So, what is the shindig really about? Well, we’re talking about the nine-year-old wonder, the diarchy that rules India, between Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Wait a second. Is the country really being ruled “between” them? Is it like the once-popular sitar and sarod duet, the “jugalbandi”, with both calling the tune, literally? Or is it an unequal music, the typical Indian solo recital, in which the percussionist or the veen follow the lead player, unless in very rare cases. Between Sonia and Manmohan, who has the edge? The jury is out, but it is no doubt a ticklish issue in political management of a nation of 1.2 billion people.
Ever since Sonia positioned the every-inch un-politician-like Manmohan Singh onto the Prime Minister’s seat—herself being in a corner from where she could drive the government from the back seat—there has been endless speculation on whether the system would work. And yet it has worked, completing nine years on this very day.
On paper, the relation between the UPA Chairperson and the Prime Minister may baffle constitutional experts, and rightly so. The Indian Prime Minister, says the Constitution, must enjoy the “confidence” of the Lower House. But Manmohan Singh has depended solely on the confidence of the lady who presides over the UPA, and its largest constituent, the Congress. It is a situation that the framers of our Constitution did not visualize. The Sonia-Singh duo thus sidesteps the written hierarchy of executives.
It is also very unlike the systems prevalent in the democratic world. In France, for example, the president is the supreme authority. He has the power to hire the prime minister, but cannot fire him. In Britain, which has Magna Karta but no written constitution, the monarch has, over the years, turned into a mere titular head, while the prime minister centralizes authority in 10 Downing Street, much in the manner that the US president enjoys special powers. It cannot be compared with the communist world, past and present, in which it is the party chief who calls the shots; the ‘shots’ are often fatal, as it was with Stalin and Mao. In China, ‘chairman’ Mao Zedong was the boss of the party and premier Zhou Enlai, his erudite factotum. During the infamous ‘cultural revolution’, when Mao detested even the nominal power that his colleagues had enjoyed, Zhou, a charismatic personality, was shown the door by the former’s obedient Red Guards. In the former USSR, it was left to party chiefs like Lenin, Stalin or Kruschev to define their empire’s world view; the Soviet prime ministers only came and went.
Manmohan may not be the best Prime Minister India ever got, but he is nobody’s vassal either. Nor did Sonia require, as Prime Minister, either a poodle or a crafty politician. Or else, in May 2004, she could have chosen someone like Arjun Singh or Pranab Mukherjee. Instead, she chose a babe in the woods of politics, a top-notch economist, experienced bureaucrat and a man of impeccable integrity. And, most importantly, someone who did not cower and cringe before the party leader in order to stay in power—a quality sadly missing in the dhoti-clad venerable generation of Singh and N. D. Tiwari, or retainers of the dynasty, like K. Natwar Singh or Digvijay Singh.
In fact, Sonia and Manmohan have never been on the same page ideologically, the former with a clearly socialist frame of mind, and the latter inherently trusting the market. They are like chalk and cheese. Sonia is an unconditional supporter of a universal employment policy, with little concern for who’d fund it, and how. Manmohan, on the other hand, is post-Keynesian in his thoughts. He served as an important brake on Sonia’s populism as the cost of her favorite job scheme, MGNREGA, is still within manageable limits. If a His Master’s Voice PM was chosen in place of Manmohan, the country would have been bankrupted by now. There have also been instances when the UPA Chairperson had shown indulgence to the Prime Minister, as she did with his doggedness about signing the civil nuclear deal with the US.
There were issues and occasions when it was Sonia Gandhi, and not the Prime Minister, who had the last laugh. Himself an ex-bureaucrat, Manmohan Singh was never comfortable with the idea of making every information allowable for public exposure under the RTI Act. But it is the Congress president’s token of pride.
Records of the past nine years of UPA are full of such instances of sparring on political issues. The nation knows that Sonia is keen on the Food Security Bill. But the Prime Minister is worried about its cost, its possible misuse and the sheer logistical challenge of moving 65 million tons of food grain across the country. In Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s budget this year, certainly overseen by Prime Minister, the amount earmarked as cost for the project is only Rs 10,000 crore whereas the minimum cost is estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore.
It is a known fact that obstructing Parliament by the opposition BJP has stood in the way of the Bill’s passage. If Sonia and Manmohan were not on the same page on this subject, they did not think alike on their approach to growth and industrialization. Had it been different, a high (80%) requirement of land-owners’ consent would not have put speed breakers on acquisition of land for industry, or global retail giants like Walmart or Tesco would have found their entry into India so much smoother.
In political belief, Sonia and Manmohan are polar opposites. Gossip columns have tried their best to add colour to it. But Sonia-Singh have run the UPA government for nine long years with exemplary grace, civility and mutual respect. It is a rare feat in modern-day politics, something the country ought to be proud of, far from feeling embarrassed. The Gandhis feel completely safe and secure with Manmohan Singh at helms compared to all previous experiments that they made with other leaders and parties. Rahul Gandhi can concentrate on re-building his party to get 272 in 2014.
(The author is National Editor of the Lokmat Group)
