Inflation and corruption put the brakes on second run

It was November 14, 2010, the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had just returned from a foreign trip. The previous Parliament session had been a washout because the Opposition had been demanding somebody’s – anybody’s – scalp in the 2G spectrum allocation scam. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report had come out on November 10, which confirmed what most people knew – that the government had suffered a huge loss because of the system adopted to allocate 2G spectrum.

The PM’s first function was in Parliament House. He met Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee there and indicated that he wanted to speak to him, requesting him to come to his office in Parliament House. Mukherjee reached there to find Congress President Sonia Gandhi already sitting there. The PM said he wanted telecom minister A Raja to resign. Home Minister P Chidambaram was summoned in case translation was necessary. Raja belonged to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a UPA ally, with 18 Lok Sabha MPs.

It turned out that Chidambaram’s services were unnecessary. T R Baalu was by Karunanidhi’s side to translate. Karunanidhi seemed to be expecting the call. It was a brief conversation. He said he would revert at 3 pm. At 3, Kanimozhi asked the UPA leadership if Raja could be retained as minister without portfolio. The request was politely declined. Raja, who was in Chennai, returned to Delhi and quit. He was arrested soon after.

This incident illustrates the kind of crises the UPA has been facing since it came to power two years ago. Whether it was the Commonwealth Games or the 2G spectrum, or the loss caused by the S-band spectrum, or the circumstances in which Defence land was given to private builders and top bureaucrats and army officers signed off on the files to feather their nests. If UPA I was hobbled by the Left parties, UPA II has been hamstrung by problems of the here-and-now.

It isn’t just corruption that has held the government back. There is also inflation. Although Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu has said India must reconcile to being a high-cost economy, middle-class rage has slowed the government further.

In the two years of UPA II, the one big idea that should have illuminated the path of the government seems to be missing.

In the last UPA tenure, the signature schemes were NREGA, the right of every child to education, a more caring, concerned state. When UPA II came to power, it was expected to carry out deep and wide administrative reform and restructuring, address issues of livelihood and food security and think of imaginative ways to maximise the demographic dividend. None of this has happened. Fearful of disturbing the administrative balance, the proposal to set up a new intelligence and domestic security infrastructure has not even been heard by the Cabinet Committee on Security. The Prime Minister carried out a reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers in January this year and himself said he was not satisfied, promising another one in May. Food security and land acquisition – two of the most complicated issues before the government, and yet, the central focus of all tension in rural India currently – are stuck. Instead, the government is embroiled in issues of the medium, rather than the message, by setting up a committee of ministers to decide who should brief the media on government initiatives.

The first two years, the most valuable, are gone. Nine months from now, a new round of assembly elections, beginning with Punjab, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh in the first half of 2012, will be held. That is the time UPA II has to liberate itself from its current problems and address itself to actually running the government.