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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

UPA Govt Squanders ’09 Goodwill

Last Thursday, India witnessed two starkly contrasting leadership styles: When three IPL players were arrested for alleged spot-fixing, Rahul Dravid stepped forward to say that as captain he would not countenance deviant behaviour. "I have to focus on ensuring that the team fulfils its enormous potential and continues to play in the Rajasthan Royals way," Dravid said at a press conference. On the same evening, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh convened a meeting to fill a vacant seat in the National Human Rights Commission. Opposition leaders Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, on the panel of selectors, vetoed the government's nominee, Cyriac Joseph, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, on the grounds of a mediocre career record. The government overruled the objections and circulated the minutes of the meeting among participants. Swaraj, before putting her dissent note, noticed that the minutes did not contain the name of Cyriac Joseph. "Prime Minister, you have signed on a blank paper," Swaraj told Singh, according to a person privy to the details. Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde quickly took the paper back from Swaraj, put Joseph's name and then passed it on to the prime minister. If Dravid's public appearance sent out a clear signal that he would not allow crooks to flourish under him, Singh's handling of the NHRC issue showed that he was willing to be led by his colleagues. Singh, who enters his tenth year in office on Wednesday, has emerged as a practitioner of 'Leading from behind', a concept popularised by Nelson Mandela nearly two decades ago and emulated by Barack Obama in recent years. If Mandela wanted a leader to be "a shepherd, letting the most nimble go out ahead not realising that they are being directed from behind", Obama has been using it to give his foreign policy greater flexibility in foreign locales. But Singh has made it the defining feature of his prime ministership in an apparent bid to avert the possibility of the buck reaching anywhere near his desk. The ship ran into choppy waters in the early part of the second term, with the CAG detecting a scandal in the allocation of air waves that led to the incarceration of a minister and spelt serious setback to one of India's biggest success stories in recent years, the telecom sector. Another CAG report found similar lack of transparency in the coal field allocations. Troubles compounded for the government after CBI, investigating cases of corruption in the allocations, admitted that the government tried to "change the heart of the status report on the probe". This forced Singh's nominee Ashwani Kumar out of the government. The court's hearing in the case may bring yet more troubles as the CBI chief has told the court that the Prime Minister's Office, too, had vetted the status report. The impression that not all of Singh's Cabinet colleagues were above board was reinforced when CBI unravelled the cash-for-jobs scandal in the railway ministry. Although the PM reluctantly showed the door to Pawan Kumar Bansal, CBI is undertaking an investigation to find out whether the then minister, too, was on the take. The government's flat-footed handling of such crises has revived a comatosed Opposition and led to stalling of Parliament, where hardly any business could be transacted during the second half of the budget session. As a result, Congress plans to get Parliament's nod for its vote catcher schemes — food guarantee and hefty compensation for land acquisitions — are in jeopardy. Finance Minister P Chidambaram's initiatives for financial sector reforms will also have to wait. The track record on foreign policy has been equally dismal, with beheading of Indian soldiers by their Pakistani counterparts and renewed aggression by China taking a toll on the national morale. "In the nine years that Singh has been prime minister, China's policy toward India has gone from being quietly negative to being openly adversarial," said strategic expert Brahma Chellaney, "It has been in this period that China reversed its claim to Arunachal Pradesh and shortened the length of the border with India to dispute Indian sovereignty over western and eastern sectors." Amid the series of debacles on multiple fronts, the timing has never seemed quite right to elevate the seemingly reluctant Congress scion Rahul Gandhi to prime ministership. But lately, scepticism has grown within the party over the Congress president holding political power and Singh handling the government. So much so that the party had to issue a clarification that Gandhi and Singh were on the same page over the recent sacking of the two ministers. As he begins his last year in office, Singh appears to have squandered much of the goodwill that he commanded when he began his second term.

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