SINGH DEFINES COALITION PARAMETERS

Manmohan Singh arrives at a programme in New Delhi on Sunday to mark the 89th birth anniversary of the late Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 28: Mamata Banerjee demands that central cyclone relief funds bypass Writers’ and be funnelled directly to districts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh politely but firmly says that will mean a violation of established norms and procedures.

Mamata rages against the deployment of forces to throttle the anti-CPM upsurge in Lalgarh, but the Union home ministry stays focused on the requirements of restoring law and order — if a state government is appealing for help, the Centre will respond.

The Left Front government wants the Lalgarh region free of political and civil society elements in order to ensure security forces face no unwanted hindrance in operations and Union home minister P. Chidambaram immediately endorses the view, knowing full well Mamata has ordered senior party leaders into the area.

Bengal has, over the past month, become a template of sorts for insulating governance imperatives from the daily compulsions of politics and politicking. The Manmohan Singh government appears to be sending out a signal that pleasing or placating allies will not get precedence over propriety.

Sources indicated that Mamata’s Trinamul Congress had mounted “enough political and public pressure” on the government to “stay clear” of security operations in Lalgarh “but when the request for forces came there was no question of not responding because it was first and foremost an issue of national security”.

Mamata

“Things will constantly have to be managed in a coalition,” a source said. “There will be moments of anger and disappointment, but that does not mean the government resorts to unjust methods. The government should do what’s right, managing collateral consequences is more the job of political parties.”

It is probably no surprise then that Mamata’s objections over the despatch of central forces to Lalgarh were taken up at the political rather than government level — finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, who is also the government’s most adept and employed trouble-shooter, said he would be speaking to the Trinamul boss on the issue.

As far as governance and administrative issues are concerned, the sources said, the Prime Minister’s line has already been spelt out clearly. They quoted a section from the letter Singh wrote to ministerial colleagues soon after he began his second term.

“Our government in the last five years has been noted for its bipartisan approach on development issues. We have been objective and fair in dealing with the genuine concerns of all state governments. Let me urge you to ensure that all requests made by state chief ministers and ministers are responded to quickly and effectively,” the Prime Minister reminded them.

Congress sources, on their part, are unwilling to concede all credit for what they call the “new ethic” of governance to Prime Minister Singh alone.

“It is equally, if not more, Sonia Gandhi who has quietly set standards of correctitude and bipartisanship,” a senior leader said.

“Remember how ham-handed power grabbing by Congressmen in both Goa and Jharkhand was quickly undone early in Manmohan Singh’s first term; remember Sonia Gandhi quit the Lok Sabha and sought re-election over the office-of-profit issue, there is an attempt to stick to high standards of public behaviour. Had Sonia Gandhi not been fully party to it, Manmohan Singh would not have been able to assert propriety so effectively.”

It isn’t as if compulsions haven’t driven the Manmohan-Sonia duo into hurried alliances where compromises and quid pro quo promises have had to be made.

On the eve of the trust vote over the nuclear deal last year, the UPA entered into an alliance with the Samajwadi Party to offset the withdrawal of Left support. The alliance not only did not last, it was widely felt in the Congress that the Samajwadi demanded too high a price for its support.

Congress and government managers are aware that laying down the law or prescribing ethics to allies will not always be easy, or even possible. A case in point is Mamata’s defiance of Chidambaram’s advice on leaving Lalgarh free of political activity while security operations were on.

At another level, the difficulties with the DMK over cabinet negotiations brought home broadly the same point to the ruling dispensation — the Prime Minister or the Congress cannot have their way all the time with all things, compromises will have to be made with allies.

Few in the government want to underplay the “nuisance potential” of either Trinamul or the DMK — “both are terribly demanding parties and both can be mercurial and tough to tame when in rage”, said one Congress leader — but there is a sense that the Congress and the Prime Minister are better placed to define the “broad parameters of this political contract” to allies in the second term because of the greater comfort of numbers the Congress has.

Equally, they hope that the “moral authority” the Prime Minister and Sonia have come to wield with their “sober and correct” political manner will “persuade” allies not to push the government into “embarrassing errors”, however well it may suit them politically.