On Thursday, the minister for industry and commerce took his proposal on a new manufacturing policy to Cabinet. Some of his ministerial colleagues objected to its contents, so the already-delayed draft policy will be in limbo for a while longer. Earlier, the sports minister took to Cabinet his proposals on sports administration, only for half a dozen ministers to shoot it down; the sports minister will now figure out how he should revise his proposals. In between, the Trinamool Congress representative in Cabinet voiced his opposition to the proposed Teesta settlement, but was reportedly silenced by a sharp snap from Pranab Mukherjee; the eventual result was public embarrassment for the prime minister, as Mamata Banerjee got into the act at the eleventh hour.
This is not how governments are supposed to work. You don’t normally take issues to Cabinet until the ministries concerned have signed on. The mechanism for doing that is usually a committee of secretaries, chaired by the cabinet secretary, and off-line meetings between ministers. The odd minister who has no direct interest in a matter might still raise his voice in the Cabinet (like Lalu Prasad torpedoing a proposal on forward trading in commodities with the dark warning that traders wanted to fix December prices in June!), but that would be a rare occurrence. In the ordinary course, the cabinet secretary oversees a process of discussion until agreement is reached, and then a Cabinet note is moved.
Sometimes, the job of banging heads together devolves on the principal secretary to the prime minister — Brijesh Mishra in the Vajpayee government, and A N Varma in the one led by P V Narasimha Rao. One of the weaknesses of the Manmohan Singh government is that there is no one who has been able to perform this role effectively. In part this may be because coalition partners don’t play ball and there is nothing that the secretariat can do to get around this. Still, Mr Vajpayee too ran a coalition government, and Mr Rao a minority government, so the problems of running a coalition are not insurmountable. The additional complication for the Singh government has been that often opposition has come from Congress ministers, as was the case with the manufacturing policy. Should one blame dual control?
One result of the various roadblocks has been that most issues get bounced off to a group of ministers (GoM). But most GoMs are chaired by one of just two or three senior and trusted ministers, but principally Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. How clogged the process has become as a result of this concentration of responsibility became clear recently when Mr Mukherjee reeled off the dates when a GoM on telecom, which he chaired, had met: each meeting was separated from the previous one by many months, sometimes a whole year. How anyone can keep a thread of thought running through such spread-out meetings is one question; the bigger one is what happens to the urgency of government decision-making if GoMs are unable to complete their work for years on end.
Talk to any official in the PM’s office and you will be told that the prime minister (who will be 79 later this month) works very hard — certainly harder than either Mr Vajpayee or Mr Rao did. Yet the Singh government is continuously blamed for inaction and policy paralysis. The explanation for the paradox could be that the prime minister is not served well by his secretariat, and he has little, if any, control over his Cabinet colleagues, while the Opposition frequently blocks Bills in the Rajya Sabha. The result is what a witty bureaucrat is once said to have written on file: “Our indecision is final”.
