DATELINE NEW DELHI

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a star speaker at the Congress party’s national convention in Delhi on Saturday. This was a meeting where Congress MP Rahul Gandhi also was more or less anointed as his successor. Much in this regard would of course depend on whether and when the Congress comes back to power the next time round. It was left to party chief Sonia Gandhi to create the ambience for the current and the future leaders to get their due applause. As is usual she used an admixture of charisma and populist rhetoric to put across her version of the government’s performance so far.

Dr Singh is supposed to be a man of integrity who weighs his words carefully when he speaks, but his address at the convention failed to measure up to stark facts on the ground. To begin with, his boast that the party and its allies got a “thumping mandate” in the May 2004 general elections was misplaced. No one really has a got a thumping mandate in India since Rajiv Gandhi, who won 400 plus seats in 1984. Everyone else since then has barely scraped through. Moreover, what is so thumping about 145 seats that the Congress got in 2004, may I ask? Granted that it was better than the 119 it got in 1999. But if the current tally is all that thumping then how would Dr Singh describe the rout suffered by Indira Gandhi when she came back with several more seats – in fact 153 — in the post-emergency polls in 1977?

Also while the Congress performed a shade better in 2004 than the previous outing in terms of seats, its vote share compared with 1999 actually fell by something more than 2 per cent. The Congress vote percentage in 1999 was 28.30, which actually came down to 26.22 in May 2004. As for the allies that Dr Singh hailed as his victory partners, the Left Front was nowhere on the Congress party’s horizon when election results came in. It was all an after thought and a way of keeping the BJP out of power that the Left Front worked out what is known as the Common Minimum Programme with the Congress and its allies, who came to be together known as the United Progressive Alliance.

Apart from the fiction of an imaginary majority for the Congress and its allies in the last polls, Dr Singh earlier in the month had indulged in more subtle equivocation. He tried to mask his discomfort with coalition governments, a feeling that came to the fore in some of his recent utterances. In fact in at least one of his budget speeches as finance minister Dr Singh had openly lamented the absence of a China-style ‘supremo’ in India, a handicap that becomes a hindrance to electorally untenable economic policies in democracies. Last week too we saw a glimpse of Dr Singh’s ongoing discomfort with an absence of absolute mandate.

In an address at a conference on federalism in Delhi on Nov 5, Dr Singh took off on his fears about coalition governments. He didn’t pause to think that he wouldn’t be prime minister but for the exigencies of coalition rule. “In a modern state, does a single party state have any advantages in managing centre-state relations smoothly as opposed to a multi-party system?” He urged the experts to ponder. “Or is a multi-party model, with national parties dominating the political scene, superior where one can hope that all of these parties will take a national view on policy issues and help to reinforce the unity of the federation.”

At one stage in his speech Dr Singh appeared to come tantalisingly close to recommending one-party rule. Discussing a multi-party model “where political parties with varying national reach and many with a very limited sub-national reach, form a coalition at a national level,” he asked: “Is such a model capable of providing and reflecting the unity of purpose that nation-states have to often demonstrate? Or is it an essential outcome of federalism, which successfully projects local aspirations at a national level? This political dimension of the centre-state relations is yet another challenge facing federal polities. Sometimes the resolution of problems acquires an excessively political hue, and narrow political considerations, based on regional or sectional loyalties and ideologies, can distort the national vision and sense of wider collective purposes. We may have a lot to learn from the experience of other countries in this regard.” Which other country has the cultural and political mosaic that could teach India a lesson or two in federalism and coalition governments? Perhaps the prime minister has some model in mind although the present one should suit him fine. Where else in a democracy would you get a prime minister who has never won an election?

Perhaps the only saving grace for the Congress is the fact that whatever its numbers on the last two counts, its vote share remained considerably higher than that of the BJP which got a mere 23.75 per cent votes in 1999 and fell to 21.73 in the last polls. The fact that in spite of its less than impressive vote share the BJP won a tally of 182 seats in 1999 was possible only because of intense jingoism it orchestrated over the Kargil standoff with Pakistan, not without generous help from an ultra-nationalist media.

BJP leaders once described Dr Singh as the right finance minister in the wrong party. Despite serious efforts by Congress satraps to narrow the ideological divide between the Congress and the BJP, there remains a strong public resistance against a relentless communalisation of the Congress. Dr Singh claimed credit for his party’s secular policies. When he took power the situation in India was tense, he said. “Communal tensions were at their peak throughout the country and attempts were being made to divide people on the basis of religion, caste, language and religion. There is no need to remind you of what happened in Gujarat in 2002.” The claim of serious and sustained secularism rings hollow even for Congress.

Tarry a little though. Who can forget that the worst communal carnages happened during the Congress party’s tenures at the centre? The mass murder of Sikhs in Delhi following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984 still continues to haunt the community. The Babri mosque was demolished in December 1992, when Dr Singh was finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government. And what followed in January and February in Mumbai in 1993 was as bad if not worse than Gujarat. Congress Chief Minister Sudhakar Rao Naik, who let Mumbai burn, died without facing any trial and Bal Thackeray, who ordered his Shivm Sainiks to teach a lesson to Muslims, has yet to face the proverbial long arm of the law. The Srikrishna Commission report, which slammed the BJP and Shiv Sena, is lying in the cold storage even though the Congress rules both New Delhi and Mumbai.

On the economic front, the Congress has continued to flaunt its slogan for the aam aadmi, the common man. The theme was common to the addresses by Dr Singh, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. And yet the mainstay of the Congress policy for poverty alleviation, the national rural employment guarantee scheme, has drawn criticism from the well meaning NGOs and intellectuals who had helped draft the policy.

If Africa has its Ethiopia and Somalia, India has Bolanghir and Kalahandi in Orissa. It was with this in mind obviously that Dr Singh’s government passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, which promises to give his reform a ‘human face’. The plan is to transform rural India by guaranteeing 100 days of employment to one member in a family with a minimum wage of Rs60 a day. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that full employment is defined as 271 days of employment in a year. Therefore, if there is no other avenue of employment, the beneficiary of the scheme will remain unemployed for almost two-third of the working days. Yet with all its flaws this scheme remains the one achievement that offers hope to the Congress party’s fortunes in the next elections. Dr Singh has something to celebrate.

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