PM and the Peter Principle

The Peter Principle suggests that every person rises to his level of incompetence. The principle, enunciated by Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull some 41 years ago in a path-breaking book, has almost never been contradicted.

Its logic is simple: if you are good at your job, you get promoted. But at the higher level, the competencies required for success are different. If you still manage to do a good job, you get another promotion and the process continues till you find a job you are truly incompetent in.

Has prime minister Manmohan Singh risen to his level of less competence? Is he prime minister material? Was his goof-up at Sharm el-Sheikh, where he agreed to delink terror from a composite dialogue with Pakistan and also inserted Balochistan needlessly into the joint statement, just a one-off or part of his larger makeup?

Let us apply the Peter Principle to him and see. He was a successful reformer under PV Narasimha Rao, when the country was facing bankruptcy and everyone was willing to accept some reform as a necessary evil. He did what any competent bureaucrat would have done — offered technocratic solutions to economic problems. As long as Rao was willing to back him politically, he succeeded. In fact, the backtracking began almost immediately after 1993. Few reforms came after that.

Now cut to 2004, when Manmohan Singh was chosen for the prime ministership. It wasn't because of his reformist credentials, but his loyalty to Sonia Gandhi. Do you recall any major reform during 2004-09? Perhaps, only the rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGS). But luck helped. He led the government when revenues were booming and made the most of it by spending it all in rural areas.

Even so, Manmohan Singh would have been written off as a decent, but irrelevant, PM till the nuke deal resurrected his reputation. But was the nuke deal a demonstration of his competence? The PM precipitated the crisis when he decided that he would rather quit than submit to the left's constant needling. Manmohan Singh also had bad vibes with CPI(M) boss Prakash Karat. Take these two factors and what you get is a petulant PM willing to give it all up. Luckily for him, Sonia Gandhi and the US government weren't willing to give up on him. She needed him, and so did George Bush.

Around the same time, the Mayawati-Mulayam Singh war was reaching boiling point and there was a complete, if temporary, convergence of interests all around. Result: The nuke deal went through and the PM became a man of consequence without doing anything more than threatening to resign. No doubt, the PM had the vision, but he needed someone else to implement it.

My assessment is this: Manmohan Singh lacks some of the essential skills needed to be PM in a diverse nation. But that does not mean he can't be PM. To succeed, though, he needs people who will cover up for his weaknesses. Pranab Mukherjee is one possible answer. He did his part in the last Lok Sabha when he fended off the left on the nuke deal till the Congress was sure it could win a vote of confidence.

The country can also thank its lucky stars that Sonia Gandhi did not agree to the PM's preference for Montek Singh Ahluwalia as his finance minister after the recent electoral victory. It would have been a disaster, not because Montek is incompetent, but because he would not have been able to carry the party along. It's like having two people in government with the same strengths and weaknesses. They would have been unable to accomplish anything between them.

This is, in fact, the lesson of history. Whenever leaders had deputies with complementary skills, they succeeded. It was Sardar Patel's no-nonsense, get-things-done style that welded India into one country from a welter of princely states and fiefs. Nehru had little to contribute here. Once Patel left the scene, Nehru stood tall — and alone. He fell prey to sycophants. The China war defeat was a direct consequence of this.

The Vajpayee-Advani combo was another alliance of complementary skills that worked to the country's advantage. Given to poetic flourishes, Vajpayee's was the vision that propelled the NDA. When he did things on his own, he faltered. He took the bus to Lahore, and reaped a Kargil. At Agra, it was the balance supplied by Advani that saved him from signing a deal that would have been loaded in favour of Musharraf and Pakistan.

At Sharm el-Sheikh, Manmohan Singh decided to go solo with his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani. Without a balancing partner, or even a cautious bureaucracy for help, he goofed on terror and Balochistan. Gilani played to Singh's weakness — the latter's desire to be seen as the man who brought peace to South Asia — and scored a victory.

Manmohan Singh will succeed as PM only if Sonia Gandhi hems him in with people who can cover up for his weaknesses. He cannot succeed solo.