Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: June 15, 2004
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/15swadas.htm
Unflinching faith in the leadership
of Sonia Gandhi is the lowest common denominator of the Congress party.
It is about as non-negotiable as formal adherence to Marxism-Leninism among
members of the CPI-M.
However, from this undifferentiated
mass of Gandhi loyalists, there are two categories of people who have been
appointed as ministers and functionaries of the Manmohan Singh government.
The first, which includes the prime minister, are those who blend the criterion
of either competence or social representation with loyalty to 10 Janpath.
They can loosely be called the traditional Congressmen. The second category
is made up of people whose faith in the party is merely an extension of
their primary loyalty to the first family. They can best be described as
the retainers.
Over the past week, as the new UPA
government settled down to business, the country has witnessed two very
distinctive styles of functioning. On the one hand there is the heartening
spectacle of Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee upholding the principle
of continuity and defending the conduct of the previous NDA government
during the 1999 Kargil war. Likewise, in an attempt to boost the sagging
morale of the capital market, Finance Minister P Chidambaram has made it
a point to stress the new government's commitment to continuity in economic
reforms.
At the same time, the retainers
have not been idle. Topping the genuflection charts is Law Minister H R
Bhardwaj who made it clear that as far as he is concerned, the Congress
president, in her capacity of a deemed Cabinet minister heading the UPA
and the committee on the implementation of the common minimum programme,
has the right to examine all official files.
Following Bhardwaj's press interview
and the loud protests from the opposition and eminent jurists, the traditional
Congressmen seemed slightly exasperated. Why was it necessary, they asked
in hushed whispers, for the law minister to go public on what is, after
all, an informal arrangement? Their misgivings, it would seem, prevailed
and it was left to the hapless Congress spokesman to suggest that Bhardwaj
had been quouted 'out of context,' the graceless euphemism for suggesting
he had shot his mouth off. 'We are correct politically and constitutionally
in all we do,' asserted Anand Sharma.
Sharma was defending a bad case.
Since the Manmohan Singh government was installed, there has been an unseemly
rush among the retainers to show that real power rests in 10 Janpath and
not in Race Course Road. We had the amazing spectacle of External Affairs
Minister K Natwar Singh informing the world that President Pervez Musharraf
had invited Sonia Gandhi to visit Pakistan. Now, there is nothing wrong
in Musharraf wanting to roll out the red carpet for the lady. During the
previous regime, he had done the same for umpteen BJP and RSS functionaries,
all of whom returned gushing inane platitudes. But for the external affairs
minister to publicise the invitation has a different diplomatic connotation
and Natwar Singh could not have been unaware of it.
Indeed, following this premeditated
signal from South Block, Sonia has received invites from the king of Nepal
and a rehabilitated Yasser Arafat. It has prompted the acerbic comment
that maybe someday someone will invite the prime minister.
It is not the intention of this
column to either undermine or ridicule the good professor who has quite
a job trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The poor man
was catapulted to the top job, but could not exercise the luxury of choosing
his own council of ministers. The man who once berated an erstwhile leader
for not being like Caesar's wife and above suspicion has had to tolerate
the company of scoundrels, rogues, and goondas. More to the point, he has
to defend their inclusion as ministers. A stickler for propriety, he had
to look the other way when the heads of the intelligence services went
to brief the deity of Janpath. An upholder of standards, he had to meekly
acquiesce in the appointment of one of the family's erstwhile bodyguards
to a gubernatorial post. And now, he has had to stomach Bhardwaj's sanction
of remote control.
It is the beginning of a pattern.
Inner voice or no inner voice, as far as the retainers are concerned, this
is Sonia's government. The retainers with Oxbridge education have even
called it the regency period -- an unfortunate analogy because it suggests
Manmohan is playing regent to a half-crazed monarch. They will do everything
in their power to remind the prime minister that he is not the real boss
of the show. And these destructive sniper attacks will be sanctified by
dynastic imperiousness. They are, after all, meant to show the prime minister
his real place -- as a supplicant to the family. If he doesn't like it,
he will be advised to take a long walk into the sunset.
India, it would seem, is headed
for an exercise in constitutional improvisation. The issue is not the right
of the Congress party to evolve its own procedures; at stake is the sanctity
of institutions of government. As long as Sonia Gandhi does not enjoy any
constitutional recognition, she has no right to enjoy an extra-constitutional
hegemony conferred upon her by slavish retainers. The government has absolutely
no moral authority to subject an entire country to such ridicule.
It is too early in the government's
innings for protests to have any effect. However, protest we must. As a
start, let me suggest that we shed the elaborate legal fiction of calling
the UPA government the Manmohan Singh government. Honesty demands we rename
it the Sonia government.