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The enemy within
Cong has reasons to worry. Rumours about PM being unhappy with partymen and his motley team have been scotched by party managers.
The Congress has reasons to worry. Speculation about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh being unhappy with some of his own partymen and the motley team he heads in government may have been scotched by the party managers, but recent developments do not augur well for the ruling party.
The principal dharma of coalition politics is to accommodate competitive political interests. But the moot point is, up to what limit? After all, the common man’s perception is that though the UPA government may be an alliance of a number of outfits, the Congress is its principal architect. The party’s future is greatly dependent on the performance of the Manmohan Singh government.
The Prime Minister has plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the way the coalition partners are behaving. The government has been at the receiving end from the Left day in and day out. Even while supporting the government, the Left has been talking about a Third Front — with the Left providing the leadership and most of the UPA constituents joining it. The Left has its own agenda and an alternative model of governance, which is radically different from that of the Congress. It is not a natural ally of the Congress and has been working consciously to appropriate the opposition space and maintain its own constituency. But then, this is more or less what was expected in any case.
But when an ally that enjoys a lion’s share in governance, the DMK, goes public and successfully bullies its own government at the Centre to put off the divestment of Neyvelli Lignite Corporation and, in the process, other PSUs like Nalco and Power Finance Corporation, it is quite worrisome. It puts a question mark on the ability of the Congress, and particularly that of the Prime Minister, to successfully manage the contradictions between the coalition partners.
The DMK’s threat to pull out its ministers from the cabinet forced Manmohan Singh to step in and shelve the disinvestment proposal. No questions were asked, at least publicly, about why the DMK ministers at the Centre had agreed to the cabinet decision to disinvest in the first place. The concept of collective responsibility of ministers, which is essential to our parliamentary system of democracy, has been thrown to the winds.
It is interesting to note that the DMK is running a minority government in Tamil Nadu with the support of the Congress and other constituents of the UPA. The ostensible purpose of disinvestment — as stated by the government — is to generate money that is to be spent on the social sector, for the benefit of the aam aadmi. So, in this case, the Congress has to accept that it will have to be willing to sacrifice the larger cause to accommodate the political interests of one of its partners. The hypocrisy is even more manifest when one considers that the same government preferred to be quiet when similar noises were made about Nalco in Orissa, where, besides the Orissa government, the workers, too, are up in arms against a proposed divestment move. It does not politically suit the Centre to appease Orissa because it is run by Naveen Patnaik’s BJD in alliance with the BJP. In Tamil Nadu, the workers have found a voice in Karunanidhi who, for obvious political reasons, would not like to give his opponent, Jayalalithaa, a stick to beat him with. The NLC may be a central public sector undertaking but the issue of state pride is associated with it.
In this game, where too many tails wag the UPA government, the image of the Congress has been dented considerably. Many within the Congress sulk about the fact that while the blame for things going wrong is often laid squarely at the door of the Congress, the credit, if any, is appropriated by the other participants of the coalition, including the Left. In the process, the Congress today is dubbed as a party that stands for the ‘uglier side of liberalisation’ and the Left and others have created for themselves an image of being ‘pro-poor and pro-workers’.
This has been happening mainly because of the Congress’s own failure as a party to extract capital out of its achievements. The Congress’s USP has been that its support base cuts across caste, region and religion. But with that support base getting splintered and with its own partners providing leadership to particularist interests, the party has to either be prepared to do a little boat-rocking of its own to aggressively assert its own priorities or be prepared to weakly submit to the conflicting interests of its partners in the interests of keeping the marriage going.
The problem is that while the Congress’s allies and the Left appear to be quite clear about their politics and their next course of action, the Congress seems to be stuck in a rut and continues to be shy of coming clean about its own moves. One major reason, of course, is the blurred perceptions on the leadership issue within the party. The common perception is that Manmohan Singh’s position is a stop-gap arrangement till one of the Nehru-Gandhi clan dons the mantle. While one can debate that issue till the cows come home, there is no doubt that the interim flux is not something that can benefit the party in anyway, particularly when Third Front talk is in the air again.
