The inner voice speaks

On May 18, Sonia Gandhi paid heed to her "inner voice" and declined to become prime minister and, instead, appointed Dr Manmohan Singh to the job. Many people still thought that real power vested with her.

Soon, however, Manmohan Singh was saying things that did not quite jell with the UPA's populist Common Minimum Programme. So the National Advisory Council (NAC), which has Sonia Gandhi as its chairperson, and which was set up to perform a bridging function between the government and the coalition partners "" read the Left ""began to send in its suggestions""a sort of inner voice to the Prime Minister.

Considering that these are signed by Sonia Gandhi, they have become like the messages Ayatollah Khomeini used to send to his prime ministers, or the ones Lee Kuan Yew, the Senior Minister in Singapore sends to his "" mandatory.

Since August 16, the NAC has sent in five such suggestions. These pertain to the law on the right to information, the employment guarantee scheme, rural roads, the education cess and public sector disinvestment.

The letters can be found on the NAC website and even a quick look at them shows how dangerously they have expanded on even some of the improbable promises of the CMP.

What the CMP had promised was itself not very do-able, what is being demanded now is altogether off the screen in some cases. Had these "suggestions" come from the NGOs that inspire them or the Left directly, Manmohan Singh might simply have written "pls. see" on the file, and they would have been passed down to some longsuffering under secretary. But not when the signature is Sonia Gandhi's.

The NAC may be a necessary device to accommodate the preferences of the NGO's and the Left. But, as the leader of the Congress party, it falls to Sonia Gandhi to hold them in check and prevent them from harrying the government.

That she has not, given her belief that the economic reform programme has not helped the poor, is not surprising. This suggests that she is not particularly au fait with the discipline that sound economic sense imposes.

That is a learning gap that she needs to quickly bridge. Second and more importantly, it suggests that she has not been able to go beyond the political economy of the 1970s. That failed India then; it will fail us now.