Downsizing Manmohan

As the National Advisory Council resurfaces, the PM finds his policy formulation space suddenly cramped.

There is a moment that comes at one point or the other in the career of every politician, when events start taking a course of their own, even as he appears to retain a semblance of control. It then does not matter what he says or does. Such a moment seems to have arrived for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—he is being cut down to size.

Indications that all is not well for him abound. They point towards the beginning of a downturn for Manmohan Singh, whose popularity level within his party, the Congress, had reached a pinnacle only last summer, when he together with Congress President Sonia Gandhi had so convincingly thwarted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s comeback bid and left India’s communist and regional parties in disarray.

The revival of the National Advisory Council (NAC) on 28 March—ten months after the UPA II Government took office—is just one of the most glaring reflections of a changed power equation at the top. In its previous avatar in 2004, when the Manmohan Singh Government first came into being, the mandate of the Council headed by Sonia Gandhi was crystal clear: to oversee the implementation of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP), which formed the basis of the Left’s external support to the coalition. Since the CMP was the point of convergence on the governance agenda, an external body to monitor its implementation only seemed logical.

This time round, however, there is neither a CMP nor any compulsion to please the Left. And yet, the NAC is back, once again under Sonia Gandhi’s chairpersonship, but without any mandate laid down for it. “It is no secret what the Congress wants to hear from the Prime Minister,” says a Congress Working Committee (CWC) member, by way of rationale, “Since not much is being done by the Government in that direction, there has been the need for the Congress President to become less discreet while making interventions in the governance space.”

The objective, clearly, is to hold Manmohan Singh to account on an agenda of the party’s making, cramping him if need be. And there are several issues on which the PM has sought to expand his sphere of influence. One of them is the draft Food Security Bill cleared by the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) on 19 March, nine days before the NAC was revived. It provided for merely 25 kg of cereals at Rs 3 per kg to below-poverty-line (BPL) families, as against a far more radical proposal calling for 35 kg of cereals along with pulses and edible oil, not only to BPL families but to all who’re poor and destitute, as sought by Sonia Gandhi in a letter to the PM on 12 June 2009. The other is the Government’s move to amend the Right to Information Act, one of the earlier NAC’s big achievements, despite Sonia’s objections. Sources say that the PM wants to keep notings and discussions on policy decisions, apart from the Chief Justice of India’s functioning, out of the Act’s purview.

The Congress, it is said, has felt slighted by the Government’s attitude towards the party High Command’s suggestions. And just days after the NAC’s revival, the PM’s authority has suffered an erosion; Sonia’s reservations on Food Security have already forced the Government to revisit the proposed legislation, and the EGoM held a meeting on 5 April to accommodate her ideas.

The NAC’s voice is expected to grow louder. So far, Sonia Gandhi has been reasonably successful in her separation of the party and Government. But party insiders feel that Manmohan Singh and his mainly bureaucratic colleagues cannot count on their independence for much longer.

Congress watchers also sense the PM’s weakening clout in the difficulty being faced by Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, considered his blue-eyed boy, in getting re-elected to the Rajya Sabha. Even if Sharma, whose term ended on 2 April, ultimately gets a ticket to the upper house, the very fact that a minister so close to the PM was made to sweat so profusely speaks of the worsening state of affairs for Manmohan Singh.

If momentum is what counts in politics, the last few weeks have been the worst ever period for the PM. Two initiatives considered close to his heart have failed to move at all. And the party, instead of coming to his rescue, appears reluctant on both. The PM’s bid to have bureaucrats consolidate their grip over the affairs of various ministries, by letting babus evaluate ministerial performance, was thrown out of gear by vocal resistance from Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ambika Soni, Kamal Nath and Jairam Ramesh, among others, about a month ago. Such was the indignation of these ministers that the Prime Minister’s Office had to clarify that the proposed Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System (PMES) was not intended for bureaucrats to rate ministers. Not only did Sonia Gandhi leave the PM to quell the mutiny all by himself, even the Big Four who were to escape such scrutiny—Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Home Minister P Chidambaram, Defence Minister AK Antony and External Affairs Minister SM Krishna—looked away unbothered. Sources say the revised PMES guidelines give ministers a major say in the process, restricting the evaluation to only a few schemes of the ministries.

