Commentary/Dilip Thakore

The Congress can still lead India out of the socialist wilderness and into the 21st century

Mind you my self-esteem took a bit of a battering in the nation's eleventh general election. For the first time since I began my professional career in the mid-sixties, my forecast of a general election result went awry. Though like most monitors of the nation's political and economic temperature I too had expected a hung Parliament, I had predicted that the P V Narasimha Rao (left)-led Congress would scrape through as the party with the largest representation in the Lok Sabha.

My calculation was that when push comes to shove in the decisive solitude of the polling booth, the electorate would opt for the devil they knew (Congress) than the other devils they didn't know as well. Moreover I presumed that the Rao government's relative success in managing the economy and setting it upon the growth path had registered with the electorate and would give it the decisive edge. Quite obviously both presumptions proved erroneous.

Looking back, how did the Congress party, and former prime minister Narasimha Rao in particular, squander the working majority they had in the tenth Lok Sabha despite a broadly sympathetic press, golden opinions from the international financial community and a proven record of good economic management? Though a detailed post-mortem is the job of a historian, with another general election round the corner, media analysis is likely to prove instructive to politicians of all shades and hues and to media pundits as well.

A detailed post-mortem is likely to prove that Narasimha Rao's age and his lack of charisma were important contributory factors to the rout of the Congress in the eleventh general election. Though there is some merit in the argument that after the ultra high profile Nehru-Gandhi dynasty Narasimha Rao's unspectacular nose-to-the-grindstone style of leadership was a refreshing change, Rao's inability to enthuse the electorate or to highlight a campaign issue (except the old hat issue of stability) kept voters away from the polling booths even in prime middle class constituencies on election day. This was evidenced by poor voter turnout in numerous urban middle class constituencies (such as South Bombay) which house people who benefited most from the Rao government's economic reforms.

If Rao insists on leading the Congress party campaign into the next general election as he seems all set to do, the least he can do is to hire some good speech writers (in the style of American presidential candidates) and take professional help in sprucing up his image while learning how to use a teleprompter.

As electoral battles in all democratic nations become more presidential in this age of satellite television, a modicum of style, if not razmatazz, is a vital prerequisite of electoral success.

The second major reason why the Congress floundered under Rao's leadership is that it under-estimated the extent of public indignation on the issue of corruption in government and public life. Though Opposition politicians as also quite a few media pundits characterised the Rao government as the most corrupt in the history of post-Independence India, neither the prime minister nor the Congress party seriously challenged this damaging indictment.

Narasimha Rao seems to have taken to heart the late Indira Gandhi's famous comment that corruption is a universal phenomenon and its unspoken corollary that if graft in public life is inevitable, one might as well practise it.

Well, that's where he made a big mistake. He should have known better given his long innings in Indian politics. The vast majority within the nation's population consists of unwilling participants in the vicious circle of which characterises contemporary Indian society. Merely because the citizenry is press-ganged onto the corruption treadmill by venal bureaucrats and employees of public sector monopolies, it doesn't mean that it condones it.

Indeed, the great majority of the Indian people abhor corruption in public life even as they are obliged to indulge in it, and come election day voters tend to be unsparing in their rejection of tainted politicians. Indira Gandhi learned this lesson the hard way in 1977 and her son Rajiv in 1989 when they were turned out of office on the corruption issue.

Nor was it just the luck of the draw that a whole host of politicians including the reportedly invulnerable Tamil Nadu chief minister, Jayalalitha Jayaram (right), and former deputy prime minister Devi Lal notorious for their lack of probity bit the dust in the 1996 Lok Sabha and state assembly elections. The Indian electorate is slow to anger. But when it is confronted with overwhelming evidence of graft in public office, its wrath is unsparing.

Surrounded by hands-in-the-till courtiers and sycophants throughout his five year term (1991 to 1996), Narasimha Rao failed to learn this patently obvious lesson from India's electoral history.

But though the nation's eleventh general election resulted in the nation being landed with a hung Parliament and a United Front government whose style of governance seems to be patterned upon the fire brigade, there was much in the electoral verdict to be enthused about.

The most satisfying electoral verdict was delivered in Tamil Nadu where the sleaze queen with imperial delusions, where the AIADMK had enjoyed an unprecedented majority in the state legislative assembly, was comprehensively routed and Jayalalitha was herself unseated. Likewise in Bihar, Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, a dangerous caste-obsessed simpleton who harbours prime ministerial ambitions, suffered a setback with the BJP-Samata alliance winning over 30 of Bihar's 54 Lok Sabha seats.

The election also cut several other unsavoury demagogues down to size. In Uttar Pradesh the SJP led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, another simpleton who God help us, has surfaced as the nation's defence minister in the United Front government fared much worse than he and his supporters expected; and arch casteist Kanshi Ram (right) who heads the BSP suffered a humiliating defeat as did former deputy prime minister Devi Lal. And down south, the elephantine K P Unnikrishnan who hounded technocrat Sam Pitroda out of public life and set the nation's telecom industry back by at least a decade, bit the dust.

Unfortunately, Narasimha Rao's maladroit leadership and the nationwide anti-Congress sweep resulted in some able parliamentarians and responsive MPs being swept away. Among them: Mani Shankar Aiyar, Salman Khursheed and Murli Deora. These gents brought knowledge, competence and diligence into their jobs as representatives of their constituencies and the eleventh Lok Sabha will be poorer without their contributions. Another name I would dearly wished to have seen among the winners was Sharad Joshi, leader of the Swatantra Bharat party and perhaps the most articulate free market politician in the country with a massive rural following.

These and the much-wronged Ramakrishna Hegde are the kind of people the Congress needs to absorb and project as its frontline candidates in the run-up to the next general election round the the corner. The country and the electorate wants contemporary, well-educated and can-do politicians to lead them into the twenty-first century. It is foolish to believe that the ignorant village poor will continue to want one of them to represent them in Parliament. The United Front government experience is likely to serve the useful purpose of exposing the limitations of backwoodsmen as national leaders.

Despite its disappointing track record in governance in the post-Nehruvian period, the Congress is the only pan-Indian political party which has the reach and the value premises to govern India. The major disability of the Congress for over four decades has been its socialist baggage. But the valuable contribution of the Narasimha Rao administration has been that it has jettisoned most of this debilitating baggage and completed the groundwork for the emergence of a national consensus in favour of privatisation and private enterprise.

Minus its socialist heritage the Congress is the only party capable of realising the pent-up energies of the country's talented entrepreneurial class and of uniting the nation. It needs to waste no time in getting its act together. The absurd shenanigans of the new backwoodsmen in New Delhi, if not divine Providence, have given another chance to India's natural party of governance to lead the nation out of the socialist wilderness and into the twenty-first century.

Dilip Thakore is the founder-editor of Business India and Business World and former eidtor of Debonair.