Tough allies make for a fragile coalition

On former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's death anniversary, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Shastri was a person who could not accept a slur on his integrity, however slight, and gave up the railway ministership following an accident that wasn't remotely his responsibility, observers thought this was a signal to Lalu Prasad to follow suit.

For obvious reasons, Prasad ignored the hint "" he could afford to, with 24 MPs under his belt.

It became clear at that moment that it was not resources, it was not winning acceptability in the Congress party, but management of the UPA coalition that has been the biggest challenge before the PM for the last one year and will continue to dog him for another four.

The prime minister is working under three kinds of coalition pressures: ideological, represented by the Left which has cast subtlety aside and as CPI(M) MP Mohammad Salim pointed out at the annual meeting of CII, is conscious that the government is in power only so long as the Left continues to support it.

The second is the compulsion of staying in power which means the lowest common denominator of keeping the government afloat has to be very low.

Some ministers, like the Telengana Rashtra Samiti's K Chandrashekhar Rao, are aware that they cannot be sacked no matter what they do or don't do, leaving the PM with nothing more than moral authority to use as a whip.

The third is the Congress party ministers themselves for whom undermining the PM matter little if their politics is at stake.

It is not that the government is completely hostage to the Left. FDI caps in telecom have been raised and airports have been privatised.

But the impression that the pace of economic reform is slow, halting and painful is lost on no one.

For many investors, the pace confirms their worst fears. In one year, therefore, the PM has been less than successful in image management.

Repeated obstructions of Parliament by the Opposition reinforces the impression that from the 1980s slogan of the Congress being a government that works, it has now become a government that works when it feels like it.

The time it took to remove Jharkhand Mukti Morcha's (JMM) Shibu Soren from his post was the starkest reminder of the helplessness of leading a coalition.

Soren resisted resigning till the very end and it took all manner of threats to secure the crucial letter, with hours left for the Supreme Court mandated time limit for a trial of strength to lapse.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi candidly admitted that Jharkhand represented a series of mistakes, but the damage it did to the image and authority of the PM was the worst.

Ministers from his own party defer to the prime minister but it is the world's worst kept secret that it was his party that defeated Manmohan Singh when he contested the Lok Sabha elections for the first and only time in 1999 from South Delhi.