The UPA’s not so melodious swansong

It looks as though the Congress-led UPA government will have its swansong in this budget session when it is about to complete its third year in office. Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, prima donna of the UPA Theatre of the Absurd, initiated its choreographing with her diktat to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for sacking railway minister and fellow Trinamool leader Dinesh Trivedi, hours after he presented the railway budget on March 14.

If the fare hike in Trivedi’s budget, whose rollback Banerjee demanded, was the cause for her unprecedented ire and insistence on his immediate resignation, it was puerile, palpably preposterous, and unbecoming of a person heading a political party expected to be democratic in its functioning.

For, Banerjee could have waited for Parliament to discuss the railway budget, which is widely seen as bold, pragmatic, and progressive, when the TMC MPs could raise the issue of rollback, and thus allowed Trivedi to render his constitutional duty as railway minister.

After insisting that his responsibility is first to his country, that his party chief should ask him in writing to resign, or that the prime minister should remove him, and that since he presented the railway budget he is not going to leave halfway, Trivedi’s sudden resignation on March 18 is disquieting and ominous for the country.

While Banerjee’s petulance shows her in poor light as a leader devoid of democratic ethos, and constitutional morality, it also brings into sharp focus the mess, muck and murk in UPA’s governance — particularly in relation to its allies — political inaction and opportunism in the name of coalition dharma, which is constitutionally aberrant, abhorrent, and non-existent and which the UPA has been using to both shield corrupt ministers as it did in the case of Andimuthu aka Spectrum Raja and Dayanidhi Maran, and sack ministers who are outspoken, upfront, and presumably dynamic do-gooders  as in the case of Trivedi.

Since the announcement of the assembly results, the Congress has been struggling hard to keep its head above the political quicksand caused by its dismal drubbings, which The Economist reported as ‘A welcome slap in the face’. But while a slap in the face of the Congress may be welcome it was not welcome enough; for as George Santayana said, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it; the Congress is in this doomed category.

It has not learnt anything from its self-destruction over the years as a national party. As it still craves for power it has no scruples in articulating its perfidies by, among other ways, crawling before opportunistic coalition partners. In this context, Trivedi’s resignation is a pointer. He would not have resigned without the prime minister asking for it, and even if he resigned on his own, the prime minister should have retained him at least until the important budget session was over, no matter how fiercely Mamata Banerjee reacted to it, no matter if the UPA fell because of the prime minister’s principled stand.

But hamstrung as he is as the head of the Union Cabinet he sacrificed Trivedi to prolong the agonising and nationally disgusting life of the UPA.

The UPA had several opportunities to free the nation from its policy paralysis and pernicious policies starting from at least the 2G Spectrum scam. Its latest opportunity was after the assembly elections. Rather than seeking a fresh mandate, Manmohan Singh waxed eloquent that he was confident of having the numbers.

But seen against the UPA’s sordid saga of corruption, cover up, and autocratic and anti-people style of functioning, as for instance its scuttling of the Lokpal Bill in the last Parliament session, decisions without public debate and consultations with political parties on FDI, NCTC, UIDAI, etc, which involve vital national interests, and abject surrender to the diktats of the World Bank, it is unlikely that it will survive the budget session.

As the lackluster general budget presented by Pranab Mukherjee is lacking in focus and direction, lacking in the ability to bring cheer to the unwashed millions or wipe out their tears, and has been criticised on several grounds, the discussion on it and on the several controversial bills is likely to stymie the budget session and lead the UPA to its irrational dead end.

The author was a professor of sociology at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, and is a media commentator on public affairs