T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Coalitions and competence

LINE & LENGTH

Now it's not just power without accountability. It is also without ministerial competence

As the UPA smirks shyly at having been in office for a year, the glass seems half empty or half full, depending. There is simply no way of judging whether it has done a good job or not, unless you consider mere survival as a job well done.

Reason: there is no significant yardstick to judge it by.

This is because when alibis abound, it becomes very difficult to judge performance. And the more plausible the alibi, the harder it is to judge. An escape clause is always available.

Not that the UPA government is unique in this respect. All governments since 1996 have shared this feature. They have been able to hide behind the excuse of coalition compulsions even when such compulsions did not exist and the only thing that prevented them from doing their job was incompetence, especially ministerial incompetence.

What is truly amazing is that never before have governments had it so good and never before have times been so propitious to get on with things. This is because before 1996 all governments had to cope with severe economic problems, some of which turned into full blown crises.

For 40 years between 1955 and 1995, there was never a five-year period that was not crisis-laden. You can take any five-year stretch and you will find this to be true.

Government in those days was more about coping than about managing. You only have to read the memoirs of the civil servants from those days to see what occupied their attentions and energies.

There were three major problems of huge political consequence""inflation, food shortages and foreign exchange shortages. One or the other of these would always pop by to say hello. They are all gone now.

So if these three major politico-economic problems have vanished, how come governments are so ineffective now? Our scholar Prime Minister should tell us. He has seen that then, and he is seeing this now.

Those who have been in government in the nine years since 1996 deny this. We were not ineffective, they say, pointing to a whole lot of small things they did. They genuinely regard these as major progress.

But only very few of these things can be regarded as being genuinely significant"" the decision to go nuclear, for example, was one. The decision by Mr Chidambaram to cut tax rates was another. I can't think of anything else that matches these. Perhaps someone will fill the gaps in my knowledge.

Much of the rest has been routine stuff not requiring much energy or imagination. Yet, governments have struggled to get even those small things done.

What is also striking is that thanks to the media (especially TV) even the most mundane things have been elevated to the status of major events. One consequence of this is that those who govern now think that even ordering the cleaning of the offices is a major achievement.

Why has getting small things done become so difficult that when they do get done, they are regarded as major achievements? Political scientists put it down to the much more fierce competition for what they call political space.

Governments have to fight so hard these days to retain their political space, they say, that they are left with no time or energy to attend to what they are paid for, namely, manage the routine. And as anyone even remotely familiar with good management will tell you, it is managing the routine effectively that distinguishes good governance from bad.

One major problem now, I think, is that ministers are no longer able to distinguish between the administrative and policy aspects of their jobs. They like to focus on the latter and completely neglect the former.

The problem with this approach""of the minister taking on what the secretary in the ministry would have done in the old days""is that it wrecks the routine. Officials have to drop everything else they would otherwise be doing and focus on the minister's fancy for the week.

A few weeks ago I asked a very senior NDA minister as to what he thought was happening in (and to) government since 1996. He told me, and gave three reasons for it.

One was that around 85 to 90 per cent of the ministers in all five governments since 1996""not counting the 13-day wonder of the BJP""had been useless. They were ministers because they were powerful in their little regional parties.

But having never held office, not even in municipal ones in many cases, they were worse than even the lower division clerks in the ministry over which they presided.

He gave a few examples as well, which I shall keep to myself. But broadly he said what used to happen at the state level has been happening at the Centre since 1997.

It wasn't just a question of power without responsibility. It was also power without competence.

The second reason he said was that often the Cabinet itself did not push for new policies. More often than not, it was left to the minister to come up with something if he felt up to it. Most preferred to do nothing""because they genuinely didn't know what to do""and focus instead on administrative issues.

Third, he said, the reason why the Cabinet did not push for new policies was that in a coalition it quickly developed into an elite club consisting of leaders from different parties.

These chaps arrived at a private arrangement about what benefit each could take out. He said political crisis occurred when the Prime Minister was obliged to favour his own party over some coalition partner.

This, he said, had the strangest consequences. Even in the old days, the Prime Minister would have to choose between one colleague and another. But now he had to choose between parties because the fellows who didn't get what they wanted went off and formed their own parties.

Result: there were parliamentary parties with just one MP as full-fledged members of the coalition!

As we try to understand what the UPA government has been doing or not doing since last May, I think it would be useful to keep in view the competence factor. I don't think corruption is any longer the central issue of governance. I think competence is""witness the number of ministers who have managed to get caught with their hands in the till.

Why, the fellows are not good even at making money.