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Journalism of Courage
Sonia Gandhi gave NDTV one of her rare television interviews last week. She was charming, articulate and reassuringly in charge, very much the boss lady despite her glowing tributes to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
But the interview left me worried. It has long been my view that one of the reasons why India remains desperately poor is because the Congress has got away, in its many decades of ruling India, by giving us charisma instead of governance.
Then came Indira Gandhi. She was responsible for giving us what in retrospect even her former admirers admit were the two most wasted decades of our journey as an independent country by resorting to dangerously populist politics and economics.
Slogans like Garibi Hatao and the 20-point programme replaced meaningful economic policies and we have spent 20 years paying for her mistakes in Kashmir and Punjab.
She was forgiven this and even her momentary suspension of democracy because she was more charismatic than her opponents.
Charisma was something Rajiv Gandhi had oodles of so we overlooked the massacre of the Sikhs that occurred in the first days of his rule and his justification of this. Please remember that nobody forgives Narendra Modi for doing exactly the same thing on a smaller scale. We also forgave Rajiv his inability to notice the extraordinary economic changes that were happening in Southeast Asia and China while his economic policies continued to be 8216;socialist8217;.
In the end it was Bofors that got him not his failures of governance.
As a foreigner Sonia Gandhi started off with the biggest handicap of any member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and she has proved admirably that she is a better politician than any other in our current pantheon by overcoming this obvious disability.
The problem is that she has also proved that all she offers us is more charisma instead of governance.
I came to this gloomy conclusion even before her interview because of the pathetic quality of the Cabinet changes that the Prime Minister affected earlier in the week. The Sonia-Manmohan government is more than halfway through its term in office and by way of governance it has given us so little that you would expect that any changes in the Cabinet would be effected only to give us more efficient governance, would you not?
So what sense does it make to shuffle Pranab Mukherji along the corridors of South Block to the other side? In the global village that is our world, English is the lingua franca and at the risk of making a personal remark I have to say that our new Foreign Minister8217;s version of this language is often hard to understand even at home.
Were there not other more important changes we should have seen? Shivraj Patil has been an unmitigated disaster as Home Minister, s can be seen from the impunity with which Islamist terrorists have spread their depredations as far as peaceful Bangalore. Naxalites increase their area of operations daily and our Kashmir problem has gone from bad to worse.
We need an Education Minister and the abolition of the unwieldy and very dodgy Ministry of Human Resource Development. Arjun Singh has proved what disruptive games can be played from here, but he remains in place.
There have been not even marginal improvements in education, healthcare and the fight against extreme poverty, but we see no changes in the people in charge of these areas.
The same is true of our economic ministries. Most trundle along much as they have always done without any significant change and the highways programme is in slow motion. It will only pick up speed when there is a powerful, single minister in charge of every aspect of highway development. But we see no changes here.
India may be close to achieving a GDP growth rate of 10 per cent and the stock markets may be booming but this has little to do with government policies and is often happening despite them.
Think of what we could achieve if we had modern roads, airports, and railways and if every Indian had access to clean water, sanitation, electricity, a decent home and good neighbourhood schools and hospitals.
These are areas in which only government can make a difference and it is precisely in these areas that we see an absence of imaginative new ideas and policies from the Sonia-Manmohan government.
Charisma is a mantra that has lost a lot of its strength. If it works at the next general election, it will only be if the BJP fails to shake itself out of its coma.
