T N Ninan: Settling in

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The parliamentary system of government is really a prime ministerial system-as anyone looking at how Tony Blair in Britain has centralized all power, must have realized long ago.

Here, though Manmohan Singh started out tentatively, even shakily, it is now clear to any visitor who meets him that he is coming into his own.

There is a quiet new confidence, a certain ease with which he talks of statecraft, and the knowledge that he has done well on the international stage""not to speak of the wisdom (which he must have picked up from that master-procrastinator, PV Narasimha Rao) that not all problems can be tacked simultaneously, and that some can and should be left for another day.

Manmohan Singh can never centralize power a la Blair, because of many factors: his own nature, a party president who can pull the plug (though not without some damage to her own reputation), and his dependence on difficult coalition partners, not to speak of cabinet colleagues who would like to recognize only Sonia Gandhi as boss.

But that is not to say that he cannot be an effective prime minister. And the signs are that Dr Singh is beginning to flesh out the role quite nicely.

Readers will recall that on the day Ms Gandhi said that Dr Singh would be her nominee as prime minister, he told eager TV crew that his government would "show the world" what was possible by way of good administration.

That buoyant confidence disappeared by the time the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) was hammered out; indeed, Dr Singh looked almost ill when he presented this to yet more camera crew as the operating mantra for his government, and it was clear that he didn't like all that he was presenting.

So when it came to preparing the President's opening speech to the new Parliament, he put in a few sentences on his own that signaled the need for caution and moderation, if not actual backtracking. Since then, it has been a tussle between what he would ideally like to do in terms of "showing the world", and the constraints imposed by the CMP (which the Left now uses to insist on its own agenda).

But the fact that the BJP has finally been put on the back foot helps, because you can't fight on all fronts, and so Dr Singh now has more elbow room than he was allowed during the contentious monsoon session.

As for taking control of the government, the signs are that the Prime Minister is trying to rein in his cabinet colleagues and get them to focus on delivering measurable results. Various missives have been going out to them, not just on how and when to make policy utterances in public but also on what procedure to follow and approvals to get before presenting any proposal to the cabinet.

The full-scale ministerial meeting that has now been called to discuss programmes and targets is only the latest in this exercise. It also takes an optimist to suggest to Laloo Prasad Yadav that he should think in terms of giving the country a railway system that compares with the best in the world. Mr Yadav may not be impressed by such visions of what is possible, and by all accounts acts as though he is his own master, but even he will not be immune to the message coming his way.

While Dr Singh gains in confidence, it is not yet clear that success will crown his efforts. His government is playing with too many bad ideas (job reservation in the private sector, job guarantee programmes that could easily become mass-scale boondoggles, fudging the fiscal deficit in order to use accumulated dollars), and however much he may insist that he will move with caution, some of those bad ideas are going to become policy and law.

Also, Dr Singh is clearly hoping to parley with the Communists: give them the odd bone and ask for a bone in return. Along the lines of: "I'll spend on your favourite programme if you allow me to increase FDI limits." If it works, well and good. If it doesn't, he has more thinking to do. But at least he now seems on top of his job, and is no longer the shaky prime minister of three months ago.