Perhaps a bigger embarrassment for the PM has been his failure to get the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, 2010, through Parliament. Here too, the party has dragged its feet in coming to his aid. The opposition alleges that the Bill is dictated by US interests, but Congress leaders are yet to defend the Bill with any seriousness. Left in the lurch by his party, the PM has taken it upon himself to lobby for the Bill with BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Yashwant Sinha.

National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, on his part, has been trying hard to allay apprehensions within the Congress and BJP on the Bill. But a hot potato is a hot potato. Pranab Mukherjee is understood to have gently reminded the PM that the very idea of limiting the accident liability of foreign nuclear suppliers could send signals that the UPA Government has a ‘pro-US tilt’, which could be a political liability in itself. Worse still, this news was leaked to the press, making things even more awkward for the PM.

Congress insiders say Manmohan Singh’s crisis stems from his government’s diplomatic setbacks vis-à-vis the US, the country for which he is seen to have staked all. With the Obama Administration now bending over backwards to accommodate Islamabad’s demands for more financial and military help, even the pro-US lobby in the party is beginning to have a rethink. The Congress is also livid with Washington for its tepid response to Indian requests for interrogative access to David Headley, who confessed his role in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks to US authorities.

Now, America’s unhelpful-to-grudgingly-helpful attitude has tarnished the UPA’s image and increased the PM’s political vulnerability. Such is the gap between Manmohan Singh and the party, say insiders, that while the former is still insistent on getting the Nuclear Liability Bill passed, the latter has started contemplating life without such a one-sided friendship with the US.

Over the last few months, a subtle though significant change has taken place at the Congress’ top echelon. All through, the relationship between Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh has been marked by mutual respect and trust. This, in fact, has been the PM’s main source of strength. But this equation, according to sources, has been strained lately. Meanwhile, Sonia is observed to be warming visibly towards Pranab Mukherjee, showing him every courtesy, someone she was once thought to be wary of. Many believe that it is Mukherjee’s advantage over Singh on matters of political instinct and electoral strategy, that is working in his favour, especially now that Sonia Gandhi has set her sights on the next Lok Sabha election, for which Rahul Gandhi could well be the ruling party’s prime ministerial candidate.

It is no surprise, then, that the Sonia-Manmohan relationship is no longer the party’s focal point. In fact, the Sonia-Pranab understanding seems to be emerging as the Centre’s new power axis, around which events in the corridors of power revolve and which gives them cohesion.

The shift does not augur well for Manmohan Singh. For it threatens not his job, but vision as India’s PM. Economic liberalisation and US-leaning foreign and strategic policies have been integral to his vision as a reformer. In contrast, Pranab Mukherjee’s approach to governance rarely ever strays from its Nehruvian social democrat moorings. The moment the latter approach becomes the UPA II’s guiding force, India’s head of government will survive merely in name.

That this has already started happening—menacingly for Manmohan Singh—became clear from the way Sonia Gandhi relied on Pranab Mukherjee to get the Women’s Reservation Bill through the Rajya Sabha. Sources say that after the first day’s fiasco in the House on 8 March, Sonia cracked her whip late that evening, and it was resolved that it would pass the very next day under Mukherjee’s supervision. Armed with the Congress President’s diktat, the Finance Minister, duly assisted by Chidambaram, first replaced the Government’s floor managers Pawan Kumar Bansal and Prithviraj Chavan, and then outmanoeuvred the Opposition and allies to propel Sonia’s ‘gift to women’ on 9 March. The Lok Sabha is next, and once again, Mukherjee has started playing the key role.

Then, there are other signs of the way the Congress is going, such as the selection of Mani Shankar Aiyar as one of the President’s five nominees to the Rajya Sabha. Known for his left-leaning views, he is among the staunchest critics of Manmohan Singh’s US-oriented foreign policy. There is talk in Congress circles of Aiyar’s landing a role in the new NAC.

What all this signifies in practice, no one dares spell out in public. But most leaks and hints suggest that it is aimed at wresting the leadership initiative from the PM so that space is created for the Congress High Command to ease Rahul Gandhi’s way to the top. Its pace, however, must not exceed the 39-year-old’s comfort. All the same, the endgame in palace politics has begun.

Manmohan SinghpolicypoliticsSonia Gandhi