Opinion Time for a rethink
Pandit Nehru tried to retire after twelve years as PM when he was nearing seventy.
Pandit Nehru tried to retire after twelve years as PM when he was nearing seventy. There was a horrific reaction and he had to relent. His last five years did more to damage his reputation than all his earlier years. He ended up expressing his regret in Robert Frosts words which end in,I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.
I recall these words as Sonia Gandhi has made a welcome return. One wishes her a long and healthy life but if even half of what we heard about her problem is true,then she should be afforded a year-long sabbatical at the very least. But then that will not be. Like Pandit Nehru,she will have to sacrifice her health for a bunch of sycophantic followers who happily claim to be unable to do without her constant guidance.
She has to do something drastic to arrest the drift in governance over the last few months. I want to cite a couple of examples from history which may help her in her task. First is the attempt by Panditji to force early retirement on his Cabinet colleagues under the rubric of the Kamraj Plan. Kamaraj Nadar was the Congress Party President and his name was put to a plan to ask senior ministers to give up office and devote themselves to party work. It was a not too opaque plan to get rid of Morarji Desai and clear the way of succession for Lal Bahadur Shastri. I say no more as to whom Sonia Gandhi may want to be rid of or even how many.
Another example is Harold Macmillans. He had been re-elected in 1959 with a large majority. But within two years,it was looking bad for the government. So he had a drastic Cabinet reshuffleThe Night of the Long Knivesin which many senior ministers,including the Chancellor of Exchequer,were sacked. Again the parallel is obvious and a nod to the wise is enough.
But then what? There has to be some rethinking. Sonia Gandhi has been the first leader of the Congress to hold chintan shivirs,once in 1998 and then in 2003. By 2003,the Congress had persuaded itself that it would not come to power on its own and so coalition was the only way out. Had this simple idea struck Rajiv Gandhi in 1989,the Congress need never have lost power. But this time around the chintan has to be about the structure of leadership as well as about policy. The experiment Sonia Gandhi inaugurated in 2004 of a division of labour between party president and prime minister was brilliant. But it has now run its course. A simple solution would have been to swap roles with Dr Singh becoming the leader of the coalition and Sonia the PM with Rahul Gandhi as party president. But I doubt if her health will permit that.
There is another solution. There has never been a shared prime ministership but it could be done with her and Rahul as a dual authority prime minister/president doing both jobs in a job share fashion.
Dr Manmohan Singh can still be leader of the coalition. Or indeed Rahul and Dr Manmohan Singh could share prime ministership,Rahul doing domestic policy and Dr Singh international affairs.
But there have to be some new ideas as well. The Congress is now vaguely populist/socialist on the NAC (National Advisory Council) side and firmly liberal/competitive on the PMEAC (Prime Ministers Economic Advisory Council) side. The two do coexist though they may be at cross purposes in the public domain. The jholawalas need the buoyant revenues from growth to spend on their favourite redistributive programmes. But they have to imbibe some notion of efficiency. The current 41 per cent wastage rate in PDS (public distribution system) is intolerable. The demands to extend PDS for food security act would be damaging to the economy if PDS is not reformed.
The liberal/economists need a drastic rethink of their stance on redistribution. The fiasco about Rs 32 a day showed that poverty measurement is no longer a technical economic issue. It raises deep questions of justice as far the Indian citizen is concerned. A new approach to minimum income affordable for all is required so that the right of citizens to a basic income is made fiscally affordable.
Get thinking!
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