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POLITICS
Caught in a monsoon breeze, Dr. Manmohan Singh?
We declare the official end of the honeymoon
period for the Manmohan Singh government
BABYCHEN MATHEW
29 July 2004
 Yes, its over. The Manmohan Singh-led
UPA government has well and truly botched its honeymoon
period in power.
It was not done to death by the Left parties, in the afterglow of the UPA government
formation, telling the stock market to go to hell. Neither was the way the stock market crashed
the day afterwards. It wasn't the tainted minister
going by the name of Laloo Prasad Yadav sitting tight
in the Union Cabinet either.
After all, people had almost forgotten
the Left. They had forgotten that the Left's target
market are the trade unions and status quo-ists
nowadays, and they have to be kept happy with aggressive
soundbites. The market went to hell, but truly, if the
market does not have much more sense than to crash
headlong into the ocean, they didn't deserve better
either. Just because brokers spend their entire day
watching CNBC does not mean they can't read regular
newspapers, and come to know a little something about
the weirdness of the Left parties. The ones who lost
the most in the stock market crash were the brokers,
and the pot-bellied ones are advised to read
newspapers occasionally. Laloo has been around,
tainted or otherwise, for donkey's years, and everyone
understood the compulsions of Dr. Manmohan Singh to
take the Bihar leader along. As long as it all stayed
within limits.
The limits were breached in July, when
one politician acted without any sense of
responsibility, and another without a shred of
dignity. And the losers in the final analysis are Dr.
Manmohan Singh and his government. The culprits are
Capt. Amarinder Singh, chief minister of Punjab and
Shibu Soren, now ex-union minister for Coal in the
Manmohan Singh ministry.
Capt. Amarinder Singh went ahead and
called a special session of the Punjab assembly
to enact the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act.
This was enacted to get around the Supreme Court order
according to which construction of the Satluj-Yamuna
Link canal had to start quickly. The agreement was
signed between three state governments and the central
government, and the unilateral abrogation of the
agreements threaten to rupture the federal character
of the country now.
This is humiliating for the Manmohan
Singh government because this is precisely the kind of
thing a central government is supposed to watch out
for, and take action to avoid. Capt. Amarinder Singh
insists that he did it with the support of all
political parties in the state, and without taking the
permission of Dr. Manmohan Singh or the party chief
Sonia Gandhi. That is just unbelievable. The fact is
that the information that the special sitting of the
assembly is to be convened had to be conveyed to the
MLAs, and such information always leaks. The IB and
other intelligence agencies are there to collect such
information and convey it to the government. If they
haven't done it, well, it shows the Manmohan Singh
government in a really bad light. The news did not
reach the PM from rival camps within the state
Congress, which also means that there is no one there
who bothers with the central government in a matter as
crucial as this. No one would have done with with a
stronger PM. Sorry, Dr. Manmohan Singh, that was sheer
bad performance.
Under Manmohan Singh, in just two
months, the Congress is in danger of losing its claim
to being the most natural party of governance in
India. Being a decent person is not enough to head a
country as complex as India, and Manmohan realises
this, of course. The problem is in the action he has
taken to avoid things spiralling out of control.
Partly the problem can be blamed on the person with
the real mandate to govern - Sonia Gandhi - staying
out of power due to complex circumstances. But
Manmohan needs to posses real authority, or Sonia
needs to posses it. If neither Sonia or Manmohan, with
all their loyalists in the party, and the entire
government machinery did not know about this
insurgency, that is just unbelievable. If they knew
and chose not to act on it, they have surrendered
Congress' credibility already. Like a columnist in
Indian Express wrote, the media too is sucking up
unscrupulously. If it was a BJP CM who did what
Amarinder Singh did, he would have been skewered.
Relief at a communal government falling out of power
is keeping the media silent at the misdeedS of the
Congress. Once state governments think they have the
power to cancel agreements which they do not like
anymore, the federal structure of the country itself
will collapse.
Then came the sordid saga of the
mystery of the missing minister. Shibu Soren, now
ex-union coal minister, was to be served with an
arrest warrant for a decades-old case. INstead of
waiting around to be arrested, he decided to vanish.
Abscond. The case could be fabricated, politically
motivated, but the fact that a central minister
thought nothing about avoiding the law by hiding -
what can be more embarrassing to someone as decent as
the Prime Minister? Manmohan Singh could not see this
coming? The news that Soren may disappear without
waiting around was in the pipeline for a few
days, but no one expected him to run away without even
submitting his resignation letter. And just how can a
union minister disappear? What about the police and
black cats that surround them all the time? A
mininster can disappear only with the connivance of
powerful people. Does the IB know where Soren is? If
it doesn't, why don't we just disband the IB? If it
does and Manmohan knows about it, what does that say
about him? This is the kind of thing that just cannot
happen in a country with a functioning government
machinery.
Sorry, Dr. Manmohan Singh. You have
botched it. For now. This is not the end, but if the
current trends are any indication, you have the
potential to be one of India's least effective prime
ministers. Let's hope it does not come to that.
BABYCHEN MATHEW
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