The sources of 'weakness'

The head of any organisation, if he is to be effective, should have the freedom to pick his team. That freedom is rarely if ever absolute; usually there are several constraints that operate""in companies, more so in politics, and much more so when it is the head of a coalition government. Manmohan Singh's handicap is that he has virtually no elbow room when it comes to picking his team. The Congress party's coalition partners in the United Progressive Alliance pick their own nominees for ministerial positions, and can function virtually free of any control""as the health minister has just shown. Or, Dayanidhi Maran can be communications minister even though that ministry takes decisions that have a bearing on his brother's cable and television business""but the Prime Minister cannot change his portfolio, let alone replace him with someone else from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Shibu Soren can be accused of murder""rightly or wrongly is not the question""but he too thinks that he has an inalienable right to be in the council of ministers on the strength of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha being a member of the UPA.

To some degree these can be explained away as the inevitable price to be paid by a coalition government, but Dr Singh has an additional handicap, which is that he has no leeway when it comes to picking ministerial colleagues from his own Congress party. Whatever choices he makes have to be endorsed by the party president, because of the unique circumstances in which Dr Singh has become Prime Minister. There is virtually no parallel for this in a full-fledged democracy: he is not a member of the Lok Sabha, has no popular mandate, and is not a vote-getter. He is there because Sonia Gandhi thinks he is a better man for the job than the options available to her. And it is clear that when it comes to ministerial appointments, he will not (and perhaps cannot move) in a manner or direction that she might disapprove.

It is not difficult for most Congressmen to realise where the real power lies. And as in most organisations, it is the informal power structures that begin to operate before long. And since politics is a game of power without any real rules, it inevitably leads to a situation where ministers feel they can cock a snook at the Prime Minister in Cabinet meetings, others can take him on in party forums, and those speaking in the name of the party start criticising their own government. More seriously, individual ministers start announcing major policy initiatives without the Prime Minister's consent, and while Dr Singh can complain all he wants about this, there is nothing he can do. His (and his predecessors') favourite device for reining in wayward ministers has been to appoint a group of ministers to go into any contentious issue, usually with a trusted man like Pranab Mukherjee or P Chidambaram to chair it and control things. But when announcements are made to the public before they are taken to the Cabinet, even the GoM is not a device that can save the situation.

There is only one way to correct this situation: the Prime Minister must have the right to hire and fire his ministerial colleagues. It must be presumed that he will act responsibly, and not like the queen of hearts in Alice in Wonderland, who kept shouting "Off with his/her head!" For instance, some candidates pick themselves because of caste and regional considerations, and others for their ability. Also, Dr Singh is not someone who will completely disregard his party president's views on individuals. But even within a complex matrix, the mere knowledge that the Prime Minister can drop from the council of ministers should be enough to keep most people in line and honouring the discipline of a cabinet system of government. If the Manmohan Singh government is to function more effectively and cohesively than it has up to now, Dr Singh and Ms Gandhi will have to consciously demonstrate that when it comes to choosing or dropping ministers, the Prime Minister has the last word. If this is not done, Dr Singh will have to live with the general impression that has been created, that he is a weak Prime Minister.

That deals with one problem at the heart of the UPA government. The other involves a core contradiction: the Prime Minister and finance minister are both liberalisers, whereas the Congress under Ms Gandhi's ideological and political leadership fought in 2004 on an election platform that questioned the results of the 1991 reform programme ("it didn't help the poor") and its political impact ("it didn't win votes"), and was therefore tinged with the populist approaches of the pre-reform era. The central premise has been that more government spending on programmes that are aimed at the poor will both reduce poverty and win votes.

And so the Common Minimum Programme agreed on by the UPA with its communist supporters was in its broad thrust a document that veered off at a tangent from the direction set by the reforms of 1991: no privatisation of profitable public enterprises, no move towards flexible labour markets, protection for rather than reform of agriculture, and more government spending in a host of areas. And the truth of the matter has been that the Congress party, its allies and its communist supporters were and are more comfortable with these positions than with the pro-market reforms of 1991.

Manmohan Singh was therefore given a programme mandate for his government that was fundamentally at variance with his own convictions. He has therefore kept his counsel, and tried to push along what he believes in while holding back or curtailing what he does not""an extension, really, of the "reform by stealth" approach that met with a fair degree of success 15 years ago. It is no secret that Dr Singh, Mr Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, tried their level best to narrow the scope of, and delay, the national rural employment guarantee programme""convinced (as the programme's critics have been) that there would be shortcomings when it came to implementation, leakages and at some stage even scandal. They failed. Undeterred, they have tried to take privatisation and disinvestment beyond the limits imposed by the CMP and been beaten back. Nor have they been able to make any progress on labour policy""though the reform triumvirate keeps talking about it. As for attracting more foreign investment, each small step towards opening up has been a huge battle.

The image of a "weak" Prime Minister therefore forms for many reasons: the sense that he is not really the boss of his team, the reform expectations that many had placed in the "dream team" and Dr Singh's inability to push ahead with his own preferred agenda, his matching inability to stall programmes that the party wants but which he himself has no real faith in, and his failure to bring about the administrative reforms which would tackle the obvious failures of governance that stymie government programmes. These are not knots that can be untied easily. But the Prime Minister and UPA chairperson will have to try, if they want to put up a better show in the coming weeks and months.