A royal let-down

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, does a disservice to his cabinet colleagues when he refuses to defend them in public. The remarks of the external affairs minister, K. Natwar Singh, to the Korea Times were not against the government?s position. There was no need for the prime minister to indicate that his remarks did not represent policy.

When Natwar Singh goes to Pakistan in February, would he be speaking in his personal or his official capacity? Should he be looking over his shoulder to see if the prime minister might not declare his statements to be non-official? Manmohan Singh has made it difficult for his ministers to function.

Natwar Singh has been quoted by the Korea Times as saying three things. He said, ?Even though we are ourselves a nuclear power, we support complete nuclear disarmament for Korea.? This is not against government policy. India supports complete nuclear disarmament ? and that includes Korea as well as the permanent five of the UN security council.

Second, Natwar Singh said that the previous government was responsible for the decision to enter a nuclear standoff with neighbouring Pakistan. This is factually correct.

The Vajpayee government consciously decided to cross the nuclear threshold and provoked Pakistan. The nuclearization of south Asia led to Kargil and a growth in terrorism. The Indian parliament itself became a target of terrorist attack. The Indian army took battle-ready position on the border with Pakistan for one whole year. And, Kashmir was seen as a nuclear flashpoint.

India became the centre of unwelcome international attention. Jaswant Singh had to do a lot of running to stay at the same place and attempt to placate the US. Was this not a result of a nuclear standoff with Pakistan?

Without elaborating on all this, Natwar Singh limited himself to saying, ?But regret would be futile. You can?t put it back in the tube. It?s out.?

Lastly, he expressed the hope that the six-party nuclear dialogue on North Korean nukes would succeed and that a situation similar to that of south Asia would not emerge in the Korean penin- sula. ?I hope the talks progress and there is some kind of an agreement,? he said. This cannot be described as deviation from government policy. Or is one to assume that New Delhi wants the six-party talks to fail and supports the nuclearization of the Korean peninsula?

There was, therefore, little justification for Manmohan Singh to placate the Bharatiya Janata Party in parliament. He should have taken Jaswant Singh head on when he raised the issue. He should have asked him in what capacity ? personal or ministerial ? had he apologized to Strobe Talbott in September 2000 in Waldorf Astoria in New York for not signing the comprehensive test ban treaty. In his book Engaging India, Talbott recalls the meeting with Jaswant: ?He apologized for having, as he put it, ?let you down?.?

Talbott quotes Jaswant more than once claiming that India wants the line of control in Kashmir to be converted into an international boundary. However, the official position is that the entire Jammu and Kashmir belongs to India. Manmohan Singh could have asked whether Jaswant Singh was deciding India-Pakistan boundary in his personal capacity.

This is the second time around that he has let his ministers down. Earlier, the petroleum minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, had been accused of acting in his personal capacity when ordering the removal of a plaque that named Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as a freedom fighter while not mentioning Mahatma Gandhi. Manmohan Singh cannot be accused of being an admirer of Savarkar. But he can be accused of wrong political judgment for there is no consensus between the Congress and the BJP on Savarkar. After all, all the Congress members of parliament, including Manmohan Singh, had boycotted the unveiling of the Savarkar painting in parliament during the previous government?s tenure. This issue divides the nation and it serves no purpose to project ideological unanimity on it.

Manmohan Singh also capitulated far too quickly in the face of differences with the left parties on the issue of the employees? provident fund. He reportedly promised Gurudas Dasgupta of the Communist Party of India that the government was in favour of raising the EPF interest rate. Dasgupta claimed that he had been given to understand that the EPF rate would be raised to 9.5 per cent.

It was wrong of the prime minister to agree to raising the EPF interest rate under pressure from the left ? in the long run that would lead to defaults in payouts from the fund. Nearly 80 per cent of the EPF corpus is invested in the government?s special deposit scheme. The interest on SDS itself is 8 per cent. The remaining 20 per cent of the EPF corpus is invested in government and state-run corporation bonds and securities that fetch a slightly higher interest. But they too have been planning to cut down on payment rates.

The average yield on EPF investments is 9.1 per cent. Manmohan Singh the economist knows that the rate of interest on EPF payouts cannot be higher than this. But the please-all politician in him wants to keep the left happy.

The prime minister also came across as politically weak in the way he dealt with his feuding ministers, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan. He tested public credulity by suggesting that since both had issued denials of ever having traded charges, the matter should be considered closed. Yet Laloo Yadav had been quoted saying, ?Nobody can save Mr Paswan. I have files in my possession which clearly show how he and his relatives made plenty of money in the purchase of cranes for the railways.? The least the prime minister could have done was to refer the matter to the Central vigilance commissioner or to a third-party mechanism to retain his government?s credibility on probity in public life.

Manmohan Singh acquired power because of his honest image and his unflinching loyalty to his leader, Sonia Gandhi. But it is in exercising the power bestowed on him that he could have gained in critical mass. When Indira Gandhi came into power, she was derisively called goongi gudiya (dumb doll). Nobody expected that she would put her detractors in jail a decade later. Even those who supported her ascendancy to power were scared of her.

Nobody is recommending that Manmohan Singh do that. But he must learn to exercise power and project authority. If he finds that his home minister changes his statements more frequently in a day than he changes his clothes, he should do something about it. If the external affairs minister makes statements that the prime minister genuinely believes go against his government?s policy, then in all fairness, he must tell him so instead of undermining the minister in parliament.

It is essential for Manmohan Singh to take on the BJP instead of seeming to be always on the defensive. It is also imperative for him to rise above the Laloo Yadavs and Ram Vilas Paswans instead of letting them pull him down. The acquisition of power allows one to put down roots, to increase one?s stability and create a constituency. Sadly, Manmohan Singh seems reluctant to do so.