NEW DELHI, 22 April — What is the difference between a crisis and an opportunity? The correct answer of course is none.
A crisis is an opportunity. A good political leader uses the pressures of a crisis to rearrange the internal balance of power and redirect the current of popular opinion, both necessary and both difficult in normal conditions.
Remarkably, both the ruling party and the opposition are unaware of this equation. The government faced a crisis and converted it into an opportunity for the Congress party. The Congress got the opportunity and used it to create a crisis — for itself!
There was no logic, apart from the compulsions of a leader’s self-interest, in the Congress quid pro quo for letting Parliament function: the party demanded a commitment from the government that there would be no investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into certain charges made by Dr. Subramanian Swamy against Sonia Gandhi.
The linkage was self-defeating and smelt of fear when the operational mood should have been one of confident aggression. No government has given its opposition more open space for assault. The Tehelka tapes show the president of the BJP take a wad of notes across a table: the memory of those swarthy fingers closing over currency notes has become an abiding and defining image of Indian politics.
Defense Minister George Fernandes’ personal friend and party president is filmed discussing the quantum of a bribe from an arms dealer and directing the money toward a colleague. This is a scenario made in some Congress kingdom.
Any Congress leader would have demanded that Parliament be convened in case it was in recess for a full debate in front of the world’s television cameras on Tehelka, and perhaps demanded the resignation of the government after using Parliament to hammer the last nails into a very well-constructed coffin.
Instead the Congress wants a judgment before a debate. Why have Parliament at all in that case? Is this because the leader of the Congress Sonia is terrified of a debate? Because she does not know how to debate in the house, as is amply evident? If this position is extraordinary then there are no words in any dictionary to describe the supplementary Congress demand.
How can you have accountability for the prime minister but a blank check for the leader of the opposition? Is Sonia beyond the scrutiny of mere mortals? Dr. Swamy made his allegations and posted them to the government long before Tehelka made its turbulent appearance.
Since time has diminished the good Doctor Swamy’s credibility, very few people took his allegations seriously initially. The prime minister marked them on to his minister for personnel, which is par for the course; and the minister marked it to the police, which is also usual. To dismiss any such charge out of hand would have been unusual. The Congress decided to link the Tehelka exposé to the Swamy allegation, and brought it into the news. At least one charge in the Swamy list seems serious and must either be proved or thrown out. It cannot be left unchecked. Dr. Swamy alleges that Sonia took KGB money at some point.
If Sonia is in the clear then she should demand a time-bound investigation that will exonerate her. She cannot afford to run away from the charge. She is in public life now, and allegations tend to become mud that sticks unless it is washed away by an independent investigation.
Instead, the Congress officially stops Parliament from functioning because it wants no investigation whatsoever! This seems to indicate that the party is terrified that Sonia will be found guilty. Or that Sonia is terrified even if her party is privately more sanguine about such a prospect.
Hence the view held by the cynical element in the Congress: the Congress was started by a foreigner; it will also be ended by a foreigner. Unless of course it is rescued by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is always a possibility.
Atal Behari Vajpayee has one enormous advantage over both his friends and his foes: he is very easily underestimated. This tends to make his foes complacent and his friends confused, particularly those friends who want his job.
The prime minister’s affable manner and measured style disguise the careful craft of a man who has watched the politics of sharp contemporaries and risen through the political mist to sit on the chair of everyone’s dreams.
Neither the ascent nor the preservation is easy; he has made both look deceptively comfortable. Within two years he has turned an improbable coalition into a working reality, and created a constituency for himself that cuts across party lines and moves toward that broad mental space called liberal India. Remember that his starting point was the Rashtriya Swamsewak Sangh (RSS), as he occasionally reminds any meeting overflowing with saffron. An uncertain leader’s mistakes are explicable. Vajpayee’s mistakes perplex.
Why is he stumbling when he could run? He started badly when Tehelka broke. Decisions that should have been taken within 24 hours, and which would thereby have had a positive impact were cursed by suspicious delay. If Bangaru Laxman (president, in the words of a fellow columnist, of the New Year Party of India) and Fernandes had been forced to resign, and an inquiry ordered within 24 hours, the damage could have been controlled.
The prime minister might have in passing suggested that he did not necessarily approve of all kinds of journalism, but who was he to pass judgment: he could name at least one former journalist on his own side who had tried the same techniques. In the end the prime minister was forced to take all these steps, but he took too long and walked with a confused limp. The same thing is happening with what might be called the tail end of the Tehelka dog. It is impossible to understand what keeps a bureaucrat like N.K. Singh in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). It is not a simple matter of loyalty to a man who has been loyal to you. This rationale holds for Brajesh Mishra but not for Singh.
Singh is not loyal to the prime minister; his loyalty is to the owners of India’s most powerful corporate house, the Ambanis. This is not a secret. Singh himself would be loathe to deny it. When word spread a couple of weeks ago that Singh was going to be — at long last — prised out of the PMO, one of the Ambani sons flew down to Delhi and lobbied with anyone who would listen to Drum up support for Singh
This is a fact, in the knowledge of the men and women of Delhi’s ruling class. It is extraordinary that a bureaucrat with such proven links to a corporate house should be appointed to the PMO in the first place; it is appalling that he should remain there despite allegations made by the president of the BJP, and while the process of inquiry is on.
The PMO is not an ordinary office; the Ambanis would not want their man in an office that was ordinary. They need information about government decisions at the highest level. It is fair to add that Singh is not their only loyalist; it would probably be accurate to state that he is their most important one.
The Ambanis need influence in government; all corporate interests need it, and the Ambanis are only better at this game than their competitors. The issue is not what an ambitious business family wants; the question is why the prime minister of India has permitted them to get what they want, and get it brazenly.
Such exercise of power by a business family sends its own message to that complex web of institutions that interlinks in the mesh of the Indian economy. The government, and the prime minister in particular, has in his dispensation the most powerful jobs in banking and financial institutions.
Any business family that can claim, justifiably or otherwise, that it can influence decisions is significantly ahead of the game. The perception becomes more important than the reality. It must be said to the credit of the Ambanis that they do not allow a mere trifle like a change of government to cloud this perception.
Their Singhs would do equally well in a Congress government. What is a well-advertised Reliance man doing in Vajpayee’s office? Vajpayee does not have to reinvent himself, but he does have to reinvent his environment. There are empty spaces which important colleagues once occupied; there is a credibility gap in his personal office.
The prime minister probably has less to fear from a confused opposition than from whisper mongers on his own side who are widening the credibility gap to include him. Vajpayee has chosen his opponents with care, but they too are searching for weaknesses on his side. There is more than one crisis afoot. Proven corruption is only the obvious one; there is also the breakdown of confidence in the economy; the unnecessary stagnation after a positive start in Kashmir; the deterioration in relations with neighbors to a point where a rogue commander in Bangladesh can step across and occupy disputed territory as well as indulge in barbarism against our jawans in pursuit of his political agenda.
However excellent his personal abilities might be, Jaswant Singh cannot manage two large and critical ministries. Drift and inaction will not address these problems. A Cabinet reshuffle and expansion is a compulsion now, not an option. This has to be followed by a revamped PMO. If the prime minister does not act, someone else will.
