PM, not Mamata Banerjee, UPA’s biggest problem

Mamata Banerjee’s humiliation of Dinesh Trivedi and the partial rollback of his eminently reasonable budget continue to elicit angry commentary. The question that remains unasked and unanswered, however, is this: If the Centre is to have coalition governments in the foreseeable future, would they be held hostage by the likes of Mamata, or have fundamental flaws in UPA-2 destroyed its image and capacity to deliver, with the West Bengal chief minister being only partly to blame? The second proposition is more likely to be true.

This writer has a slightly unorthodox position on the Dinesh Trivedi controversy. Whilst his budget was good, it militated against Trinamool Congress ideology. You can heap scorn on Mamata’s ideology and say worse things. But the fact remains that she has the votes in West Bengal. UPA-2 has taken her support. Dinesh Trivedi was her nominee for railway minister. While he needn’t have shared the specifics of the rail budget with her to maintain secrecy, he could have discussed the broad parameters and principles, the idea being to involve her in the decision making so as to avoid future embarrassment and loss of face.

For whatever reason, Trivedi did not think it necessary to keep his party boss in the loop. And not learning from Mamata’s past behaviour (Teesta waters, NCTC, Lokpal bill, etc), neither did anybody in the Union cabinet think it politic to gain Mamata’s consent on the controversial second-class fare hike, which she believes hits her constituency of poor. Yes, there are classical problems with someone outside the Union cabinet having a veto power on its decisions. But it is laughable to suggest that only Mamata has gathered such clout. Considering how 2G spectrum allocation decisions were made, the Union cabinet ceded all its powers to the DMK. As the food minister during high inflation, Sharad Pawar was outside the PM’s control. And to suggest that the PM is boss, and that Sonia Gandhi plays no role in UPA-2 policies is to be egregiously uneconomical with the truth.

The nub of the problem is this: Because Manmohan Singh is not a Lok Sabha-elect, has no political base of his own, and owes his job to Sonia Gandhi, he is weak. Obviously because he is weak, he is the prime minister. But that is the reason UPA-2 is a fundamentally flawed project. In a coalition government, cabinet ministers could be drawn from party partners with conflicted loyalties. But the PM must be his or her own boss. If the PM is also a puppet, you would have a joke government like UPA-2. Granted, Mamata is a hugely problematic ally. But she feeds on the incoherence and flaws of UPA-2. With a party leader as prime minister, her capacity to damage and wreck policy-making would be considerably diminished.

What is infrequently understood is that a coalition government is pronouncedly more political than a single-party administration. Power brings coalition constituents together while keeping their individual electoral identities intact. Getting mutually opposed forces to work together for a larger vision is a tough call, and only a consummate politician can pull it off. AB Vajpayee also had to face Mamata’s tantrums. J Jayalalithaa ditched him, and the Shiv Sena pulled the plug on one of his finest ministers, Suresh Prabhu. But as prime minister, Vajpayee left a mark. If you see it from Vajpayee’s side, it is all in a day’s work. Managing contradictions is bread and butter for politicians.

Or take the remarkable PV Narasimha Rao. Although he manufactured a parliamentary majority, his biggest headache was his own party, the Congress. On top of that, India faced economic ruin and multiple post-Cold War threats, including that of Balkanisation. Rao ‘hired’ a technocrat called Manmohan Singh for the economy and simultaneously set about managing India’s internal and external environments in the best political ways. In all but form, Rao ran a coalition government. After he left office, he explained some things to this writer, and he was brilliant.

The simple point is that running a coalition government is not a Sunday picnic, but an astute politician can almost make it appear so. India, therefore, should not overly worry about coalition governments (or obstructionists like Mamata) so long there are able prime ministers to lead them. Which is to say that awful experiments like UPA-2 must never be repeated.