Since 1947, India has been a crisis in search of a solution
It is easy to remember good government, even if we tend to take it for granted when we get it. It works. Rotten governance is more complicated, for its consequences are more evident than its causes. Should inflation be considered an obvious manifestation of political mismanagement? A major reason for today’s street rage is certainly the fact that food inflation has averaged over 12 per cent during the second UPA term, and that prices have risen more than 18 per cent since the food insecurity bill.
But inflation is only the small pox scar on the face of the body politic. The true illness of UPA2 is impotence. It did nothing, apart from making a few pious statements, not through the principal actors in charge of India’s economy but through acolytes who hyperventilated at the prospect of a sound-bite. A government that reduces food on the tin plate of the poor is irresponsible. Why should the voter care for a government that does not care for the voter?
The original sin of bad government is arrogance, with complacency as a silent partner. The ministers of UPA2 began to believe that because they had got away with a lot, they could get away with anything. There is a visible and vocal sense of crisis in the present environment. The anger is not just about economic decline, inflation unchecked and corruption rampant, which affects everyone; but also about aspiration denied, which is why the young are in the demographic vanguard of opposition to the establishment. But this is not the first crisis that India has faced; and while its intensity can hardly be denied, it might be the most easily remedied.
Since 1947, India has been a crisis in search of a solution. But here is the astonishing thing. India rises to its most resilient when challenged by its biggest dangers. Despair serves as an invitation to good government. The first challenge, massive hunger and recurrent famine, was inherited from the British Raj. In the 1950s and 1960s, we brought such deprivation under control and laid the basis of a new economy through the framework for industrial and then agricultural production. The second was entirely self-inflicted. Between military defeat in 1962, and the two wars with Pakistan, we suffered the trauma of a security crisis. By 1971, India had shamed its skeptics within and critics abroad.
The Seventies witnessed economic collapse so severe that the political consequence was abrogation of democracy and freedom. In the 1980s came existential doubts, with secessionist insurrections rising in the northwest and the northeast, fomented by large-scale terrorism. More than two decades later India’s unity is intact, and its economy strengthened by delivery and potential. In 1991 Congress abandoned its shibboleths, particularly socialism, and set us on a road that promised prosperity.
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‘Wise sages tell us to learn from our mistakes. Politics, that clever art, suggests a brilliant variation: learn from the mistakes of your predecessor.’
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Wise sages tell us to learn from our mistakes. Politics, that clever art, suggests a brilliant variation: learn from the mistakes of your predecessor. As long as the next government, born from the 2014 general elections, understands why UPA2 lost its popularity, the country will be comparatively safe and possibly healthy.
Bad governance is primarily the sacrifice of national interest for partisan gain. This can operate as straight corruption, as in the spectrum fire-sale. Or it can maim policy, as in the Prime Minister’s decision to miss the Commonwealth conference in Colombo because present or potential partners of the Congress in Tamil Nadu used political blackmail. A national government cannot abandon what is right and hope to retain its credibility.
The structure of government does not change, whether it is brilliant or awful. A prime minister presides. A cabinet sits in attendance. But government collapses when common purpose is lost, when every minister becomes his own master and the prime minister turns into a helpless spectator. Government degenerates into a circus without a programme; acrobats become indistinguishable from clowns. The next prime minister must be able to exercise something more vital than the tenuous authority of an office no one takes seriously. UPA2 has had a resigned air without anyone actually having resigned.
The third dimension of change has to be executive. Governments often seek an alibi in legislative delay. But most of the problems of the last five years have risen from the inability to complete the process of a file that converts intention into reality. When UPA passed the laws considered necessary to bring foreign direct investment into retail, it was advertised as the seed of economic regeneration. What happened? Nothing. Government might want to forget this episode. The voter does not have any vested interest in amnesia.
India is on an evolving, not a stagnant, journey. It can absorb a limp on the road, but it will not be crippled. And the most effective medicine is always, but always, a curative general election.
The writer is a leading Indian journalist and author. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Sunday Guardian. He has also served as Editorial Director of India Today.