Parallax View: Manmohan Singh has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory

Is this the most politically inept government of India in recent memory?

I am beginning to think that the levels of stupidity displayed by the Manmohan Singh regime are without any precedent in the last two decades.

 

   Let’s take the facts or at least the ones that we know are indisputable. Manmohan Singh is one of the most honest politicians India has ever seen. Though he has occupied a variety of important public offices there has never once been the faintest whiff of impropriety about his actions. Forget about his performance as Prime Minister when he knows that he is in the glare of the media. Consider instead the way in which he behaved when he was chief economic advisor to the Government of India or when he was Governor of the Reserve Bank.

 

   I remember the Reserve Bank phase especially well because my family knew him a little and because he lived down the road from us. Such was his integrity that he would not allow his official car to be used to drop his daughters anywhere. That car was for the RBI Governor, he said, not for his family.

 

   Even now, with his government under continuous attack, nobody has been able to come up with any allegation of the slightest corruption against him. Even his worst enemies will admit that he is a man of impeccable integrity.

 

   So why then is he heading a lame-duck government that is under siege on the corruption issue?

 

   There are many reasons for this. The first one is that the Prime Minister’s priorities have been misplaced almost from the beginning of his term. Everybody knew that the DMK’s ministers were making money from telecom – first, it was Dayanidhi Maran and then it was A. Raja. Even Manmohan Singh was aware of this. But he put it down to the cost of doing politics in a coalition scenario and turned a blind eye to the money-making.

 

   Why did he do this? It is not that he loved the job so much that he was unwilling to make waves. In fact, he threatened to resign as Prime Minister unless the Indo-US nuclear deal was passed, losing the support of the Left and forcing his party to cobble together a majority for him.

 

   Even if you do not accept that his actions forced the Congress to go out and purchase MPs, you’re still left with the fact that this is a Prime Minister for whom a nuclear deal – which has had little impact on India in the two years since it was signed – is much more important than weeding out corruption from his own government. He was willing to resign if he could not keep his commitment to George Bush. But he was not willing to resign on the issue of providing clean governance to India.

 

   Why should an essentially honest man who has demonstrated his willingness to give up his job on what he considers to be a matter of principle be so tolerant of corruption within his own government?

 

   The answer is simple. As long as he was personally honest, he did not believe that he had any obligation to demand a minimum level of honesty from his ministers.

 

   Corruption was simply not his top priority.

 

   Consider now how much middle-class anger there is over corruption, and how this anger has been building up over the last year. Most politicians are unable to harness this anger because they are themselves tainted in some way. Manmohan Singh is the happy exception. He is the one politician whose own record is not tainted in any way.

 

"So complete is the failure of Manmohan Singh’s leadership and so foolish is the nature of this government’s behaviour that the regime has been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Hazare and his grouping."

   The smart thing for him to do would have been to acknowledge the anger over corruption and to say that as one of India’s most honest politicians he would harness the anti-corruption feeling to give us a more transparent system of governance and that he would lead the fight against corruption himself.

 

   Instead, he hid himself at Race Course Road, provided no moral leadership to the nation and allowed others to seize the initiative.

 

   Why did he do this? I think there are two explanations. The first is that he is a politically illiterate person with no feel for the public mood who was surrounded by a PMO of dodgy officials. The second is that he took the short-sighted view that as long as he was personally honest he was not obliged to act against the corruption of others or to lead a movement against graft.

 

   With these two poor decisions he demonstrated once again why he seems so ill-at-ease in the Prime Minister’s office. This is a man who does not know how to lead even when the issue is one that he is uniquely qualified to own.

 

   When a leader fails to lead then all his decisions become cowardly and foolish. The Ramdev agitation is a case in point. He first sent his ministers to grovel before the Baba and when that did not work he sent in lathi-charging policemen.

 

   On Anna Hazare, his behaviour has been even more craven and confused. Everybody wants to fight corruption. Equally, many of us are disturbed by the Hazare camp’s insistence that their bill must be adopted by Parliament without any changes. The government’s bill is not perfect. But then, neither is Anna Hazare’s. The answer has to lie in some kind of compromise between the two bills.

 

   But just as this realisation was taking hold of the educated middle class, the government suddenly moved away from the path of compromise and embarked on a road of aggression. Hazare was called names. His own integrity was called into question. And then, the police were sent in to lock him up.

 

   In the process, Hazare won that round without having to do anything. When India was finally ready for compromise, the government turned its back on the process of accommodation and opted for intimidation. Perhaps Manmohan Singh’s advisors had been misled by what they saw as the success of the police action against Ramdev and believed that the same thing would work again.

 

   Whatever the reason, the government has miscalculated horribly. The issue is no longer the nature of the Lok Pal Bill or Anna Hazare’s tactics. It has become a classic battle between peacefully-protesting citizens and the brute power of the State.

 

   And yet, the facts themselves have not changed. Manmohan Singh is still an honest man. There is still room for negotiation on the Lok Pal Bill. Many people still think that it is wrong to say, as Hazare and his associates are saying, that their bill must be accepted in toto.

 

   But the facts don’t matter. So complete is the failure of Manmohan Singh’s leadership and so foolish is the nature of this government’s behaviour that the regime has been comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Hazare and his grouping.

 

   In this, as in so many other things of late, Manmohan Singh has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He has thrown away his mandate, abandoned the advantages of his record, and failed to deliver on the faith India had in him when he won his second term