Commentary/Dilip Thakore
The Congress can still lead India out of the socialist wilderness and into the 21st century
With the unwieldy 13-party coalition United Front
government lurching from crisis to crisis, it won't be long before another general
election is called. The way things are going with the hapless
prime minister, H D Deve Gowda, rushing around putting out fires lighted
by every tuppenny caste leader who overnight seems to have acquired
the power to destablise the federal government, this administration will do well
if it survives for a year. Which means that leaders of the nation's
major political parties, particularly the Congress, need to start
thinking about strategies for winning the next general election.
Mind you my self-esteem took a bit of a battering in the nation's
eleventh general election. For the first
time since I began my professional career in the mid-sixties,
my forecast of a general election result went awry. Though like
most monitors of the nation's political and economic temperature I
too had expected a hung Parliament, I had predicted that the
P V Narasimha Rao (left)-led Congress would scrape through as the party
with the largest representation in the Lok Sabha.
My calculation was that when push comes to shove in the decisive
solitude of the polling booth, the electorate would opt for the devil
they knew (Congress) than the other devils they didn't know as
well. Moreover I presumed that the Rao government's relative success
in managing the economy and setting it upon the growth path
had registered with the electorate and would give it the decisive
edge. Quite obviously both presumptions proved erroneous.
Looking back, how did the Congress party, and former prime minister
Narasimha Rao in particular, squander the working majority they
had in the tenth Lok Sabha despite a broadly sympathetic press,
golden opinions from the international financial community and
a proven record of good economic management? Though a detailed
post-mortem is the job of a historian, with another general election
round the corner, media analysis is likely to prove instructive
to politicians of all shades and hues and to media pundits as
well.
A detailed post-mortem is likely to prove that Narasimha Rao's
age and his lack of charisma were important contributory factors
to the rout of the Congress in the eleventh general election.
Though there is some merit in the argument that after the ultra
high profile Nehru-Gandhi dynasty Narasimha Rao's unspectacular
nose-to-the-grindstone style of leadership was a refreshing change,
Rao's inability to enthuse the electorate or to highlight a campaign
issue (except the old hat issue of stability) kept voters away
from the polling booths even in prime middle class constituencies
on election day. This was evidenced by poor voter turnout in numerous
urban middle class constituencies (such as South Bombay) which
house people who benefited most from the Rao government's economic
reforms.
If Rao insists on leading the Congress party campaign into the
next general election as he seems all set to do, the least he
can do is to hire some good speech writers (in the style of American
presidential candidates) and take professional help in sprucing
up his image while learning how to use a teleprompter.
As electoral battles in all democratic nations become more presidential
in this age of satellite television, a modicum of style, if not
razmatazz, is a vital prerequisite of electoral success.
The second major reason why the Congress floundered under Rao's
leadership is that it under-estimated the extent of public indignation
on the issue of corruption in government and public life. Though
Opposition politicians as also quite a few media pundits characterised
the Rao government as the most corrupt in the history of post-Independence
India, neither the prime minister nor the Congress party seriously
challenged this damaging indictment.
Narasimha Rao seems to have
taken to heart the late Indira Gandhi's famous comment that corruption
is a universal phenomenon and its unspoken corollary that if graft
in public life is inevitable, one might as well practise it.
Well, that's where he made a big mistake. He should have known
better given his long innings in Indian politics. The vast majority
within the nation's population consists of unwilling participants
in the vicious circle of which characterises contemporary Indian
society. Merely because the citizenry is press-ganged onto the
corruption treadmill by venal bureaucrats and employees of public
sector monopolies, it doesn't mean that it condones it.
Indeed, the great majority of the Indian people abhor corruption in public
life even as they are obliged to indulge in it, and come election
day voters tend to be unsparing in their rejection of tainted
politicians. Indira Gandhi learned this lesson the hard way in 1977
and her son Rajiv in 1989 when they were turned out of office
on the corruption issue.
Nor was it just the luck of the draw that a whole host of politicians including the reportedly invulnerable Tamil Nadu chief minister,
Jayalalitha Jayaram (right), and former deputy prime minister Devi Lal notorious
for their lack of probity bit the dust in the 1996 Lok Sabha and
state assembly elections. The Indian electorate is slow to anger.
But when it is confronted with overwhelming evidence of graft
in public office, its wrath is unsparing.
Surrounded by hands-in-the-till
courtiers and sycophants throughout his five year term (1991 to 1996),
Narasimha Rao failed to learn
this patently obvious lesson from India's electoral history.
But though the nation's eleventh general election resulted in
the nation being landed with a hung Parliament and a United Front
government whose style of governance seems to be patterned upon
the fire brigade, there was much in the electoral verdict to be
enthused about.
The most satisfying electoral verdict was delivered in Tamil Nadu
where the sleaze queen with imperial delusions, where the AIADMK had enjoyed
an unprecedented majority in the state legislative assembly, was
comprehensively routed and Jayalalitha was herself unseated. Likewise
in Bihar, Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, a dangerous caste-obsessed
simpleton who harbours prime ministerial ambitions, suffered a
setback with the BJP-Samata alliance winning over 30 of Bihar's
54 Lok Sabha seats.
The election also cut several other unsavoury
demagogues down to size. In Uttar Pradesh the SJP led by Mulayam
Singh Yadav, another simpleton who God
help us, has surfaced as the nation's defence minister in the
United Front government fared much worse than he and his supporters
expected; and arch casteist Kanshi Ram (right) who heads the BSP suffered
a humiliating defeat as did former deputy prime minister Devi
Lal. And down south, the elephantine K P Unnikrishnan who hounded
technocrat Sam Pitroda out of public life and set the nation's
telecom industry back by at least a decade, bit the dust.
Unfortunately, Narasimha Rao's maladroit leadership and the nationwide
anti-Congress sweep resulted in some able parliamentarians and
responsive MPs being swept away. Among them: Mani Shankar Aiyar,
Salman Khursheed and Murli Deora. These gents brought knowledge,
competence and diligence into their jobs as representatives of
their constituencies and the eleventh Lok Sabha will be poorer
without their contributions. Another name I would dearly wished
to have seen among the winners was Sharad Joshi, leader of the
Swatantra Bharat party and perhaps the most articulate free market
politician in the country with a massive rural following.
These and the much-wronged Ramakrishna Hegde are the kind of people
the Congress needs to absorb and project as its frontline candidates
in the run-up to the next general election round the the corner.
The country and the electorate wants contemporary, well-educated
and can-do politicians to lead them into the twenty-first century.
It is foolish to believe that the ignorant village poor will continue
to want one of them to represent them in Parliament. The United Front
government experience is likely to serve the useful purpose of exposing
the limitations of backwoodsmen as national leaders.
Despite its disappointing track record in governance in the post-Nehruvian
period, the Congress is the only pan-Indian political party
which has the reach and the value premises to govern India. The
major disability of the Congress for over four decades has been
its socialist baggage. But the valuable contribution of the Narasimha
Rao administration has been that it has jettisoned most of this
debilitating baggage and completed the groundwork for the emergence
of a national consensus in favour of privatisation and private
enterprise.
Minus its socialist heritage the Congress is the only party capable
of realising the pent-up energies of the country's talented entrepreneurial
class and of uniting the nation. It needs to waste no time in
getting its act together. The absurd shenanigans of the new backwoodsmen
in New Delhi, if not divine Providence, have given another chance
to India's natural party of governance to lead the nation out
of the socialist wilderness and into the twenty-first century.
Dilip Thakore is the founder-editor of Business India and
Business World and former eidtor of Debonair.
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