UPA-II: Pass without Honours

At the start of 2004, when the Congress was down and out after being routed in several north Indian states, and Congressmen were themselves predicting a two-digit tally for the party in the general elections later that year, Sonia Gandhi determinedly hit the road to get atop a very difficult situation.

The images of her walking in the north Indian plains, sometimes putting an arm around an emaciated woman or picking up a diseased baby, stuck in people’s minds. She also walked across the road to the home of Ram Vilas Paswan, striking up alliances — something the Congress had earlier ruled out.

In some ways, the situation is not very different today, as UPA-II completes four years in office. Over the last three years, the Congress’ graph has dipped, scams and price rise have taken a toll on the credibility of the government, and the prime minister’s personal image has taken a knock.

In UPA-I, Manmohan Singh’s honeymoon period lasted for almost four years. This could be attributed to several factors — low expectations from the Congress, which was not anticipating a win, Sonia Gandhi deciding not to take up prime ministership, which lent credibility to her leadership and led to the acceptance of the dual power model, Singh’s honest image and technocratic credentials, the confusion inside the BJP (the party took a long time to get around to playing the role of the opposition), and the role of the national advisory council and the Left in keeping the UPA on the straight and pro-aam aadmi path.

But things turned out to be very different in UPA-II. Along with the series of mega scams which came to light, there was a weakening of the central authority, both in the government, where ministers ran their ministries like independent fiefdoms, and the prime minister, who left the running of the cabinet and the government largely to Pranab Mukherjee.

What is more, the damage to UPA-II has been compounded by the prime minister himself coming under the scanner — from the 2G spectrum case, where he was seen as a “weak PM” by allowing corruption to take place under his nose because of coalition compulsions, to Coalgate, where his role in allocating coal blocks when he was coal minister has come under scrutiny.

In 2009, he was the darling of the urban middle-class; today, it is this class that views him as a leader presiding over one of the most corrupt regimes.

In the party, given Sonia Gandhi’s indifferent health, she, too, left things increasingly to a group of her aides.

The expected transition of leadership to Rahul Gandhi (the talk of him taking over in 2012 and of Manmohan Singh being shift to Rashtrapati Bhavan began soon after UPA-II came to power) did not take place along expected lines.

Given Rahul’s reluctance to take charge and his insistence that it was more important to revive the Congress organisation first, senior leaders started to position themselves for the top job in case there was a vacancy.

This led to a process of doing the other down; factional fights became common and spats became public, even between senior leaders like Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram.

The impression of a drift and a policy paralysis gained ground.

Scams mostly come to light when leaks take place from within the system and this is what we have seen over the last three years. The system is known to be corrupt, but the last three years have seen exposés of an unprecedented kind, tumbling out without a let-up, one after another.

It was only recently that Sonia Gandhi began showing signs of asserting herself once again. Her “insistence” on the sacking of both then law minister Ashwani Kumar and then railway minister Pawan Bansal, was more a political statement than anything else — that she was finally and fully in command again. The party seems now to be trying to cut its losses, and is going in for a counter-offensive.

The UPA’s report card, released by the prime minister on Wednesday, to mark the completion of UPA-II’s four years in office and UPA’s nine years, reflects this resolve as does its Bharat Nirman campaign showcasing its achievements.

The campaign is quite good and imaginative in parts. The rights-based framework — right to information to empower citizens and to make the government more accountable, the right to employment, however limited, and the basic enshrined in MNREGA, the right to education, the food security bill sought to be enacted to provide a safety net to the poorest in the country, the bill on redressal of public grievances before Parliament, the right to universal health, which is still being mulled over — is the enduring contribution of the UPA, even though these measures may still have huge problems of implementation.

The UPA has many talking points, like the decision not to cut social sector spending despite the downturn in the economy and drop in investment, the improvement in the agriculture sector and the “green revolution”, which underway in eastern India, the quick response it gave to the issue of women’s security and the despatch with which it brought an ordinance later translated into a law made more stringent to ensure their safety.

Clearly, with this emphasis, the Congress would like to shift the focus away from the issue of corruption, which has been flogged by the BJP, to its strength area of social welfare programmes for the aam aadmi. It may calculate that the urban middle-class may have become disenchanted with it, and may be looking at Narendra Modi as an alternative, but that it may still be able to hold its own in the rural areas.

Its Karnataka victory — and earlier in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakand — which heartened the party, has also raised the question whether the general elections will be an aggregate of state elections and, therefore, the party should fashion a state-by-state strategy of different themes, caste line-ups and alliances.

Or, it will be determined by a so-called “national” mood and presidential-type of poll. The Congress will have to counter Modi, if he is projected as its PM candidate, with the party as a collectivity, given Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance to become the party’s PM candidate, Manmohan Singh’s non-sellability for the third time, and Sonia Gandhi’s decision not to take up the prime ministership, though she is left with little option today but to lead from the front again as she did in 2004 and 2009.

There is a another critical question which confronts Sonia Gandhi today. Should she try and strike up more alliances, as she did in 2004, even though there is an adverse climate against the Congress? The party is in a back-channel dialogue with both Nitish Kumar and the RJD-LJP in Bihar, and has to make up its mind which of the two to align with. But, even more important, should the party stoop to conquer and try and win back the support of the Trinamool Congress and the DMK, which deserted it last year?

The central question, however, remains: Can the Congress really undo the damage of the last three years done to its credibility, which is always that much more difficult to restore? For a good message with a non-credible messenger, delivering it is bound to fall flat.