Quote:At last India has decided to settle some of its dues with history with Bangladesh, by agreeing in principle to cede control over some 17,000 acres of territory as part of a larger, comprehensive agreement, in which the remaining tiny part of the 4,096 km-long boundary will be demarcated, while several pockets of adverse possessions and enclaves claimed by both sides are likely to be settled on an “as-is-where-is” basis.

Quote:A year of UPA : Corporate over Cabinet

[url="http://www.dailypioneer.com/256387/A-year-of-UPA--Corporate-over-Cabinet.html"] link[/url]

Sidharth Mishra

This Sunday the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government completed one year of its second term in the office. In its second term, the Manmohan Singh-led Government has maintained a distinctively different profile from its first avatar and rightly so the present Government has come to be christened as UPA II. The obvious difference between the two UPA Governments is the support of the Left front.



With a solid block of Communist MPs supporting the Congress-led UPA I Government, Manmohan Singh did never face any challenge to his authority. He used the first four years of his term to consolidate his position and thereafter marshaled the nuclear deal with the United States of America, in the process dumping the Left but also ensuring divorce between the Marxists and their socialist comrades of the Samajwadi Party.



The Left had never made a more miserable bargain. It suffered the ignominy of supporting for full four years a Government which successfully piloted a nuclear deal with the United States of America. All the while Communist leadership patted itself for having decided who should be the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the President of India, it realised little that whilst losing small battles to them the Congress leadership was preparing for the bigger battle of Kurukshetra — getting the nuclear passed through Parliament. To the Left’s dismay — Somnath Chatterjee, their face in Parliament for decades, was to turn Trojan horse and facilitate, as the Speaker, the passage of the bill.



This had repercussions in their electoral fortunes too, losing in their stronghold States of Kerala and West Bengal to the Congress-led alliance during the Lok Sabha polls in the summer of 2009. The Left’s loss proved to be Congress’ gain. The party came back to power with more number of seats, not needing either the Left or its deserter allies like Samajwadi Party or RJD’s support.



This should have led to better governance by the Congress-led coalition but the year has been in news for Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s blabber, former Minister Shashi Tharoor’s twitter and DMK squatter on the issue of the sacking of Communications Minister A Raja. This has largely been due to the corporatisation of the Government.



With the leadership of the Government resting outside the cabinet structure, the collective responsibility of the Cabinet has got overtaken by the core leadership of the party and by extension the coalition collegium. For the students of Public Administration, UPA II Government makes a unique case study of a Government having de jure responsibility towards Parliament but de facto accountability to the party leadership.



The present arrangement marks a big departure from the structure which the Congress leadership had till the turn of the last century. Between 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power after the Janata deluge, and 1996, when PV Narasimha Rao bowed out as Prime Minister, the leadership of the Government and the party was merged in one person. It would have remained that way had then President APJ Abdul Kalam in 2004 not shown the reluctance in swearing in Congress president Sonia Gandhi as the Prime Minister.



It was first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who started to contest the hegemony of the party over Government. In September 1951 after a protracted struggle, Prime Minister Nehru replaced PD Tandon as the Congress president. Tandon was dubbed as conservative, who could not keep pace with a progressive Nehru. Nehru, however, did not hold onto the Congress presidency forever but considerably devalued the office of the Congress president vis-à-vis that of the Prime Minister. In 1956 he handed over Congress presidency to UN Dhebar, a leader acceptable to all factions, to be only replaced by Indira Gandhi in 1959.



Indira Gandhi did away with the façade of the autonomy of the party after she returned to power in 1980. After becoming Prime Minister in 1966 she was faced with the attempt made by the party heavyweights, identified as the Syndicate, to dictate terms on the Government. Her resistance led to the split of the Congress in 1969. Even after this split she preferred another leader as president of the faction of the Congress led by her.



However, after ouster from power in 1977 and the second split in the Congress in 1978, Indira Gandhi not only became the president of the faction led by her but also named this faction as Congress(I). This assimilation of the leadership of the party and the Government was followed by her son Rajiv Gandhi and also PV Narasimha Rao.



Today the situation stands totally reversed as it is also unique. The repository of power in whose name the ruling party contests elections heads the party but such circumstances has prevailed that she cannot take the charge of the Government. However her accountability to the voter cannot allow Sonia Gandhi but to maintain a tight leash over the Government.



However, the mechanism of the party’s control over the Government has undergone a metamorphosis as Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi did away with the traditional structures like the Congress Parliamentary Board. Today the Congress decides the policies for the Government through an informal core committee which has at times come to be referred as coterie. More importantly, this coterie decides only for the Congress component in the government and not the allies.



The allies, on the other hand, behave like the 26 per cent stakeholder in a corporate rather than be integral part of the Cabinet. The DMK’s petulant insistence of having Communications Minister A Raja on board despite serious charges of abuse of his Ministerial responsibility goes against the very grain of the collective responsibility of the Cabinet.



How would the Congress core group restore the Ministerial responsibility and the dignity of collective responsibility of the Cabinet is the biggest challenge before the UPA II. Hopefully Manmohan Singh and the Congress leadership are hearing.

Quote:OPED | Friday, May 21, 2010 | Email | Print |





Sonia takes charge of policy



Kalyani Shankar



With UPA completing the first year of its second term in office, real authority has clearly shifted away from the Prime Minister to the Congress president



In May 2005, one year after he took over, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave himself six out of 10 marks for his Government’s performance. How would he rate his second innings? How does the country rate his one year in office? Before judging the UPA 2.0’s performance, one has to bear in mind the circumstances under which the Congress came to power in 2004 and 2009. The UPA 1.0 was formed when the Congress was weak. It was Congress president Sonia Gandhi who took the initiative for building up a coalition. When the time came to occupy the throne, she declined to become the Prime Minister, choosing Mr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister.



The Sonia-Singh duo shared power and worked in tandem during the UPA 1.0 but the remote control was in Ms Gandhi’s hands. It was the Congress president who managed the allies and kept the coalition going even after the Left parties parted ways. While everyone expected her son Rahul Gandhi to take over after 2009 elections, both mother and son pitched for Mr Singh once again.



The composition of the UPA 2.0 is slightly different from the UPA 1.0. It was minus Left parties and plus Trinamool Congress. The NC also joined the coalition. The DMK continued while the JMM was out. One important thing was that the Congress performed better crossing the 200 mark.



It may be too soon to judge the performance of the UPA 2.0 as its mandate is for five years but, by and large, it has not done badly. Credit should be given for getting the Women’s Reservation Bill passed in Rajya Sabha as also the Right to Education Bill. Introduction of the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill also needs mention. The Food Security Bill is the next important pro-poor legislation. Some measures for economic reforms have been taken up. The handling of Maoists is a serious concern. On the economic front, price rise and inflation are two serious problems and the Government is not very successful in containing them.



The perception is that the Prime Minister is not in command over his Cabinet colleagues or in checking corruption. Cohesiveness is lacking in the Cabinet with Ministers speaking in different voices on various issues. There is a kind of drifting away from the pro-poor programmes.



The Congress has to improve its relationship with allies. The stability with which the UPA 2.0 came to power has eroded somewhat with the Government struggling to mobilise the numbers to pass the Bills. There is no trust between the Congress and its allies — the NCP, the Trinamool, and the DMK. The allies complain they are not consulted. Strangely enough, a common minimum programme, which was the bible of the UPA 1.0, does not exist now.



There is a perceptible change in the Congress-Government relationship with the party asserting itself over the Government. The UPA 2.0 Cabinet bore the stamp of 10 Janpath. This was evident in the case of Mr Shashi Tharoor, Mr Jairam Ramesh and Mr A Raja.



The Congress president has also asserted herself on certain issues. The party is concerned that the Government was not doing enough on pro-poor programmes. It distanced itself from the India-Pakistan joint statement at Sharm el-Sheikh. On the Women’s Reservation Bill, it was evident that it was Ms Gandhi who overruled the Prime Minister and got it passed in Rajya Sabha. While the Prime Minister is in favour of diluting the Right to Information Act, it is Ms Gandhi who is not in favour of any amendments. Mr Singh is cautious about the Food Security Bill, which will cost about Rs 40,000 crore but Ms Gandhi is very keen to bring it. Even the caste Census bears the stamp of Ms Gandhi while the Government is reluctant. Above all, the revival of the National Advisory Council which functions as a super-body under the chairmanship of Ms Gandhi shows that she wants to run the party and the Government from the front and not through remote control any more.

Quote:Hiranmay Karlekar



The report card on the United Progressive Alliance’s performance in the first year of its second term in office need not be faulted on its self-congratulatory tone. All Governments or parties supporting them pat themselves on the back while presenting such documents. What leaves one with a profound feeling of disquiet is its failure to link its performance with any vision of the kind of India it stands for. It is important to mention this because in the absence of the statement of such a vision, the targets chosen and the success in achieving them become mechanical and bureaucratic exercises where success is measured in essentially statistical terms. Implementation lacks the kind of zeal that informs it when it is seen as a part of mission to transform society, which, in turn, requires a defining ideology.



There is, for example, the Gandhian vision of polity and society based on the concept of gram swaraj (village autonomy), an ethical public and personal life resting on a strong commitment to truth and non-violence, recognition of the dignity of physical labour and the virtues of simplicity and austerity. Marxism views ideas as super-structures of economic relations. Its ideological locus is the materialistic interpretation of history which is perceived as unfolding through the dialectic of class struggle leading to a proletarian revolution, paving the way to a final withering away of the state and the establishment of a classless society where alienated labour is a thing of the past.



The essence of the Humanist weltanschauung is encapsulated in Protagorus’ classic aphorism, “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagorus belonged to a period when gender equality and justice did not feature as a principal concern of political and societal discourse. A contemporary re-iteration of his encapsulation would be, “Humankind is the measure of all things.” Be that as it may, the central point of the humanist message is that freedom is the basic urge of human beings and rationality, the defining attribute of the species, enables it to be moral and the maker of destiny.



The three, besides political Islam, and their variants and derivatives —Maoism in the case of Marxism and Radical Humanism and Integral Humanism in the case of Humanism — have shaped political debates, with varying degrees of impact since the end of World War II. It is important to distinguish between philosophies/ideologies and agendas. The latter are the means of achieving the goals set by the former and, hence, have an instrumental role. Most of the non-Congress constituents of the UPA2 have not been terribly vocal about their ideologies. Their forays in this area have at best been desultory and platitudinous. So, unfortunately, have been the Congress’s as well. One can understand this in the case of the allies. Their emergence has more to do with the dynamics of regional politics and individual and collective rivalries than differences over first principles.



One expected things to be different with the Congress, an heir to the political legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately, the expectation has been increasingly belied over the past several decades. One may, of course, be told here of the Congress’s commitment to socialism (still?), secularism and democracy and the UPA2’s common programme. The latter is essentially the alliance’s agenda and does not fall into the domain of philosophy. Socialism, Secularism and Democracy have become shibboleths through ritualistic reiteration and lack of sustained debate at the level of the party as to their content.



It is important to emphasise this. Each of these concepts is not only capable of a multiplicity of interpretations but is also instrumental in nature. There is, for example, Guild Socialism, Syndicalism and various hues of social democracy. Each of these brands, again, is vulnerable to misappropriation. Thus, Mussolini’s concept of a fascist polity was based on liberal borrowals from the ideas of the Frenchman George Sorel, the best-known proponent of Syndicalism, who conceived of a state structure based on federations of collectivised trade unions. Adolf Hitler thought nothing of calling his ravings National Socialism!



Similarly, there are many perceptions of secularism which most people believe stands for the separation of politics and religion. Though this concerns a very important dimension of secularism, it reflects a mechanical and legalistic approach which leaves the door open to a wide range of diverse interpretation of such issues as societal approach to religious minorities and minority-related affirmative action. Nor does such a definition address the issue of tolerance which can well be the subject of several debates.



Democracy too is a multi-dimensional concept comprising aspects such as constitutional forms, political systems, majority rule, minority rights, equality, access to opportunities and so on. Governments considered to be democracies emphasise these in their functioning in varying measures. Besides, Governments which are not democracies camouflage their authoritarianism by affixing to their names labels that mislead. Thus Field Marshal Ayub Khan had his Basic Democracy, and President Soekarno of Indonesia his Guided Democracy.



The instrumental character of the three concepts becomes clear on recognising that they are not ends in themselves. Democracy is a political arrangement that derives its justification in terms of maximising the freedom available to individuals in a society. Secularism derives its rationale from the need to protect discourse and governance from religious domination, secure freedom of faith and worship from sectarian restrictions, and ensure freedom from strife among religious communities. The various hues of socialism have stood for freedom from economic and social exploitation, and the freedom of the exploited and disprivileged to access economic power, which alone can lend content to the egalitarian dimension of democracy.



It is a reflection on our times that most political parties, in India and abroad, do not engage with ideological issues with the required seriousness. The reasons partly relate to the manifest decline in the quality of leadership, particularly the intellectual inadequacies of most politicians. Partly, they stem from the fact that politics is increasingly the business not of people keen to reform or remake society but to milk the system to make personal fortunes.



Whatever it is, the result is a failure to focus on the ends of power and question the basic premises of the pattern of development thrust on the country. One may have to pay a very heavy price on both counts.