TRIUMPHS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN
Alot happened this week. China announced a new direction at its Third Plenum. Japan took another step forward in its move towards Abenomics. Sworn enemies USA and Iran worked towards an understanding on nuclear proliferation. What were India’s premier politicians doing? Rahul Gandhi was calling the BJP a party of thieves and Narendra Modi was calling the Congress a khooni panja. Charming words for men expected to run the world’s largest democracy. But there is one thing that Rahul has accused Modi of that he could definitely use; the art of marketing. Modi not only found new ways of ensuring better governance— whether it is innovations in solar energy or in scrapping the bureaucratic transfer industry—but also found ingenious ways of communicating these to an initially reluctant audience. His transformation from ordinary pracharak to a darling of industry and icon of governance is one of the greatest triumphs of the last decade. It is not merely marketing, but hey when did effective communications ever hurt anyone in public office?
Consider this. When even the fiercest critics of this Government look back on its ten years, they will find three transformative ideas that could have altered the discourse of governance if there had been some singularity of purpose: Greater transparency, greater accountability and the rise of civic participation. Greater transparency, almost entirely the handiwork of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, could have been portrayed as UPA’s greatest triumph. It was supposed to be the bureaucracy’s ticket to freedom from wrongful control. By putting everything potentially in the public domain, the RTI Act stripped governance of the cloak of secrecy, and therefore the possibility of cover-up. But those it was meant to empower became its worst critics. In a coalition gov- ernment, the masters multiplied. In the absence of a strong PMO, ministers decided their own secretaries, the more amenable, the better. Transparency went out the door. Collusion became the order of the day.
Greater accountability was another possible achievement which the UPA allowed to get away. Minister after minister castigated the Comptroller and Auditor General for its wrongful estimation of loss to the public exchequer instead of owning up to it and saying it was in the larger public good. Instead of making an example of a coalition party minister for his wrong implementation of policy, it quickly distanced itself from the policy altogether, strangling the telecom sector. As governance was paralysed, courts stepped into the vacuum, and demanded supervised accountabililty.
The UPA’s biggest triumph could have been the recognition of people power. Having returned to power largely on the basis of its urban vote (it won 103 of the 197 urban/semiurban constituencies in 2009), it should have embraced the anti-corruption movement. Instead of trying to discredit the anti-corruption activists of 2011, it tried to first browbeat them and then to stall them. An independent CBI under the original Lokpal Bill would perhaps, in retrospect, have been as aggressive as it is now, whether on Coalgate or the reopened Radia tapes case. By 2012, it recognised the power of public anger and reacted with an anti-rape law in time, but its increasingly cynical manipulation of the woman votebank, whether in announcing budgetary schemes or in targeting political rivals, shows how even this can be subverted.
Instead of a season of big ideas and bigger ideals, let’s brace ourselves for a long cold winter of discontent where every abuse will be met with invective, and every alleged misdeed be matched with an even blacker stain.
WHEN EVEN THE FIERCEST CRITICS OF THE GOVERNMENT LOOK BACK ON ITS TEN YEARS, THEY WILL FIND THREE TRANSFORMATIVE IDEAS THAT COULD HAVE ALTERED THE DISCOURSE OF GOVERNANCE: GREATER TRANSPARENCY, GREATER ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE RISE OF CIVIC PARTICIPATION.