Riding pretty: Manmohan Singh at the halfway stage
Nov 25, 2006 - 2:10:44 PM
, Reviewed by: Priya Saxena
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The Manmohan Singh government, therefore, has gained as much from its own decision to abandon 'socialism' and pursue economic reforms as from the failure of its opponents to shed their hidebound ways.
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By Amulya Ganguli,
[RxPG] If Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government looks more secure midway through its five-year term than one may have expected when it first took office, the reason is that it has managed to avoid some of the customary pitfalls that afflicted previous Congress regimes.
One of these handicaps was the infighting that undermined the Rajiv Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao governments. In the first case, the revolt of then defence minister V.P. Singh over the Bofors howitzer purchase scandal had robbed Gandhi of his political legitimacy.
In Narasimha Rao's case, the split in the party engineered by two disgruntled Congress leaders, Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari, ultimately paved the way for the party's defeat in 1996.
Manmohan Singh is fortunate that there are no such overt internal dissensions. Arjun Singh is suspected to be resentful of the prime minister's popularity. But his pinpricks have been confined to landing the government in unwanted rows, as over the reservations issue and the status of the national song, Vande Mataram.
These tactics of his made a cartoonist depict Arjun Singh carrying a case labelled Pandora's box. But this otherwise silent dissenter poses no real threat because Congress president Sonia Gandhi is firmly behind the prime minister.
It is perhaps this factor where Manmohan Singh does not head the party unlike other prime ministers. This may have acted as his saving grace.
The neat division of responsibility between him and Sonia Gandhi has ensured a smooth functioning of the party and the government, belying all predictions of an ego clash. There is little doubt that such harmony between two powerful people at the top is something of a novelty in Congress history, and perhaps in the history of all parties, especially in India where parties are splitting all the time.
However, the perception of the Manmohan Singh government's stability also comes from the fact that the prime minister has demonstrated that he is no pushover where certain objectives close to his heart are concerned.
As is known, Sonia Gandhi has openly expressed her fears about the Special Economic Zones - robbing farmers of arable land, and about a Free Trade Area - involving China flooding the Indian market with cheap Chinese goods.
But the government has nevertheless pursued its own line, undeterred by such criticism, particularly in relation to the SEZs, showing that the prime minister and his team of reformers, including Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, are not easily deflected from their path of economic reforms.
In only one respect did Sonia Gandhi push through her own policy preference, even if the economists were uneasy. This was the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme aimed at alleviating poverty in the countryside through daily wages for local schemes. If the reformer in the government had any qualms about projects that usually fail to create durable assets, they have chosen not to speak about it.
Otherwise, the Congress president has shown no inclination to queer the pitch where the government's so-called neo-liberal economic line is concerned. As a result Manmohan Singh has unhesitatingly taken up the task of economic reforms, which he had started as the finance minister in Narasimha Rao's government.
But even he might have faltered if the economy had not taken off in the manner that it has in at least the IT and manufacturing sectors. But notwithstanding the continuing distress in the agricultural sector, the high rate of growth has begun to convince even the sceptics that the reforms are the way of the future.
An added impetus to this belief has been given by state governments like the one in West Bengal, whose Marxist Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee has become an open votary of the market economy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the prime minister has now sought Bhattacharjee's help in convincing the Marxists based in New Delhi about the need to implement further reforms, such as those in the pension fund, banking and insurance sectors.
The disunity within the Left on the economy has also ensured that the Manmohan Singh government faces no immediate danger about the Marxists withdrawing their support. On foreign affairs too, the latter have had no option but to swallow some of their reservations, for example about the Indo-US civil nuclear deal.
One reason why they have chosen to tread with caution is the sign of revival the Bharatiya Janata Party - has shown through recent election successes in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Although no one believes that the BJP is set to regain its earlier prominence at the national level, the Left is well aware that this is not the time to destabilize the Manmohan Singh government.
But these are not the only reasons why the government can look forward to the remaining two and a half years of its tenure with confidence.
Its main advantage is that it has been able to establish a connection with the increasingly prosperous upper and middle classes, who have become conscious of the fact that the economic direction and the social stability this government provides are indispensable if India has to move forward.
In this context, the dangers of the confrontationist policies followed by the Left in favour of the trade unions, and by the BJP with its aggressive pro-Hindu line, have become more than apparent.
The Manmohan Singh government, therefore, has gained as much from its own decision to abandon 'socialism' and pursue economic reforms as from the failure of its opponents to shed their hidebound ways.
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