Tetchy issues

The Left is demoralised, atrophied into inaction, waiting to be ousted from West Bengal in the Assembly elections scheduled for April 2011 after having ruled the state continuously for as long as 33 years. The Bharatiya Janata Party, under Nitin Gadkari, is yet to get its act together as the principal Opposition force in the country. Under the circumstances, one would have presumed that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) would be sitting pretty. On the contrary, the ruling coalition is repeatedly being buffeted by internal implosions. Just over a year after the second UPA government was voted to power with a stronger mandate than before, it paradoxically appears to be at war with itself.
On April 14, a newspaper article by Digvijay Singh, an important general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee and a close confidant of both Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, surprised many by the sheer vituperation in the tenor of his attack on home minister P. Chidambaram. He wrote: “I have known P. Chidambaram since 1985 when we both were elected to Parliament. He is extremely intelligent, articulate, committed and a sincere politician — but extremely rigid once he makes up his mind. I have been a victim of his intellectual arrogance many times, but we are still good friends. In this case, I have differed with his (counter-Maoist) strategy that does not take into consideration the people living in the affected area who ultimately matter. He is treating it purely as a law and order problem without taking into consideration the issues that affect the tribals…”
It is true that the Prime Minister and the Congress president rejected the home minister’s offer to resign after 76 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were brutally killed by Maoists in the jungles of Dantewada district of Chhattisgrah bordering Andhra Pradesh on April 6. But few expected that the antipathy towards Mr Chidambaram would be articulated in the way it was. If the Prime Minister is backing his home minister to the hilt, Mrs Gandhi is simultaneously seen as someone who is no longer playing a passive political role. Witness, for instance, the way in which she helped push the Women’s Reservation Bill through the Rajya Sabha on March 9 and how she revived the National Advisory Council.
Despite her astute political management, the government headed by Dr Manmohan Singh appears to be floundering in curbing food inflation, which is eroding the real incomes of the proverbial aam aadmi with each passing day. Until recently, official spokespersons were claiming that inflation was about to subside — that is, till the Prime Minister acknowledged during his May 24 press conference that inflation will not come down to the five-six per cent level before December. While Dr Singh has blamed everybody and everything else for inflation (drought, international economic crisis etc.), the fact remains that the government’s decision to hike diesel and petrol prices has not helped to bring down prices.
Food and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar thought he had got away bungling sugar exports and imports by blaming the government as a whole — of which he is only a part — till the Indian Premier League (IPL) scam broke out. His protestations that he and his family had nothing to with the bids that were placed for IPL teams seem to have backfired on him.
There have been many other points of tension in the UPA-2 government. Minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor had to quit his position after it became known that his companion had been offered generous sweat equity by an IPL franchisee, while minister of state for environment Jairam Ramesh embarrassed the government by his comments in Beijing on the alleged sensitivity of the home ministry to imports of Chinese telecommunications equipment. He had earlier locked horns with road transport and highways minister Kamal Nath on environmental clearances, disagreed with two of his colleagues — Mr Pawar and minister of state for science and technology Prithviraj Chavan — on the issue of introducing genetically-modified brinjal in the country and sarcastically criticised human resources development minister Kapil Sibal for his efforts to attract foreign universities into the country.
Fertilisers minister M.K. Alagiri of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam opposed aspects of the government’s attempts to move towards a nutrient-based fertiliser subsidy regime — that is, when he was in New Delhi. Government functionaries have been speaking in myriad voices on the bill to reserve seats for women in the Lok Sabha and in state Legislative Assemblies as well as on whether caste-based enumeration should take place during the ongoing Census.
As if all these were not enough, the Prime Minister has rather reluctantly had to keep company with Andimuthu Raja, minister for communications and information technology, who has presided over a massive scam relating to undervaluation of electro-magnetic spectrum, a scarce national resource that is used by mobile phone operators. The resounding success of the public auction of third-generation (3G) spectrum has, curiously, exposed the opaque and faulty manner in which the department of telecommunications sold telecom licences in January 2008 with second generation (2G) spectrum at one-tenth their market values that, according to the latest estimates, led to a total loss to the exchequer of — hold it! — Rs 1,90,000 crores. This amount is nearly five times higher than what the government will be spending this financial year on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, often described as the world’s largest social security programme.
The kind of open dissension and public airing of differences in the incumbent regime has not been seen in years, if not decades. To blame it all on the compulsions of coalition politics would be to run away from reality — which is that the government is incoherent although there is no apparent threat to its stability for the next four years.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator