Dangers of hubris

From Sharm-el Sheikh to Telangana to women's Bill

First, the mishandling of the Sharm-el Sheikh joint statement issued by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. Second, the knee-jerk response to Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader K Chandrasekhar Rao’s feigned fast. Now, making a mess of a long-pending Bill for reservation for women in Parliament. With three self goals, the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has breathed life into a moribund Opposition and alienated allies, and wasted three precious sessions of Parliament. More striking than the mishandling of an issue or the absence of a strategy to deal with opposition is the insensitive handling of allies within the ruling coalition. The Congress party has dispensed with the mechanism of a Coordination Committee, which has met sporadically only in response to a crisis, not as a matter of course. The institutional mechanism of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) has also been neglected. The CCPA never met after the new UPA government came to power till the Telangana issue rocked the government. One would have expected a discussion within the CCPA on a crucial issue like a Constitutional amendment on reservation for women in Parliament. If the government finds itself in one imbroglio after another, each disrupting a session of Parliament, it is time to ask why an electorally re-empowered alliance is faltering.

Has the Congress party misread the verdict of the general elections of 2009? Dizzy with an unexpected success, having won over 200 seats in the Lok Sabha, the party’s spin doctors rushed to claim victory not for their alliance, indeed not even for their coalition government, but for their party’s first family. The “architect of the election victory”, claimed Congress party managers, was Rahul Gandhi. It is paradoxical, though, that this “architect”, and a prime ministerial aspirant, has not spoken on crucial issues affecting the ruling alliance, be it Telangana, the women’s Bill or, indeed, even inflation and budgetary policy. What the Opposition and its allies are trying to tell the Congress party is by now crystal clear — that the 2009 verdict was not a vote for the unquestioned leadership of Sonia Gandhi or her son. It was, without doubt, a vote of confidence in favour of the UPA. But the credit for that ought to be shared by all members of the UPA. It is their successful running of the first Manmohan Singh government and the prime minister’s successful management of the economy, with a historic 9 per cent rate of growth, and the balanced conduct of foreign policy, including relations with Pakistan, that enabled the UPA to return to power. By disempowering the prime minister and its allies, the Congress party has weakened its own government. Nobody but the party is responsible for the mess it finds itself in over the handling of the Women’s Reservation Bill. Rather than genuflect all the time before the party president and general secretary, Congress party leaders must ask themselves how they can strengthen the prime minister’s hands so that the government can bring the economy back to 9 per cent growth, improve relations with our neighbours and major powers, and take India back to the path it was firmly set on in the first decade of the century.