The summer freeze

(L-R) Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, and Pranab Mukherjee | File photo: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

Finally, there is unanimity at least on one thing in this capital city: that this has become our most dysfunctional real government in three decades. Real, to distinguish it from the obviously temporary arrangements like Chandra Shekhar’s, Gowda’s and Gujral’s, described by late Vithal Gadgil in his immortal phrase, ten-day wonders. It passes the buck to GoMs and EGoMs, which in turn only make news in single-columns on inside pages for postponing their meetings. The government is too scared to raise petroleum prices, treating the three-figure Nymex and Brent quotes with suspension of disbelief, indecision over coal mining is blighting power generation, and waffling over the Cairn-Vedanta and Reliance-BP deals is being watched with such dismay by foreign investors. Appointments of heads of the most important PSU giants like ONGC and UTI, chairman of our most vital infrastructure organisation, NHAI, even the CVC, are stuck. There is no progress on the ambitiously high-sounding National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), though the president promised it in her address to Parliament.

Our higher defence organisation is a mess, with chiefs speaking out of turn and an unedifying controversy over the army chief’s birth certificate which is not being set at rest one way or the other, thereby dividing the brass. Such is the state of paralysis that even members of this cabinet, senior leaders of the party and definitely its furious coalition partners all acknowledge it with a shrug of helplessness. We have seen how devastating a government which is non-functional despite a majority can be in West Bengal in the two years under Buddhadeb since May 2009. Now to have a government in that condition at the Centre, and that too for three full years?

It is a frightening prospect. Businessmen are voting with their feet, taking a bulk of their new investments overseas. The markets are usually the first to sense policy paralysis. The markets, languishing in the third position among the world’s worst performers in the past 12 months, have brushed aside Egypt to become the second worst. Given the mood of dismay in Dalal Street, Russians should be feeling threatened at the bottom.

The paralysis in the government is matched by the confusion in the Congress party. Its carefully scripted strategy of distancing itself from all government decisions except the most obviously populistic ones has now unravelled and backfired. While the government finally responded to this by suspending all decision-making on anything even remotely controversial, it is the party that is now getting the rap for all the scams, some real, some exaggerated and some (as a most eminent and honest scientist-entrepreneur, Kiran Karnik, explained in an interview with me, IE, March 8) mostly imaginary like ISRO/ Devas. You can blame the formidable whispering machine of the RSS for it, and maybe you are right, but the clamour over hundreds of lakhs of crores of dollars” stashed away in foreign banks has a very strong undertone of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin. The same whisper machine talks of her recent Europe visit as some smoking-gun evidence of a conspiracy to vacuum-clean India’s wealth. The more brazen, like Subramanian Swamy, say so in public: that Sonia and Rahul have gone to Switzerland to sort out their secret accounts, nervous that now their time is up. Over the past three weeks I have been stopped by ordinary people at airports, in shopping malls, at a petrol pump, in a spiritual ashram, at the national athletic games in Bangalore and so on with a question that seems to have become a clamour: why are you in the media so scared of the Gandhis? Why is no one exposing their humongous stash overseas?

It is all bunkum, of course, and in any case the beauty of Swiss accounts is that nobody needs to go to Switzerland to do anything with them. But the Congress defends itself very poorly when it merely responds by calling those making such allegations deranged or uncivil, or sounding as if the RSS is the new ISI. People of India are not stupid. They know who to trust and who to laugh at. But the Congress party steps on its own toes by even treating its top leaders’ travels as some kind of a national secret. Of course, they are perfectly entitled to spend their vacation wherever they wish, whether within the country or overseas, but why should that be kept so hush-hush? So far, the Congress has got away with treating its top leaders as some kind of an endearing, mysterious, aloof royalty. The use-by date on that self-imposed mystique is now over.

Ditto for the Gandhi family. The strategy of controlling the politics and government from a distance without directly speaking to the people has become counter-productive and has contributed to the current paralysis. The Congress is not the Communist Party of China, when you had to face-read Mao or Deng to figure out what the party line was, and it is not the seventies or the eighties. In this increasingly young, aspirational India of 2011, leaders have to talk not just to their partymen but also to their people. Because if they don’t, the so-called civil society, hyperactive judges and a hyperventilating media will grab that space. To take this space back, the Gandhis have to not only totally reboot their politics, but also their political style.

There are two areas where we Indians believe we can teach the world a thing or two: politics and cricket. So if you see this peculiar party-government arrangement, it is a bit like you send out a nightwatchman to play out the difficult half hour at the end of the day, so your main batsman, some Sachin Tendulkar, can come and shine the next morning. That is the way the party looked at UPA 2, presuming it had already won 2014. But it forgot that five years of governance was not the difficult last hour in a day’s play, but an entire innings. The main batsmen (in this case the main batsman, Rahul) can no longer be hidden in the safety of the pavilion. He has to step out and speak up. So must Sonia.

The same nightwatchman syndrome has caught the government as well, with the prime minister and the seniormost ministers being totally out of the picture. Just as the Congress has outsourced its fight to Digvijaya Singh, the government has left it to Kapil Sibal. Why should the government continue to sound like it has a bad conscience? It is shockingly, suicidally stupid to go on saying that the prime minister himself does not mind being under the Lokpal, but the government doesn’t want it. The prime minister may be reticent about speaking in public, but he has to now step on the podium to explain to us one simple point: that while he may personally have no problem with being under the Lokpal, these are the problems it will cause in governance, and the reason his government is opposed to the idea. He is still trusted and respected as one of our most selfless, honest leaders ever. Where is the need for him to be silent?

This has been a remarkably unique period in our political history, where three seniormost leaders of the establishment have not been speaking to us, the people, as a matter of policy and strategy. It is not working. They have to reinvent both their politics and their style, and start conversing with India. Since it is primarily because of their silence that the whisperers are now winning. The victory they had taken for granted in 2014 is now most certainly a fantasy. Worse, if they do not change tack, 2012 may indeed be the new 2014.