Why UPA-2 will last the full five years

Mulayam Singh Yadav is the latest of the political heavies trying to scare everyone with talk of mid-term parliamentary elections, which would ordinarily be held in the summer of 2014. Those who believe him say the Congress party is going to be paralysed the rest of 2012 and will be without any political leadership:  they say that party chief Sonia Gandhi’s ailments, still unrevealed to the public, will hamper her crisis management skills as the year wears on (and there will undoubtedly be worse and worse crises); they say the UP election results have dealt such a shock to party general secretary Rahul Gandhi that he will take a long time to recover — and even if he does recover, his capacity to convince party colleagues of his decisions is diminished until he next proves himself electorally; and that the other political manager with any clout, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, will go into a sulk once the presidential elections are over and he finds that he is not moving into Rashtrapati Bhawan. Without a politically canny leadership, the party will thus find itself cornered until it has no options but to call elections.

What hogwash. Everyone should remember what BJP leader AB Vajpayee said in the early 1990s about the Congress government led by PV Narasimha Rao: that it would last five years — because it could not last six. Such will be the same with this government. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will last till the last day of the current Lok Sabha.

Firstly, no one wants elections — not Mamata Banerjee, not Mulayam Singh Yadav. If they or their proxies talk of elections, it’s only because they want something, immediately.  To extract from the UPA-2 whatever they want — money, sops, etc — they need to keep the Congress nervous and off-balance. It suits them, and other allies, to have a weak Centre; early elections could take that away. So if Mulayam speaks of mid-term polls, it’s because in the next couple of days he plans to go to the prime minister with a list of demands for his state (his party promised a lot during the elections, and he wants his son to get off to a good start). He will not return disappointed, especially since the prime minister is equally keen to prolong his tenure as much as possible.

Secondly, an early election pre-supposes that the people who will contest the elections will be ready for it. The simple fact of the matter is that the various non-Congress chief ministers will never get their act together to fight the Congress at the parliamentary level. Forget about a common minimum program; can the chief ministers even agree on who amongst them will speak on their behalf? Each sees himself or herself as a future prime minister, be it Nitish Kumar or J Jayalalithaa or Naveen Patnaik. Even if Sharad Pawar were to manage things from behind the scenes, it is less likely that these regional heavyweights could come to an arrangement of any sort on their own; it is more likely that the pressure of time, when elections are called in 2014, will force a patch-work arrangement between them. Remember, the Left is too debilitated to act as glue for disparate regional parties, and the BJP will still be an untouchable for many of them.

Thirdly, for all this talk of a federal structure, the fact is that India needs a strong centre. Having seen enough third front experiments, the voter is unlikely to be impressed with a patch-work arrangement of strong chieftains, unless there is a proper front like the UPA or the NDA in place. You can be sure that the chieftains themselves know this, and that unless there is a proper front in place they will not dare force a mid-term election.

So what happens if there are no early elections? Nothing. The same non-governance that has characterised the past three years will characterise the next two. There will be crises galore, but the government will muddle along. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

No governance means that citizens will be spared large social expenditures such as the farmers’ loan waiver or the proposed food security bill or other such plans which are basically meant to bribe a section of voters. No governance means that we will not suffer crony capitalism such as the gifting away of land or coal or gas or other natural resources to big industrialists in an opaque and suspect manner. No governance means less chance of a scam, now that everyone is breathing down the government’s neck, ready to whip out a draft CAG report when there’s a whiff of graft or pestering it for a Lokpal bill.

You may say this is too cynical a view; after all, a country requires governance. Yet, what great administrative initiative did we see in the recent budget, one that all agreed was Mukherjee’s last chance of bold action? Having watched the likes of P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal botch things again and again, the last thing we should want is government in action.

Nobody wants early elections, not the political class and not the voter. The UPA-2 will last five years. Because it can’t last six.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai