UPA Achievements

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A year of UPA : Corporate over Cabinet

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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.