Father, son and the UP ghost

Rahul Gandhi will have to find a way to put people back in charge of their lives and not be left to the mercies of the huge army of bureaucrats

Mohan Guruswamy New Delhi

The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has prophesised that Rahul Gandhi is the future of Uttar Pradesh. But it seems much more likely that Mayawati is UP's immediate future and fate. Which means that India's largest state and among its most backward ones at that, will remain condemned for a few more years to kleptocratic rule and to the narcissist excesses of personality cult. It would also mean that India's chances of catching up with China in the next few decades would have been delivered a stunning blow. UP is almost 15 per cent of India and dominates its polity and India cannot go forward leaving UP behind. 

But UP's politicians seem determined to put narrow and immediate interests ahead of greater national goals. Having said this, it must also be said that our national leadership in general and our Prime Minister more specifically, have also failed in articulating national goals. It is even more unfortunate that Manmohan Singh's abilities of articulation seem reserved for scoring cheap shots at the opposition and not for enlisting them in the great task of taking India ahead. It's now too late for the Prime Minister. His time is fast closing whichever way one looks at it. 

He is over 75. Many of the Congress's allies, particularly the Left, would not care to go to the people in 2009 to defend his legacy. They would instead like to take the credit for dumping him and his policies. I would be willing to bet my last rupee that the Left will abandon the UPA well before the next Lok Sabha elections are due, in a bid to keep the cake and eat it too. Even more certain is that once out of office the Congress party will turn on him like it did on Narasimha Rao. Dr Manmohan Singh will do well to study Dr Abraham Masslow's celebrated study on primate behavior: on how baboons deal with their fallen leaders. 

It is not without some irony that Singh has of late begun to see much merit in the late Narasimha Rao. It may also be because Singh knows something that most people don't:  The economic reforms of 1991 were actually authored by the late PV Narasimha Rao and the author of the South-South Commission Report, Manmohan Singh, then, still had views that India's Left comrades would have appreciated more. The Government Order that led to the scrapping of the Industrial Licensing Policy and the disbanding of the infamous Directorate General of Technical Development (DGTD) emanated from 7, Race Course Road and not from North Block. 

The then Prime Minister had to work hard to get his team aboard. In fact, only P Chidambaram, then commerce minister, did not need any persuasion. The then finance minister, who was the Prime Minister's second choice for the job, required a bit of cajoling to come aboard. The Prime Minister had to tell him that he was going ahead with the reforms and the finance minister will then have to decide whether to stay on or not. But once adulation was forthcoming, Singh displayed great alacrity to take credit. As John Kennedy said, success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. This, too, Singh will learn soon. 

The UP campaign did not throw up any issues. The only thing that stirred the talking heads was Rahul Gandhi's comment about the services to India rendered by his father, grandmother and great-grandfather. But was this such a big matter for the entire spectrum from Kuldip Nayyar to LK Advani to take umbrage?

Who can deny Nehru a leading role in the freedom movement and in forging the new nationhood? Who but the most churlish would deny Indira Gandhi credit for taking India to victory in 1971? And to say that had Rajiv Gandhi been prime minister the demolition of the Babri Masjid would not have happened, is fair. 

Whatever else may have been Rajiv Gandhi's failings, inertness was not one of them. He would not have sat around being taken in by all and sundry while plans were afoot to topple the dilapidated masjid. He would have decided that the structure was under the care of the ASI and his government was duty-bound to protect it. By such time cronies like Arun Nehru who advised him to unlock the Babri Masjid for prayer by the rambakhts, were long gone. So what was the big fuss all about? Rahul was not distorting history. He may at best be guilty of selectively choosing from it for his advantage. 

If lineages are what matter and as we see all around us they do, young Rahul Gandhi has a lineage he ought to be proud about. India's politics are increasingly family businesses. Except for the ideologically driven parties, all of which are obscurantist, most other political parties are family-dominated enterprises whose main purpose is to ‘enjoy’ political power. Take any one of them.

Karunanidhi's DMK, Mulayam Singh's SP, Lalu Yadav's RJD, Jayalalitha's ADMK, Badal's Akali Dal or Thackeray's Shiv Sena, all of them are family-led factions bearing little resemblance to the parties our founding fathers contemplated while giving the nation its political system. Lineages are important in our politics now, and let's face it, Rahul Gandhi has the best there is.  

But that will still not make him UP's future. To be that he has to craft out a new vision for India based on a new political style and message. The greatest challenge India faces is its agriculture.

Today agriculture accounts for less than a quarter of the GDP while it is the source of sustenance for over 60 per cent of the people. In a prosperous India, less people will depend on agriculture and more of its GDP will come from industry and not services. To sustain current rates of GDP growth and to be able to catch-up with China in the next three decades, India's agriculture needs to grow at about 4 per cent. It is currently growing at 1.6 per cent. For agriculture to grow at higher rates a lot more of our agricultural land needs to be irrigated. Public spending on irrigation has dropped precipitously since the advent of reforms.

The second challenge our agricultural sector faces is the fragmentation of farm holdings. Today, over 60 per cent of our farms are smaller than one hectare. They also tend to fragment even more with every passing generation. This is not conducive to agricultural growth and productivity. Nor do they provide any worthwhile income. The only way to reverse this is to get people off the land with alternate employment.

This can only come from industry. The World Bank says that a kilometre of new roads does more for per capita income than anything else. God knows UP needs lots of new roads and canals. The land of the Ganges is mostly without irrigation. Rahul Gandhi will do well to shape his new politics around water and farmer.

The problem is that Rahul Gandhi too thinks that politics is a marketing game, like Mulayam Singh with his Amitabh Bachchan campaign. Politics in India needs to be structured around policies. Policies which not only determine what we will become but also how we manage ourselves. Rajiv Gandhi had a vision of restructuring India by decentralising public administration. He  was correct in his assessment.

We spend over Rs 1,90,000 crore each year on public administration. Of this, the central and state governments account for almost 90 per cent with local government only getting about 10 per cent. Our government is too remote from the people. Thus, if a teacher does not show up in the village school, the redress for it lies in the state capital. Ditto for a doctor in the primary health centre. 

India needs to find a way to put people back in charge of their lives and not be left to the mercies of the huge army of bureaucrats. JP's slogan 'Power to the People' was about this. Rajiv Gandhi did well to be inspired by this. His son will do well if he picks up the fallen standards and learns from our recent history. Only then, will not only UP get a better future but also India.