Why the NAC is a Bad Idea

Civil society loves the National Advisory Council, but it is ultimately an extra-constitutional entity framing policies without any accountability.

In May 2006, in the desert heat of Rajasthan, Aruna Roy, member of the first National Advisory Council (NAC) and the prime mover behind the NREGA legislation, told me a month before she quit the NAC that she was troubled by the conduct of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the Narmada issue: “It seems as if he is being run by remote control at the behest of special interest groups either in this country or outside.” Today, the Narmada issue is much as it was, but Aruna Roy has agreed to be renominated as a member of the reconstituted NAC by the same Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

What has changed since then? In the same interview, Aruna Roy said the NAC had stopped mattering precisely because Sonia Gandhi quit as chairperson following the office-of-profit controversy. “The NAC had a group of people who would take note whenever the Government violated the CMP (the common minimum programme of UPA I),” she had said at that time, “This protest was channelised through the chairperson, but over the last three months there has been no meeting of the NAC. This has closed a very important channel of monitoring the CMP. And the CMP is the only way in which the agenda of the poor is represented in this government, the rest is all Sensex, World Bank and software technology.”

The first NAC then had a pretext, the monitoring of the CMP. Now even that pretext no longer exists. Ad hocism is being institutionalised, creating a body never envisaged in the Constitution and one that bears no accountability to anyone. The NAC, whatever the motivations for its creation, will eventually become a channel for wielding extra-constitutional power. It may seem odd, but even such power in our system needs to be institutionalised. Sonia Gandhi’s case is illustrative. She herself was far less influential on policy issues while the NAC was not functioning. 

This NAC, purportedly set up then to allow the chairperson to channel certain views into governance, seems admirable only when the views channelled are those of Jean Dreze or Aruna Roy. 

But consider for a moment a BJP-led government in power and an NAC with RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat as chairperson with MG Vaidya and Praveen Togadia as members. The very persons today applauding the new NAC would be crying hoarse over the travesty of allowing such a body of men to frame and monitor policy in India. 

For all the talk about the body being advisory, it wields considerable power and creates a pretext for bringing in outsiders to directly frame and monitor policy. But if the question is only of bringing in people with talent into positions of governance, a mechanism already exists. It is called the Rajya Sabha. The Prime Minister himself is an example. But as a member of the Rajya Sabha, Aruna Roy could not have gotten away with casting aspersions on Manmohan Singh as she did. 

Much as civil society activists talk of the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution, they forget that these values are tied to the very nature of constitutional institutions and the checks and balances that go with them. Far too often, civil society in this country only pays lip service to this idea; institutions and individuals are good only when they support the views activists propound, otherwise the labels come thick and fast (‘remote controlled’,  ‘run by special interests’ and so on). 

The activists who are part of the NAC would like to claim the right to be inside and outside the Government at the same time, with no sign of a mandate or popular support, without accountability. It is no secret that Jean Dreze and Union Rural Development Minister CP Joshi do not see eye to eye on how the NREGA should be implemented. For us, it is far too easy to caricature this disagreement as a bumbling politician heady with power disregarding the advice of a man who has worked on the ground. While this may even be true in this particular case, it is a recipe for disaster as a general rule. The CP Joshis may be mistaken, but they have to answer to Parliament and an electorate. 

The Jean Drezes may be admirable, but who are they answerable to?

Consider the faith that civil society has placed in a Sonia Gandhi of their imagination. On the very day the formal announcement of 14 members nominated to the NAC was issued by the Government, newspapers also reported that Captain Satish Sharma would be one of the Congress nominees for the Rajya Sabha. This was also at Sonia Gandhi’s behest. Activists see the Sonia Gandhi they want to see, but Sonia above all is a pragmatic politician. And she is the one who has appointed Manmohan Singh and allowed him to function as he does. For now, she may have put together an outstanding NAC, but over the long run she has created a precedent that is unfortunate. 

When leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru were debating the Constitution of India, they may never have envisaged that a Satish Sharma could become a member of the Rajya Sabha. But even so, they had imposed certain constraints; a Satish Sharma in the Rajya Sabha is much less of a problem than a Satish Sharma in the NAC. The day, though, is not far when other politicians will decide they need their own version of Satish Sharma on the NAC, and then the good a Dreze or two would have done will seem insignificant.

Aruna RoyNational Advisory Council