India: Whose government is it,
anyway? By Ramtanu Maitra
To
identify the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as a
Congress party-led government would be altogether wrong.
The government has at least three power centers - the
first is the Congress party under Sonia Gandhi, the
second is Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and his
Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and the third is the left of
all stripes.
Because of its weakness, the
Congress is unable to stem the tide of either Yadav or
the left-wing faction, and it is almost a certainty that
more power centers within the government will begin to
surface in the near future.
Does this mean the
UPA will collapse like the proverbial house of cards?
Not necessarily. As long as Manmohan Singh can make
policy concessions, even if they are token concessions,
without hurting the Congress, the boat will remain
afloat. Whether this boat will be able to get to the
riverbank to deliver anything is another matter,
however.
There is another reason the government
will not disappear in a hurry: there is no opposition to
replace it. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) resembles
Humpty-Dumpty. It will take more than the Vishva Hindu
Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) and other hardline Hindu organizations and
the saner heads within the party to put Humpty-Dumpty
together again. This will give the UPA time.
The importance of political
stature All of this is not to say that the
previous multiparty coalition government, the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) under Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
was highly functional. It was not, and that was
underscored by the Indian electorate in the April
20-May10, four-phase parliamentary elections. Despite
the similarity between these two governments in their
lack of effectiveness, there is nonetheless an important
difference: the NDA prime minister had real political
stature. Vajpayee did not always have the political
strength, but he had the personal political standing to
fend off potential power-grabbers and prevent the
formation of additional power centers within the
government.
The difference between Vajpayee and
Singh in this regard is simple: Vajpayee is a politician
and Singh is not. Despite the ideological distortions he
inherited because of his total immersion in the RSS,
Vajpayee worked all his life with the people, with his
feet firmly on the ground, his eyes closed perhaps, but
his ears picking up people's words. Vajpayee's political
experience did not translate directly into sound
economic policymaking. He never had any real
understanding of the economy. But, as he came to realize
toward the end of his term, the issue is in any case not
the complicated operations of the financial world but
the straightforward, people-oriented physical economy
that consists of the country's physical infrastructure,
its transport, health care, education etc.
The
ideological gobbledygook of globalization, even when
declaimed by a man of his stature and political
maturity, he found, does not carry far. It is perhaps
this understanding that led him to make the excellent
push for rapid development of national highways and to
propose interlinking of the rivers to end the annual
drought-and-flood cycle that haunts almost all Indians.
Vajpayee's political maturity was a more obvious
asset in the area of foreign policy. There is no
question that during the five years of the Vajpayee-led
NDA administration, India exhibited the most mature
foreign-policy framework since the days of Jawaharlal
Nehru when India gained independence in 1947. The
understanding of the colossal importance of both China
and Russia being close allies of India; the wholehearted
effort to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir dispute with
Pakistan; and initiation of a dialogue toward developing
strategic relations with the United States - all this
showed a political maturity and statesmanship not seen
in New Delhi for more than 30 years.
Manmohan
Singh is not a politician. His understanding of foreign
policy is broad, and not fine-tuned. One may say that he
has able lieutenants in K Natwar Singh and National
Security Adviser J N Dixit. But without the ability to
make creative input into the foreign policy of a country
of more than a billion people, the stature of the prime
minister is lowered and, in essence, another power
center is created, however positive and friendly that
power center may be.
Pro-poor
policies? Manmohan Singh is, however, an
economist. He was the architect and implementer of
India's liberalization policy in 1991 under the guidance
of former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao. Now, for
political reasons, he is entrusted with a different
economic task. With the help of his team, he will have
to guide the economy away from a strict growth
orientation to encompass policies that are more helpful
to the poor than to the middle class or the rich. This
is a much more difficult task than simple growth
generation. Unfortunately, he is not likely to get a
whole lot of help on this from the Congress power
center, Sonia Gandhi. She likes the poor and would like
to ease their burden, but has little idea how 300
million Indian people can be delivered from poverty.
