The odd couple of Indian
politics By Siddharth
Srivastava
NEW DELHI - They are the odd
couple of Indian politics. Even as the
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance completed
two years in office this week, the focus has been
as always on the two individuals at the helm:
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and party president
Sonia Gandhi. It is a unique instance in Indian
political history that a person considered more
powerful than the head of government holds the
party post.
A recent countrywide survey
places Manmohan notches above Sonia as the best
suited to lead the country, given his rise from
village roots to study at Oxford, work at the
World Bank, head the Reserve Bank of India, and
become finance minister and now premier. But
Manmohan knows who is boss. Sonia owes her
position to the powerful
lineage of the Gandhi family and insights into
Indian politics she acquired from living in the
shadow of her late mother-in-law Indira Gandhi and
husband Rajiv Gandhi, both former prime ministers.
When Sonia selected Manmohan in May 2004
to lead the country after the unexpected victory
of the Congress party over the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), the Cassandras did not give
the relationship much of a chance. Yet it has
endured, and most say it is stronger than ever. It
has survived the intrigue and jealousies within
the Congress party with stalwarts such as Defense
Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Human Resources
Minister Arjun Singh who fancied being in
Manmohan's position, once it became clear that
Sonia was not interested in being in the direct
line of fire given that her foreign origins (she
is Italian-born) provide easy fodder for the
opposition.
Pranab has since aligned
himself with Manmohan to emerge as the
second-most-powerful minister, while Arjun is said
still to harbor misgivings and fancies his chances
of becoming the president of the country, an
honorary post but the highest public functionary
under the constitution.
Indeed, the key
difference lies in the personalities of Manmohan
and Sonia. Sonia is conscious of her aggressive
role as a leader rooted in the political realities
of the country, where the majority is still poor,
and people can be influenced by caste and
religious affiliations. She knows as much as the
late Indira did that image counts for a lot in the
country. Rural India had an unbreakable emotional
bond with Indira, despite her not having actually
delivered the poor of their material miseries.
On the other hand, Manmohan, a trained
economist, has never won a direct election (and
has no aspiration to do so after losing his only
attempt) and is a gentle, diplomatic visionary who
looks at India through the definitions of
excellence, growth, market forces, competition,
foreign investment, exchange reserves and economic
prosperity. These virtues take time to percolate
down to the individual voter, who exercises his or
her political preference based on his immediate
situation rather than images on television of
swanky private-sector offices or residential
skyscrapers that may exist somewhere else in the
country.
The BJP was rudely jolted about
this reality in 2004 when it lost the elections on
the basis of an "India Shining" campaign, thought
up by stalwarts such as L K Advani and the late
Pramod Mahajan. Such an India exists for many, but
does not for many more, who still get to decide
who will be the political party in power.
Indeed, observers point out that Sonia has
allowed Manmohan complete freedom and trusts his
judgment more than anybody else to pursue his
dreams on subjects that may not impact the
immediate political future of the Congress party,
but will be good for the nation in the longer run.
Thus Manmohan more or less has a free hand in
pursuing economic reforms (though he constantly
has to grapple with the left), Indo-US relations
and the nuclear-energy pact, and Indo-Pak
relations, aspects that the BJP under Atal Behari
Vajpayee was also good at.
These issues go
down well with the 300 million people in the
affluent and middle classes who do not want the
government to become an impediment as they go
about their business of making more money in a
globalized environment with a surfeit of
multinational and service-sector job
opportunities.
Sonia knows that the other
700 million who are not yet part of this growth
scenario have to be addressed as well, or her
party meets the fate of the BJP. Sonia's efforts
have been in trying to ensure that her party's
efforts/image do not become too distant from this
bigger picture.
The one ramification has
been the massive rural employment program that she
has explained as an effort by the government to
transfer resources from the richer sections to the
needy. To meet the expenditures, the government
has been looking to increase the tax base by
bringing under the tax net more segments within
the fast-growing service sector. This is seen as a
necessary concomitant to growth with social
justice in a democracy.
The government has
also mooted a huge social-security plan for the
unemployed, farmers and peasants that will entitle
them to pensions, health care and other benefits.
Sonia has also been very careful to
cultivate and buttress her image of standing for
high morals in public life, as demonstrated by her
resignation and re-election to parliament after
the "office of profit" controversy recently.
The trickier aspect of this socio-economic
re-engineering has been reservations (quotas) for
backward castes who form 50% of the country's
population and are key to government formation in
the northern states often referred to as the "cow
belt". The Congress has been eyeing the big state
of Uttar Pradesh for a while now, as its political
fortunes and seats in parliament are linked to its
performance here. Sonia's son Rahul has made it a
test case for his political initiation.
The government has, for the time being,
put the issue of quotas in private sector firms on
the back burner because of resistance by industry,
but has decided to move ahead with reservations in
centrally funded higher educational institutions,
including prestigious medical, engineering and
management colleges. Because of massive nationwide
protests by higher-caste students (mostly from the
middle class) who see their chances being
sacrificed for narrow political gains, the
government has decided to sugar-coat the quota
pill with a commitment to increase proportionately
the number of general-category seats.
It
was initially believed that the quota gamble was a
turf war between Manmohan and Arjun, who spoke
about the proposals out of turn. But it has
emerged that Arjun always had the blessings of
Sonia. Some observers see a silver lining as
quotas should result in the revamping of education
infrastructure, but many are unhappy, as they want
government affirmative action on ramping up
primary education, the basis of competition at an
equal footing.
Using reservation as a
political instrument (with an added balm for the
upper-caste students) could go either way for the
Congress. The party could end up losing the middle
votes and not win the backward castes, who have
strong affiliations with regional parties. The
strong constituency of middle-class voters who
have always backed Manmohan's sagacity could be
eroded. It could allow the BJP to spring back.
Aggressive Hindutva is a ploy often used by the
BJP. It worked in the '90s and boomeranged in
2004, so the party is already in a dilemma.
It has, thus, become apparent that for
Sonia, political compulsions and survival come
first. Manmohan (who was reportedly not happy with
quotas initially) has quietly fallen in line,
maintaining the sanctity of their relationship.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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