Now get going

After the drama of Sonia Gandhi stepping aside and proposing Manmohan Singh as prime minister, the knotty task of putting together a coalition government has proved to be drawn out and messy.

Fortunately, the disputes over portfolio allocations are now over, and hopefully the new ministers have stopped venting their frustrations and jealousies in public. The squabbling has not been a pretty sight, nor has the presence in the ministerial council of people with charge-sheets.

In the age of saturation media coverage and instant punditry, not to speak of nervous stock markets, the government has lost some credibility but (one hopes) not goodwill.

Assuming that the initial tremors are at an end, Dr Singh should impose some restraint on his ministerial colleagues so that they function from now on with the discipline that comes with being part of a government.

If the Left has conducted itself with such restraint after the initial grandstanding 10-12 days ago, then the new ministers should be able to do the same. What no one wants is a repeat of the endless squabbling and jockeying that marred the Morarji Desai government of 1977-79 and the V P Singh government of 1989-90, and which eventually brought them both down.

Moving forward, the action will shift to the drafting of the common minimum programme (CMP). Once again, this is likely to be an exercise in getting people who start from extreme positions, to come closer to the centre.

The end product will hopefully demonstrate enough common ground to make the government's continuance meaningful. If this gets sorted out in the next 48 hours, as has been promised, then the initial hiccups can be said to be over and the real business of governance can begin.

The first 100 days of a government give a window of opportunity for decisive action. Dr Singh used the opportunity brilliantly as finance minister in 1991. He and his colleagues need to do something similar now, to make people forget the messy start and give the new government momentum.

Meanwhile, the first round of pronouncements by the various ministers should not be taken as indicators of their considered approach, since none of them has had time to get a proper briefing from their officials.

However, the initial sound bytes suggest that some things are not going to change. There seems to be a broad preference for reforming the public sector as an alternative to privatisation; the faith in such reform is touching, given the blotchy experience of the past; in most cases, it was a case of pouring good money after bad.

Equally, there is a touching faith in what new "policy" can achieve "" as in tourism, which has seen no dearth of policy pronouncements over the years, with little changing on the ground. Mr Chidambaram has struck the right tone, as has Mr Vaghela in textiles.

But Laloo Prasad Yadav is making a fundamental mistake if he turns his back on paying passengers and de-emphasises the profitable freight operations of the railways.

His promise that the trains will run on time in a corruption-free regime, strains credulity. But that is the price of coalition politics.