The prime minister's economic colleagues -
Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Planning Commission
deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia - are also
unlikely to provide much assistance. Educated with
"Washington Consensus"-bred economic policies, Manmohan
Singh's top economic officials believe growth is the
panacea. Growth creates a trickling effect; if the
growth is higher, the trickle effect is stronger. And
that strong trickle, instead of losing its way, may even
reach the most unskilled and poorest of landless
Indians. Chidambaram and Ahluwalia know very well how to
utilize the skilled and educated people to generate
growth, but they have no credentials whatsoever when it
comes to getting the poor out of their numbing
illiteracy and hapless poverty.
Chidambaram told
parliament on July 8 when he presented the budget that
boosting investment was vital to achieve his growth
target and to fight poverty: "It is my goal to make the
environment in India attractive to investors," he said.
But the 2004-05 budget contained few major concrete
measures that would suggest the finance minister is
serious. It imposes a 2% levy on all taxes, an
additional 10% surcharge on people earning more than
US$19,230 a year and raises corporate taxes by an extra
2.5%.
Spending was lifted $2.2 billion over the
previous government's interim budget in February. The
increase is largely to deliver the Congress-led
coalition's promised "new deal" for rural India, which
brought it to power. But in this, too, there is a
caveat. For instance, as pointed out by former prime
minister Chandra Shekhar in an op-ed in The Hindu on
July 14, Chidambaram "spoke at length about reviewing
and developing water bodies". The aim was to address the
concerns of rural India, where water is a life-and-death
issue. But in the end, one finds the finance minister
has allocated just $22 million, in place of the NDA's
last budgetary allocation of about $16 million, for the
entire country. "How many of India's water bodies and
watersheds does the finance minister think he can renew
with this paltry amount?" asked the former prime
minister. "This is nothing but the most cynical
tokenism," he concluded.
But Manmohan Singh cut
his economic teeth during the Nehruvian days of the
Indian economy, when the public sector was declared to
be India's commanding heights. He was not directly
involved in it, but is fully conversant with the green
revolution that saved the nation and developed a viable
agricultural sector. He can, if he wants to, guide his
financial whiz-kid colleagues to formulate policies that
would positively affect the poor.
But if he
tries to do that, he could be checkmated by at least two
other power centers, and perhaps create new ones. The
greatest problem would come from the left wing, with its
61 parliamentarians supporting the government from
outside. The left "owns" two of India's states - West
Bengal, fully, and Kerala, partly. Its objective is to
maintain the ownership of these two states, both of
which are very poor, forever and ever. The left claims
to support a pro-poor economic policy to ensure greater
allocation of money to the poor from India's annual
budget. But the left insists that allocations must be
disbursed through the states, because the left wants to
control the money in the states it "owns". Any attempt
by New Delhi to try to alleviate poverty directly would
result in the left pulling the government down. The left
has already made clear that the UPA's economic policy
must have its approval, or else.
The
muscleman The third power center is represented
by Laloo Prasad Yadav, a self-proclaimed socialist who
outwits everyone with his caste politics using sheer
native Bihari cleverness. He is a loose cannon. It is
impossible to figure out in which direction he will fire
next. He needs money because he wants to "own" Bihar as
the left "owns" West Bengal. He is not there yet, but he
would like to use his muscle, and his stick, to get New
Delhi's help to get there. It is evident that Laloo
Yadav is no one's patsy. But once he is in an alliance,
unless the alliance leader has the political acumen to
straitjacket him, Laloo Yadav will remain a power center
of his own, no matter what.
Bihar is arguably
the poorest state in India, and lawlessness reigns
supreme all over the state. The poverty and the anarchy
are controlled by the powers-that-be. Today, as it has
been for a few years, one of the controllers of poverty
and anarchy is Laloo Prasad Yadav. New Delhi is fully
aware that if any attempt is made by the central
government to alleviate poverty or bring back law and
order in the sate, it will have to confront Laloo Yadav.
The UPA will not do that because Laloo Yadav's support
is essential to maintain its majority in the Lok Sabha,
or Lower House.
The UPA has no reason to
collapse. The BJP will take a long time to figure out
why the NDA lost the elections and who was responsible
for the defeat. Even if it figures that out, it could
take years to put the right people into the right places
to make a comeback. Hence the BJP is not a threat. There
is really no threat to the UPA's survival. The question
is: what kind of survival will it be?
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