I very well remember that hot afternoon in May 2004 when I, and most my professional colleagues, were contemplating the opening line to the story about what seemed to be the big news of the day. It was the impending swearing in of India’s first foreign-origin prime minister, Sonia Gandhi. The assembled scribes were about to leave the Akbar Road headquarters of the AICC adjacent to 10, Janpath, the residence of Mrs Gandhi. And then the penny dropped. It was later in the same evening that her "inner voice" spoke through the microphone. The rest is history.
In the years that have rolled by, most people have wondered how the unique arrangement of having Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, with Mrs Gandhi at the helm of Congress and as chairperson of the UPA, has been working. Or, rather, has it worked? Its uniqueness arises from the fact that there is no concept of a "party" in our Constitution (except in later additions, such as the anti-defection law), so the constitutional status of the UPA chairperson is confusing. The prime minister is no doubt the head of the government, answerable only to Parliament, just as it happens in all mature democracies of the world. Of course there is a clause in the Constitution that delineates the ministers’ power. It states that the Council of Ministers, which is headed by the Prime Minister, shall be "collectively responsible to the House of the People".
But the clause is not as innocuous as it seems. It is obvious that the person who can tilt the balance of numbers in the House of the People (Lok Sabha) can overturn the government. In a coalition-led democracy such as ours, there are quite a few people who can trip up the Prime Minister and his cabinet. Prakash Karat of the CPI(M) attempted it on the UPA-1 cabinet, and failed. Mamata Banerjee attempted the same trick on UPA-2, again with no success. But the leader of the coalition’s core party, Congress, not only has the numbers on her side. She also wields final authority as the head of UPA. In other words, under this arrangement, the Prime Minister could not but be back-seat driven.
That takes us back to where we began—has it worked?
A bigger puzzle, though, is why this question is raised. There have been several occasions in the past that Congress prime minister and the party president were not the same persons. Jawaharlal Nehru, as prime minister, had worked with U. N. Dhevar and K. Kamaraj as party chief. So did Indira Gandhi, who might have had a troubled relationship with party president S. Nijalingappa but had smooth sailing as prime minister with the party under the charge of the influential Jagjivan Ram and the scholarly Shankar Dayal Sharma. However, there had been no occasion till 2004 when a member of the Congress’ ‘first family’ headed the party with a non-‘family’ member as the prime minister. In that respect, having Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi as UPA Chairperson was a novelty. May be that is why people in general were startled and were figuring out if the party would accept a non-Gandhi figure as prime minister, however towering may be his reputation as an economist and reformer. In the 1990’s, the party felt uneasy while P. V. Narasimha Rao occupied the top room in South Block. But the chemistry between Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi has not faltered even for a day, though there is no dearth of insiders regaling juicy stories.
For Mrs Gandhi, it was a leap of faith. For Manmohan Singh, it was an abiding trust in her leadership and a stoical indifference to loss or gain in personal stature. It is not that the two UPA governments they’ve jointly piloted have been super performers. UPA-2, in particular, waffled on everything, particularly economy. But it surely goes to the credit of the Gandhi-Singh duo that there has been no visible friction between them even at the worst of the times, particularly after 2010 when waves of corruption charges lashed the government and fingers were pointed even at the Prime Minister for his alleged acts of omission. A Congress president with less patience than Mrs Gandhi could hit the panic button. In 1996, the late Sitaram Kesari as Congress president merely exhibited his power when he sacked H. D. Deve Gowda, a Tweedledee, to replace him with the late I. K. Gujral, a Tweedledum. But Mrs Gandhi remained unfazed. It is her party that benefitted from her calm. The public agitation against graft begun by activist Anna Hazare has now been muted, and an awareness is growing in people’s mind that the fight against corruption is best left in the hands of constitutional bodies, especially the courts. On the other hand, the Opposition has not succeeded so far in offering a widely acceptable alternative, thus causing the fear that a premature end to the UPA-2 government could lead to a 1996-type crisis when it was difficult to find anyone who could mind the store.
However, the dual leadership of Mrs Gandhi and Manmohan Singh is entering its 10th year. With political uncertainty looming large, political analysts believe that no single party will get a majority throwing up a hung house again in 2014. No doubt, P Chidambaram, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Meira Kumar and many more are offering their services in any new dispensation under Sonia Gandhi in UPA-III. But I have my doubts that Sonia Gandhi will experiment with a new face rather than her trusted colleague for 9 years. After all, Manmohan Singh is part of the transformational switch, from a top-down model of state-determined doles to a rightful demand from below. Much of the initiative for these innovative steps came from the party.
Manmohan Singh, until that hot summer day in 2004, had made his mark as a man who had demolished the license-permit raj of the socialist era, and had brought the economy to modern age. It had made him a celebrity among those who’d trust the market more than the state. But his nearly decade-long working association with Mrs Gandhi must have rounded off his image as a public leader, with concern for both the market and the common man.
(The Author is the National Editor of the Lokmat Group)
