No, Prime Minister

The State in India is in full retreat. It has largely failed to meet even the minimum aspirations of the people

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

Predicting the defeat of the Congress Party in the recent Punjab and Uttarakhand elections was easy enough if one analysed the performance of these governments during their term in office. (See Hardnews, September 2006 to read about the dismal performance of the Amarinder Singh government). It is only the so-called professional psephologists and glib television pundits who invariably get it wrong. Let us also not forget that India Today (which has now become India’s most popular reading in barber salons and dentist waiting rooms) had only last year deemed the Amarinder Singh government as India’s best performing one and had got the president to award him a prize.

At that time, this columnist had decried the practice of the president and high constitutional authorities being chief guests at such superficial beauty parades. Ordinary people are better judges of performance and have always exhibited a great ability to discern good government from hyped-up governance, as they did in the case of Chandrababu Naidu and SM Krishna in the recent past.

But the prime minister seems to be busy acting as chief guest at political beauty parades and other such functions organised by the faithful, not realising that the faithful are faithful to the office and not to the person. One should accept the adulation of the CII and FICCI with more than a pinch of salt, for the adulation comes with a price tag. Witness how the State is acquiring land from the peasants using the most unrealistic valuations to give them away to so-called developers of SEZ’s; actually, in most instances, these are just gigantic real estate plays.

Many decades ago, a leading industrialist, Lala Charatram, candidly confessed: "We support the prime minister. We support whoever is the prime minister." Dr. Manmohan Singh would have got a truer measure of his popularity with India’s multitudes if he had counted the attendance at his meetings in his home state of Punjab. At more than one meeting, policemen vastly outnumbered the public. I have enough Congressmen testifying to this.

Then, consider this: If Manmohan Singh had accepted the offer of Amarinder Singh to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar, we would have had a true world record of his being the first prime minister to be defeated by a professional humourist. But then, he was defeated in South Delhi by one just a little better than that. Right now, Singh is better off being the paying guest of the late Hiteshwar Saikia’s widow in Guwahati and being returned to the Rajya Sabha by the long suffering people of Assam.

The point here is that we have a prime minister without a political constituency and hence out of touch with the reality of India. Unfortunately for him and for us, ours is a system of government by elected politicians, and India is paying the price of having a non-political person as its leader.

Now, the challenge of Uttar Pradesh is on hand. The only question for the Congress party is whether it will get more than two dozen seats or less. We seem to be getting some early indications of how the cookie is going to crumble with the Special Protection Group (SPG) advising that Rahul Gandhi curtail his public meetings and the MoS in the home ministry, Sriprakash Jaiswal, advising Rahul Gandhi to follow the advice of the SPG. I suspect that it is not security but attendance that is the problem.