After the new highs touched in his speech to Parliament on the G.T. Nanavati Report, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation from the ramparts of Red Fort yesterday was something of an anti-climax.Last week — through the great feeling, sincerity and anguish he expressed in his Rajya Sabha address — he could move his listeners and turn around the difficult situation the Congress found itself on the Action Taken Report. The Independence Day speech, on the other hand, was a routine affair. Obviously prepared by officials, it attempted to touch on a broad spectrum of issues and programmes his government has launched, or was about to initiate.This presentation of a report card could have been done in Parliament or any other forum. August 15, in contrast, is an emotional moment, when a PM can strike a chord, arouse people, dream dreams with them. Some prime ministers knew how to use these situations creatively. Jawaharlal Nehru engaged with people, not just on Independence Day, but in every public meeting. There is a lovely story in the Discovery of India, in which Nehru talks about interacting with a rural audience on what they meant by the slogan, Bharat Mata ki Jai. Nehru explained that Bharat Mata was not just about mountains and rivers but the people — including each one of them. His daughter, too, learnt to use the public meeting to take people along with her. She did this very effectively in the run-up to the Bangladesh war.The Congress party’s biggest failing today is its inability to read a crisis right. This was patent in its failure to react promptly to three recent crises: the police attack on workers in Gurgaon, the floods in Mumbai, and the ATR on the Nanavati report. It did not anticipate how these three situations would play out. It was either not thinking politically, or was so complacent that it felt it could ride out the storm. Either way, it was clearly out of sync with the public mood.In a party with a 120-year history, this is disappointing. The history of the Congress is replete with instances of leaders defusing an impending crisis through timely action. For instance, Manmohan Singh will recall the time when the securities scam hit the scene. The Congress government announced a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe it, even before the Opposition had got around to demanding one.Had the chief minister of Haryana, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, transferred top police officials and ordered a judicial inquiry soon after TV images of his policemen raining blows on protesting Honda workers shocked the nation, he would have saved his party much embarrassment. As it turned out, he had to do all of this and more, three days later. Public opinion and pressure from the Left and Opposition parties forced Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh to talk tough to Hooda. But the damage had been done.Similarly, the initial response of Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to the floods in Maharashtra came in for sharp criticism. Nobody can prevent a natural calamity. But here again it may have been a different story had the people — marooned in their homes or on highways, deprived of drinking water and electricity — seen images of their CM reaching out to them, even if it meant that he had to wade through water. Instead news channels beamed images of Deshmukh looking svelte in a TV studio, exhorting people to take this action or that. His first public appearance that registered was when the PM visited Mumbai after the worst was over. Though the administration swung into action subsequently, once again the damage had been done.The paradox is that while the Congress’s political reflexes seem to have slowed down in anticipating crises, it now appears more responsive to public pressure than it did earlier. In all the three instances cited here, the party did not preempt the crisis but responded to it only when there was a public outcry. The conclusion then is that the Congress of 2005 tends to react to situations rather than initiate political action.Why does this happen? One reason could be the absence of a clearly defined line of authority. Sonia Gandhi is wary of speaking on behalf of the government and Manmohan Singh, on behalf of the party. Manmohan Singh is reined in by the fact that he does not have the full support of his party colleagues, nor has he established himself as a leader with a popular base, and he has a tendency to play it safe.At the end of the day, the PM, who has left “politics” to Sonia Gandhi, cannot afford to be apolitical. Manmohan Singh has demonstrated that he can be highly political when he wants to be. This was seen in the way he handled the Nanavati controversy, and Sonia Gandhi backed him. They may have had differences on issues like the expansion of the Cabinet — which has been put off four times — but when it comes to the crunch they have moved in sync.Undoubtedly, the coalitional model thrown up by the 14th Lok Sabha is a difficult one, and calls for greater accommodation between Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi to provide political direction to the party in the absence of one supreme authority figure.
