It is this policy of keeping them in good humour which has now blown up in the Congress’s face. Even the incarcerations of Kanimozhi and Andimuthu Raja have made no difference to its plummeting reputation. Next to the Congress president, the blame for the party’s and government’s ethical and governance deficits is the prime minister’s. By the time he said that “our government is dead serious in bringing to book the wrongdoers regardless of their position”, it was already too late.

In any event, the statement itself gave the game away. A government must always be “dead serious” in the matter of punishing the guilty, and not in fits and starts. That is the basis of the rule of law. Moreover, the prime minister should really have no need to say it publicly as if he has finally realized that the wrong-doers have been having a merry time. From this standpoint, the statement is an admission of failure. As is Manmohan Singh’s subsequent observation that “we have a functioning a government …we take our job very seriously … we are here to govern and govern effectively”.

What is evident from these pathetic attempts to emphasize the obvious is a belated realization that the government has allowed the situation to drift. And the specific lapse was to allow Raja remain as the telecom minister despite mounting evidence of his dubious deals. But the reason why such indulgence was shown to him – the fear that the DMK would withdraw support – turns the spotlight back on Sonia Gandhi’s anxiety to avoid the uncertainties of a mid-term poll.

Before Raja, she had been similarly lenient towards the Left. To ensure that it continued to offer outside support to the government, she was even willing to scuttle the nuclear deal by saying that the communists had a “point” in opposing it. But for the belated realization, apparently on Rahul Gandhi’s part, that such a stance would alienate the middle class, and the Samajwadi Party’s unexpected gesture of support, the government might have bowed to the Left’s diktat.

The lesson from such conciliatory backtracking before intransigent allies is that it doesn’t help in the long run. As the recent elections results have shown, the voters did not believe that the Congress was “dead serious” in its fight against corruption. In this particular case, of course, the party had the added disadvantage of being in the DMK’s company. The latter’s dramatic decline in M. Karunanidhi’s twilight years holds another lesson – that of not clinging too closely to a partner which is showing signs of moral decrepitude under an aging patriarch.

But, as the electorate decided to torpedo the DMK, there was no escape for the Congress but to go down with an ally, whom it had tried so hard to please by accepting its veto of the Neyveli Lignite disinvestment in UPA-1 and the Raja episode more recently. Yet, if the prime minister had been serious from the start to “govern effectively”, he should have drawn a Lakshman rekha for the allies. The line might have carried different specifications for different parties. For outfits like the DMK, it would have been about probity. For the Left, it would have been about ideological obsessions.

A third lesson which the Congress’s conscience-keepers might have kept in mind was that the party had to be particularly careful when it dealt with corruption. Its reputation in this respect has never been lily-white. Rajiv Gandhi’s government lost its huge mandate on this issue alone. Now, the Rajas and Suresh Kalmadis have further besmirched its name. Any belief that the latest arrests will be of any help in reviving its fortune is misplaced because it is the judiciary which is seen as conducting the anti-corruption campaign, and not the government.

The Congress’s coalition-building capabilities have always left much to be desired. If, before independence, it erred on the side of being assertive – rejecting the requests of Muslim leaders for accommodation in U.P. and West Bengal – it is now too tame. Arguably, some of the meekness stems from the party’s internal confusion, which is reflected in the tussles between the government’s “neo-liberal” line and the Sonia Gandhi-led national advisory council’s jholawala orientation. If these cross-currents are sorted out, perhaps the government will be able to do its “job very seriously”. (IPA Service)