Aditi Phadnis: Polite politics doesn't pay

PLAIN POLITICS

Those whom the Gods want to destroy, they first send to India as inexperienced Chief Ministers.

Consider Bhupinder Singh Hooda. In the six months that he's been CM of Haryana, he's had to handle one trade-union riot, one caste riot and is preparing himself for an uprising by farmers on the issue of power, now that neighbouring Punjab has announced free electricity for agriculture. Hooda is the total antithesis of the stereotype Haryana CM. He is soft-spoken, pleasant and decent.

There are, as yet, no charges of corruption against him. But as chief minister, he's done precisely nothing. It is hard for Haryanavis to recall a more well-spoken but more ineffectual chief minister. The Centre may chafe at limitations coalition politics imposes.

Haryana has no such problems. The Congress has a brute majority: 67 members in the 91-member Assembly. Given its numbers, if the party had wanted to, it could have passed legislation requiring all the sheep in Haryana to wear lipstick. Unfortunately, the government's radicalism has stopped at concessions to farmers who lost their crop because of hail, and abolishing registration fees for tractors.

Among its major achievements, the Hooda government says with pride, is setting up a committee to modernise cooperative sugar mills (since when did a committee ever solve a problem?), cancelling power dues amounting to Rs 1,600 crore among rural domestic consumers, and (where other states are privatising state-owned transport corporations to make them more efficient) increasing the annual outlay of the transport department from Rs 56 crore to Rs 76 crore.

So why is the chief minister unable to think out of the box? Could you, if you'd never held any ministership either at the Centre or the state and were suddenly made CM? When Harayana Assembly elections yielded such a rich haul for the Congress, it was widely believed that Birender Singh or even Bhajan Lal would become CM. Hooda's name came up because he controlled no faction and was, therefore, uncontroversial.

It is no crime to learn on the job. And state governments are either run by strong chief ministers or strong bureaucrats. Anyone else would have conceded his inexperience and given key jobs to bureaucrats with a proven record of successful administration. In Haryana, over the years, the role of the chief secretary has yielded primacy to principal secretary to the chief minister.

This is the person who runs the government. Hooda selected for this key appointment, a former class fellow with a reputation for testiness on the job. The next administrative tier "" the CM's cell "" is manned by four people, among them one, who came with a strong recommendation from a party colleague of the CM's. In other words, the CM's secretariat has been hand picked from among the CM's friends rather than a pool of brilliant administrators.

The joke in Chandigarh is that the self-assurance of these men is such that their conduct with petitioners and constituents costs Hooda 10,000 votes every day. Dissidence is setting in fast. Officers are angry at the way they are spoken to. Legislators are angry because they can't reach the CM.

Hooda evokes no respect among his other senior colleagues whom he pipped to the post. Bhajan Lal's son Chander Mohan, who was appointed deputy chief minister as part of the formula to get Bhajan Lal to stand down from the contest for chief ministership, is not reputed to have a rocket scientist's abilities.

Others are less than circumspect in showing disrespect to the CM's orders. Last week, the chief minister's office ordered the transfer of an officer in a fellow minister's department. The letter was torn up by the minister before the eyes of bemused officials.

What is really worrying is that the link between the highest and lowest "" the chief minister's office and the district commissioner (DC)/district magistrate "" has been broken. Bansi Lal is counted among the most successful CMs in Haryana because at least once every day, every DC would get a call from him on a line equipped with a scrambler, asking for a situation report.

In the trade union clash in Gurgaon, the chief minister stood nobly by the DC and asked him to go on leave a good 48 hours after the incident. But neither the labour commissioner, nor the DC nor the SP warned him in advance. Similarly, in Gohana, Dalits began leaving the village days before the actual clash between the Jats and the Dalits.

Why didn't anyone tell Hooda? Intelligence Bureau sources say in a state where news travels fast and caste passions are easy to rouse, another disaster is waiting to happen. There has been another incident in Panchkula because this government came to power on the strength of the non-Jat vote and these communities are now asserting themselves.

Hooda's son has been nominated for the Rohtak parliamentary constituency. This is consistent with the tradition of the Congress. This constituency has 33 per cent Jats and 22 per cent Dalits. His son Deependra Hooda will certainly win. But the margin cannot be predicted. And will the Congress woo the Jats or the non-Jats ?

Hooda needs to stop being a gentleman and become a chief minister. In six months, the stock of the Congress government has plummeted. Give it another six months and there will be no goodwill left for the party at all.