Nitin Desai: Leadership for change

The PM must leverage the respect he has earned to persuade voters to embrace change.

A few days ago a Hindu-CNN-IBN survey came out with results that must have surprised many in the Delhi dinner circuit and in the media. The survey showed a remarkable increase in support for the Congress party and clear approval for the leadership duo of Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh. In fact the numbers projected suggest that in a snap election the UPA could win an absolute majority and not need any Left party support.

Many commentators had started talking about a government which has lost its way, unable to pursue its economic reform agenda, hostage to its allies, and prone to populist measures like OBC reservations and the new Pay Commission. There were some who felt that Dr Manmohan Singh was not showing the leadership expected of a Prime Minister. They will soon tell us why the survey is wrong!

Assuming however that the survey is accurate, the country at large does not seem to share these sentiments. The popularity of Manmohan Singh has shot up in the past few months, according to the survey. This may be because of his patent decency and probity, qualities that are truly scarce in our political class. But there is more to this difference between elite perceptions and public sentiment.

The despondency of the chattering classes was due largely to the perceived stalling of reforms like public sector divestment, labour law changes, further openings for FDI and other elements of the LPG (Liberalisation, Privatisation, Globalisation) agenda. This has stalled with perhaps some implications for the next Plan that Yojana Bhavan is preparing.

The fact is that ordinary voters do not care too much for the LPG agenda. They seem to judge performance in terms of the delivery of public services and the incidence of corruption. But has anything happened to improve matters here?

The RTI Act is a major change in the transparency of governance and is fast attracting the attention of ordinary citizens. It would be a grave mistake if the government, which brought in this change, now attracted public criticism for diluting the Act and surrenders a major political asset to the Opposition. On service delivery we have Bharat Nirman, Shiksha Abhiyan and similar schemes. But there is no reason for supposing that they will be any better than earlier efforts.

Most of the public services that affect daily life are delivered by State governments and the voters' ire is directed at them rather than at the Centre. Sheila Dikshit takes the blame for Delhi's power woes and Vilasrao Deshmukh for the various crises in Mumbai. Manmohan Singh stays off the hook. Efforts to pass the buck to the Centre by complaining about inadequate help do not seem to weigh much with the voters.

This shows up in the CNN-IBN survey rankings of Chief Ministers. New CMs like Nitish Kumar, who hold out the prospect of improved governance, or Navin Patnaik and Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, who have opened new opportunities for economic development in their States, lead the popularity stakes. The ones at the bottom like H D Kumaraswamy or Mulayam Singh Yadav or Arjun Munda are suffering the consequences of poor administration and their regimes the taint of corruption.

The Central government cannot hide behind State governments in all areas. In agriculture for instance, where people have known better times, the dissatisfaction will be directed at the Centre, which is blamed for the core problems of inadequate investment and unremunerative prices.

There are other economic issues like price rise and employment which voters' care for and where the Centre is implicated in the public mind. The record on inflation is quite reasonable but voter tolerance is low. Some 49 per cent think the situation has worsened and more will share this sentiment if the combination of rising petroleum prices and large increases in bank credit leads to a price spiral.

With regard to employment, nothing much has changed except perhaps the NREG scheme in a few districts. But the situation is no worse than it always has been and somewhat better for the English-educated middle class. Even though 45 per cent think the situation has worsened, the government does not get blamed for something which has always been a problem and is treated as part of the natural order like droughts and floods.

Voters do not judge a government solely on bread and butter issues. Their sense of security matters. This has worsened with the spread of Naxalism and home-grown terrorism. This shows up clearly in the survey results. Foreign policy has little impact on voters except perhaps for relations with neighbours.

Dr Manmohan Singh touched on all of these points in his Independence Day address. The one point he did not cover, except very elliptically, is the roadblock to economic reform.

These reforms cannot be handled solely by market-friendly ministers who go down well in Davos. The example of the railways shows that a more earthy political leadership can make a huge difference. A technocrat in Rail Bhavan would still be struggling to change the tea-shop contracts while a through and through politician has worked wonders with railway finances, pushed through a major reform in freight movement and brought in some real improvements for travellers.

Hence the Congress leadership needs to stake its prestige and build a political case for economic reforms. This cannot be done with India-China comparisons, a favourite of the media and Delhi policy wonks. In fact during the Mumbai floods there were derisive remarks about Vilasrao Deshmukh's stated goal of making Mumbai another Shanghai. Nor can the case be made on grounds of dire necessity, as in 1992.

The case for reform has to be made in terms of what voters care for, which is better service delivery and less corruption. It must involve transparency and public consultation beyond the call of duty. It also means some sense of priority in pursuing the different elements of the agenda. For instance, is it worth risking political capital for a 10 per cent divestment in a public enterprise?

Dr Manmohan Singh has earned the voters' respect. He must now leverage this respect to do what Pandit Nehru did, which is to get people to embrace the changes that they should be asking for.