, or a comfortable exile for those you do not want making mischief some place else.

2. Both the party and the government need a Kamraj Plan. There are senior members of the cabinet who you would rather have out there, managing your politics, tying up alliances, making deals. At least three of them need to go out and that will serve the party better than their current, distracted non-performer status in the cabinet. Similarly, some from the party should be inducted into the cabinet, particularly one of the general secretaries who has not held a government position for a long time now and has age, energy and resourcefulness still on his side to deliver on specific responsibilities in key areas. Think of him in one of the key positions in Cabinet Committee of Security, not all of whose members are the finest performers of this cabinet.

3. The prime minister has to fix his PMO. We know that he is such a believer in correctness but over the decades the engine of any government is the PMO. He needs more and fresh people there and he needs to empower those that are there and he trusts much more. The PMO cannot be a forwarding office. It has to make sure the prime minister’s and the government’s agenda is implemented, its wishes are carried out and the bottlenecks, as they arise, are quickly removed. Vajpayee’s PMO is a good example. That was a coalition government too and Vajpayee’s mandate was hobbled by internal power struggles of the BJP even more than Manmohan Singh’s because of the sniping by the Congress party’s establishment dissidents.

But his PMO packed real power, and delivered what he wanted. And, honestly, Vajpayee worked no more than six full hours a day, and never missed his long siesta, while Manmohan Singh works 18 and, from all accouns, takes his worries to his bed. He needs more people in his office delivering, getting ministers and ministries to talk and sort out their differences and getting decisions implemented.

4. Revisit the idea of GoMs and EGoMs. This Manmohan Singh innovation has worked well in the past but has now begun to go past its use-by date. This was a useful instrument to get consensus decision on contentious and complex issues. But it has lost much value in UPA-II. Most GoMs have failed to arrive at a coherent conclusion and where they have, they have run into resistance, in some cases even at the NAC. The PM, therefore, has to first of all do a performance appraisal of the currently functioning GoMs and then take back what is stalled and push it top-down from the PMO.

5. The prime minister has to reach out to Sonia Gandhi and find a way of institutionalising his government’s interaction with the party and now, inevitably, with the NAC. There is no point in the government announcing a decision or policy and then stalling in the face of criticism from a party critic or opposition of even one member of the NAC whose power can no longer be under-estimated. When a newspaper article, or even stray criticism by an NAC member can chill the government into rethinking or inaction, the only way to function is to institutionalise that interaction. How that is best done, the prime minister and Sonia have to figure out. Otherwise excuses to do nothing will keep arising, and so will irritants.

And while the prime minister and the government do some of this the party will need to do some cleaning up at its end as well. A crucial aspect of this will have to be a fresh look at its chief ministers and the states it is running. Its chief ministers in Maharashtra and Andhra (which send 87 members to Lok Sabha) look powerless and ineffective. Its other states, from Kashmir to Goa, are a disaster. If fortunes in today’s national elections are a net result of several key state elections, the Congress will need to empower its chief ministers and be able to flaunt more best practices from its own states than just tiny Haryana’s land acquisition policy.