Straining at the leash

That, precisely, is the problem. For so long have we lamented the absence of the vision thing in our politicians that, confronted all at once with too much of it, we, the garrulous, opinionated and cantankerous nation, are left speechless. In other circumstances that might be something to be thankful for. But right now it is time to tell this government to get its priorities straight and cut out the rest.

Just at present the national lament — or the national-media lament anyway — is that Murli Manohar Joshi’s perfectly legitimate and wise plans forimproving education have got buried because of the unfortunate Vidya Bharati ruckus. Well, tough luck.

To take an example from American politics, if Congress is fool enough to try to load abortion law on to fast-track trade negotiating authority for the President, both ideas deserve to get sunk, and you know whom to blame.

Likewise, if you try to sneak in some furtive, unventilated and outlandish-to-boot (Homer’s epic is an adaptation of the Valmiki Ramayan!) agenda on the back of real education reform, what right have you to expect that your reforms will see the light of day? Putting a partisan tail on a non-partisan agenda means that the tail will, yes, wag the dog.

Trouble with the BJP is it cannot reconcile itself to the fact that it does not have mandate. Well, it has mandate of a sort, but not of the sort it thinks it has or the sort it wants to have. It is the single largest party, no doubt about that. But does it have the mandate to undertake social-political spring-cleaning of a magnitude thatis truly breathtaking? Does it have mandate for its big ideas?

Most of the ideas, it has to be conceded, are not bad. Most of them deserve decent ventilation: review of the Constitution, poring over the presidential form of government, education reform. Beware of those particularly who will make the Constitution a dinosaur, a sacrosanct document set in stone which by definition is condemned to becoming irrelevant. But the crucial questions are, naturally: precisely wh-at sort of reform, and is what is being proposed reform or reaction?

The BJP does not have time for ventilating these things. And it does not have the respect for democracy and a sufficiently liberal outlook to accept that it cannot begin to implement those ideas without consensus and at least a semi-clear mandate. You know about those who steal what they cannot have. Well, here is a government that wastes its suspect resources sneaking in — or trying to — what it cannot respectably bring in through the front door.

What a great pity.There would be nothing defeatist about accepting that the BJP did not have a mandate for undertaking a wholesale review of contemporary India’s very social and political foundations. It would be fruitful to act on the idea that the party should focus on things that are not contentious and are essential as well. Call it the National Agenda for Governance or anything else. We all know what those things are. The BJP coined the phrase ‘good governance’ for them. Oh, there is lip service to them all right. But where is the conviction?

Yet it could hardly be otherwise. Not only do the BJP and its Parivar have far too much vision for their own good, they also have far too many visions to inspire them as one collective entity. There is an L.K. Advani vision. There is definitely a Murli Manohar Joshi vision. There is an Atal Behari Vajpayee vision, too, one supposes. There is the muscular swadeshi vision. There is the liberal swadeshi vision. There is even the Ananth Kumar type of vision, such as it is. These busilyorbiting visions exhibit a startling tendency to collide. Is it any wonder that instead of symphony we get cacophony?

We hear of bipartisanship — ideologically different parties or groupings coming together on a certain agreed agenda. It cannot be too much to ask the BJP to condescend to display at least internal bipartisanship. It is wrong to think that agreeing on those small things and getting on with them will not suffice to leave a mark. It will, if anything will, because those things have been so conspicuously lacking and so desperately needed.

For fifty years the Indian people have seen far too many big ideas, even when they did not hang together as one coherent vision, and not enough small ones. In any case the big ideas, dear as they may be to party and Parivar, are divisive, impossible to implement at this time and will earn the government the thanks only of sections of the people. It is a lack of imagination that prevents the party from addressing a constituency of over 900 million.

Yet itis not easy. (Who said it was?) Good governance requires capability. Far easier to hold forth on grand ideas than do one little thing right. Compounding the weak mandate is, in fact, singular ineptitude. This perhaps has been most clear in the way bureaucracy has led this government up the garden path. No one ever doubted the bureaucracy’s lethal hold on this country, but such a raw display of it has seldom been seen. If the BJP had a mind to give priority to what many consider its subversive agenda, the least it might have done was aim to secure the support of the omnipotent bureaucracy. This does not even appear to have been attempted.

The fantasy of bringing the presidential system to this country, of undertaking a thorough review of the Constitution, of Indianising, nationalising and spiritualising education, of showing a brawny judiciary its place — all this has to be measured against the reality of failure to make onion prices look south for a change. Ludicrous? Exactly. This government needs toget real. Let it try to evolve a sense of proportion between what it wants to do and what is feasible. Let it not strain at the leash so hard. It is undignified. Worse, it could end up choking itself.