INDIA
Despite being re-elected to power, the Congress has succumbed to its old maladies of putting expediency before principles, winking at corruption and putting economic reforms on hold.
Despite being re-elected to power, the Congress has succumbed to its old maladies of putting expediency before principles, winking at corruption and putting economic reforms on hold. Even the facade of integrity presented by the likes of Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram will not arrest this fall from grace if the party leadership does not change its ways.
The Congress’ precipitous decline in the course of a year from its second successive general election victory to the possibility of a serious setback, if not defeat, in the event of a mid-term poll can be ascribed to the party’s old malady of cynicism. What this attitude entails is an overpowering desire to cling to power at all costs. As Harish Khare, the prime minister’s media adviser, recently said, the Congress’s ideology is only about winning elections. In line with this approach is the American diplomatic assessment of Sonia Gandhi as a person who is unable to provide “principled leadership”, as the Wikileaks have revealed.
The outcome of this unblinking pursuit of electoral happiness is that the Congress is more than willing to turn a blind eye to its own follies and that of its allies. Nothing demonstrated this philosophical acceptance of human frailties more than the A Raja episode. The motivating factor behind allowing the virtual loot of the exchequer was the Congress’s reluctance to offend the DMK lest it should pull the rug from under the government’s feet.
Familiar pattern
The same kowtowing to the prejudices of an ally, even if these were widely recognised as a sign of paranoia, was in evidence when Sonia sided with the Left on the nuclear deal virtually throughout the UPA’s first tenure till Rahul, apparently, induced her to change her mind. Otherwise, it is quite possible that her objections would have robbed India of the unique privilege of entering the nuclear club without signing the NPT. But for the scare which Mayawati gave to Mulayam Singh Yadav to make him switch from the communists to the Congress and enable the government to survive the Left’s withdrawal of support, the deal would not have been signed - to Pakistan’s and China’s delight.
What these episodes underline is the reason for the Congress’s fall. No party can sustain its position if it is seen to be forever on the retreat before allies who have no stakes at the national level. It has to be realised that if the Congress’s success in 2004 was due to the BJP’s failures, especially in Gujarat, as Atal Behari Vajpayee said, the confirmation of its winning streak in 2009 was the result of the Manmohan Singh factor, along with the persistence of the appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to the underprivileged and the minorities.
Wasted opportunity
For the middle and upper classes, however, who are now a formidable force in the polity because of their numbers and volubility, the Manmohan Singh-P Chidambaram duo means that, for the first time, the country has a leadership known for integrity, intelligence and an uncluttered vision of the path of progress.
Unfortunately, the party’s retreat before the allies was preceded by a retreat within which saw the formation of the supra-cabinet body, the national advisory council, under Sonia Gandhi, which harked back to Indira Gandhi’s faux socialism.
This return to a discredited and discarded doctrine, coupled with the winking of the eye where corrupt practices within the party and without are concerned, has led the Congress downhill. The man who has suffered the most is Manmohan Singh. He has neither been able to pursue economic reforms although the obstructionist Left is no longer there, nor has he been able to check corruption, as the continuation of Raja in office showed, despite the mounting evidence of wrong-doings in his ministry till he could not be saved any longer.
Lessons from the past
Before succumbing to the DMK’s threats, the Congress should have remembered that corruption has long been its middle name. From the time of the jeep scandal in 1948 to the Haridas Mundhra affair of 1957, which led to the then finance minister TT Krishnamachari’s resignation - the first and only head to roll because of allegations of corruption - and then to the Bofors pay-off, which saw the Rajiv Gandhi government’s majority plummet from 415 to 197, sleaze has been the party’s constant companion. The Congress should have mulled on its less than glorious history, therefore, before letting the DMK hold a gun to its head.
If Raja was an outsider, who could not be punished for the sake of coalition dharma, this could not be said for Suresh Kalmadi and Ashok Chavan. But the inordinate time the party took to discipline them has eroded both its own as well as the prime minister’s standing and given the previously disoriented BJP a talking point where it had none before. But for the BJP’s own albatross of BS Yeddyurappa round its neck, the party could have been even more aggressive.
It is not impossible that the Congress’s and the prime minister’s declining prestige encouraged Jagan Mohan Reddy to be even more defiant in Andhra Pradesh, threatening the Congress’s hold on yet another state, and made Mamata Banerjee talk of taking on the Left on her own in West Bengal. To compound the party’s miseries, the brief flicker of hope which its last year’s success in UP kindled, has been extinguished by its dismal showing in Bihar.
The Congress may still scrape through even if the next general election is brought forward because of the opposition’s continuing weakness at the national level. But it must learn to follow principles, not expediency.
Amulya Ganguli is a Delhi-based political commentator
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