Rajiv Gandhi had enjoyed a bigger majority. Yet the shakers and movers found him so vulnerable that he had to take the issue of power brokers right up to the plenary session, the party’s largest forum. Now that the Congress is commemorating its 125th year this week, it is the right time for Sonia Gandhi for an honest introspection. The slain leader’s stern warning sounds so prophetic. It looks directly aimed at the managers of the present government. A look at his speech will show how he had foreseen the swarms of brokers deciding who should be the ministers and what portfolios they should get.

Things have reached such a pass that the Supreme Court had to pass remarks against A. Raja for disregarding the PM’s directives. This happened while the PM himself had no complaint against his ministers flouting him. This is some thing unthinkable even under a Deve Gowda or I.K. Gujral who were supposed to be weak PMs. A saving grace has been that no one directly blames the Congress establishment for the current mess. This has been due to the party’s conscientious efforts to delink itself from the functioning of its government. At times, the party had behaved as an outsider arbiter. It had used this unusual tool, i.e. the right to criticize its own government, to prevent deviations to the extreme. Among them are interventions after the Shrm-al-Sheikh adventurism and forcing the party’s welfare programmes on PM.

The Radia tapes and a slew of corruption charges against the UPA government show the malady is much more deep. Old kind of shock treatments have become ineffective. Consider the utter helplessness by which the ruling coalition watching as the hydra spreads fast to the entire government system. A drastic restructuring of the government system alone can save the UPA from the imminent disaster. The ongoing war of nerves on JPC and counter-allegations of corruption against the BJP may at the most provide a temporary respite.

True, a commemorative jamboree with cheering mobs may not be the right platform to take hard decisions. Yet the party chief can send the right message to the nation about her determination to set the whole system right even if it meant a total structural and conceptual shake-up. This has been the sentiment among a section of the party leaders who had dispersed after the end of the ill-fated Parliament session last week. Normally, Congress men take extreme care not deviate from the official line. But this time the MPs seemed really perturbed.

They have now to explain two stigmas: a corruption-ridden government and the growing public perception that the crucial government decisions as taken not by the PM or party establishment but corporate and foreign lobbies. Every order by the Supreme Court, every raid by the CBI and revelation of every taped conversation points to this truth. Sadly for the party men who have to deal with the people on the ground, the government’s efforts so far have been only to hush up the truth or belittle the consequences. This kind of rebuttal, they fear, only heightens mistrust in government.

The UPA government suffers from twin debilities – a heavy doctrinaire baggage being carried by its reform camp and absence of prompt oversight of the ministries. Every action or inaction by the ministries is evaluated not by their performance but how reform-friendly they were. You give a liberalization tint to any move, they are endorsed without check. Favour seekers and policy twisters put this high-level obsession to maximum use to get instant PMO approval. Radia tapes frequently talk of how to ‘wrap’ a cause in terms of GDP growth and liberalization. Even the 2G swindlers had done so. Mani Shankar Iyar was a suspect and should be watched. But Kamal Nath is a reform man and he could never do wrong. Even though a person like N.K. Singh says ‘Nath could get his 15 per cent in highways’ and Radia approves.

The second is lack of coordination and supervision. The present PMO is perhaps the largest if one includes the advisory panels and the largely academic ‘missions’ under old loyalists. But in practice much of it is wasted on procedural niceties. Hence the field remains wide open for the influence peddlers to act through their doctrinaire friends and trusted officials. This was what had happened in the case of the 2G approval. Did the PM know about Raja’s action on 2G? If yes, at what stage? Was any attempt made to prevent it?

Answers to these queries, irrespective of their nature, will reveal inherent debilities of the present oversight system of the UPA government. When UPA returned to power in May, 2009, the power brokers and media had strived hard to attribute the success to the nuclear deal and as endorsement of PM’s bold policy initiatives. This had a purpose. Such a depiction could camouflage the real reason: Sonia Gandhi’s welfare schemes. This could have enabled the lobbies and fixers to safely move behind the shadows of an honest PM.

When the Left quit the UPA, PM might have felt ‘liberated’. But soon he had inadvertently got trapped in the shady world of fixer-broker network. The Left had stopped many such moves. They did raised 2G scam which was then beginning to shape up but nuclear deal had overshadowed it. Lobbies had begun flourishing only after the red watchdog left. For over a year, there was no eagle eye on the government until the Sonia establishment stepped in in a limited way. This was the time when the lobbies had taken over full charge of the blocs and bhawans of Delhi.

Denial of JPC and counterattack on BJP corruption are only short-sighted remedies for a besieged government. After the commemorative session, Sonia Gandhi’s first priority should be to restructure her government. The present government has caught itself in a Japanese syndrome where business-induced corruption and power fixing had ruined successive governments. More ovear, we have reached a stage when personal integrity of the party chief and PM alone cannot bring votes. First thing the party must do is to probe the role of those ministers and leaders figure in the tapes. One can only wait and watch how the Sonia establishment cleans up the mess at the government level. (IPA Service)