On the future, reassuring answers
Fielding media questions about the state of politics and government, economist Prime Minister Manmohan Singh responded with a savvy few thought him capable of in the area of political articulation. The questions were essentially futuristic in nature (Will you still be PM after the election?), but there was a reassuring quality to the replies Dr Singh offered journalists on the way back from Durban on Thursday.
He gave nothing away, but in the first instance the PM’s responses make Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh’s energetic assertions as regards the Third Front seem under-rehearsed. This relieves the political matrix of the shaky feeling that some may have been beginning to have on account of recent developments. The virtue of this is that anxieties should abate in the business-economic sphere about the fate of the reform process that the government has been seeking to push of late.
Perhaps the most significant observation the Prime Minister made was to indicate that he preferred to let allies go when they sought to pull the weight of their numbers in the Lok Sabha to stall reforms (Mamata Banerjee on the issue of FDI in multi-brand retail) or to derail governance (DMK on the “genocide” resolution to censure Colombo on the Sri Lankan Tamil question) rather than retain the comfort of a stable majority in the House which would not permit itself to be deployed to meaningful ends. He was seeking to rebut the thinking that the Congress did not have the imagination to take allies along.
The import of this is that the Manmohan Singh dispensation has a certain vision (with which people are naturally free to dissent) to which it would do its best to give practical shape. The Prime Minister conceded that the feeling of a stability deficit was inherent in a coalition arrangement, but he himself had little doubt that his government would last its full term.
Although Dr Singh did not spell this out, any party supporting the government can hold out a credible threat of dislodging it only when it can be sure that the regime will collapse if it were to pull out. After the bitter experience of the Left (in UPA-1) and that of Trinamul Congress (UPA-2), a party that thinks it holds the whip hand needs to be more than circumspect in the light of the experience of the Bengal parties.
Dr Singh ruled nothing out, nor did he rule anything in, when asked if he would be PM if the UPA mustered the numbers to form the next government. Doing either would have had implications that are best left to the political side of the UPA’s management.
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