Elections, politics and black money

According to one estimate, till February 5 in UP alone, the EC nabbed Rs 32 crore of unaccounted cash, Rs 12.3 crore from Punjab, R1.35 crore from Uttarakhand, R47 lakh from Manipur and R36 lakh from Goa.

Elections now do not mean the spending of crores, but of multiples of crores.

When I read those figures, I was reminded of an election episode in UP of 75 years ago.

It has been recounted by Lal Bahadur Shastri in a 1959 tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru:

“The general elections under the new Government of India Act took place in 1937; they were of great significance. In these elections Nehru played a very important role. I remember his visit to the district of Allahabad. It was about 8.30 pm when he finished his speech…

Nehru had taken no tea in the afternoon and… he was feeling very hungry. He asked me whether there was any restaurant in the city… I remembered the railway station where some tea could be got. He said: “Let us go there.” We motored to the railway station and went to the railway restaurant…

After having taken the tea we were asked to pay the bill. Everyone of us searched his pockets and found that none of us carried sufficient money. Between us we could collect about R2.50. Nehru had about a R1.25. Purnima Banerjee another rupee and I gave the few annas to complete the full amount required.

How awkward would it have been if we had failed to make up the amount among ourselves!” 

Seventy-five years is not all that long ago. That is, we are not talking of the 1800s. And we are talking of people whose names are invoked in today’s election campaigns.

Money played a part in elections even then, but by and large it was licit money, modest money. It was money, not the monster called black money.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi in Hindustan Times. Here

The Rise and fall of Manmohan Singh

The leader of a party allied with the Congress described to me a meeting with Manmohan Singh in December 2005, two months after the release of the UN report investigating abuses in the Iraq Oil-for-Food programme. The report had implicated Natwar Singh, then the minister of external affairs, and he was forced to resign as a result, but it had also named Reliance Petroleum Limited as a beneficiary in the oil-for-food scam. The party leader said he had raised the issue with the prime minister, saying, “Sir, the report mentions not just Natwar, it also prominently mentions Reliance. Why are you not taking any action against Reliance?”

“With a sigh,” the party leader recounted, “Manmohan Singh said to us, ‘After all, what can I do? It is India’s largest corporate.’”

In the course of the last 20 years, Manmohan Singh has been at the centre of two major public debates, both of considerable historical significance: first, over the shift from a socialist planned economy to a liberalised free market, and second, over the turn away from a non-aligned foreign policy and toward stronger ties with the United States. In the waning years of his political career, he now seems likely to occupy a central role—if perhaps a symbolic one—in a third era-defining debate, over corruption and its causes and cures.

Manmohan Singh himself does not symbolise corruption in the way that he has become an emblem of liberalisation and Americanisation, and even if many call his government the “most corrupt” India has ever seen, that record may yet be broken. But the debate over corruption is not really about scandals and bribes, or about the devious schemes of amoral persons inside and outside of government: it is about the increasingly common fear that the system itself is broken, and about the inaction and apathy of those who should be positioned to lead in its repair.

In the end, the fate of Manmohan Singh’s legacy is out of his hands. If the intractable structural crises troubling India somehow get resolved, then his place in history will be far larger than a footnote. But if the centre cannot hold, then Manmohan Singh will be seen as the man who let loose a storm but failed to bring it under control—who sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Vinod K Jose in The Caravan Here

Why there is a chance for Mayawati to become PM?

The Congress party is vulnerable because of its own misdeeds, starting from the nuclear deal that was pushed through Parliament with purchased votes, to the blind eye turned to the loot of the country in the 2G scam. Anna Hazare has demonstrated the widespread public revulsion that exists for the UPA government; character assassination of Team Anna members may remove the personnel, but not the public revulsion. Such is the state of public nausea that voters are willing to tolerate a timid and unimaginative chief minister like Maharashtra’s Prithviraj Chavan so long as he’s clean, as a DNA survey showed this week. The opposition parties must think of maximising the opportunity on the horizon; however, on current evidence it looks a tall order. The BJP has over-estimated its own strength and its ability to deliver an alternative. The fact that some of its worthies still think that the 84-year-old rath yatri LK Advani is a PM candidate, despite the fact that he led a losing campaign in 2009, demonstrates the bankruptcy of their political strategy.

India has had several experiments with non-Congress, non-BJP governments, but they have not lasted the full course. This does not mean a future experiment will also come up short. But the regional parties have to get their act together for 2012’s two milestones: the UP elections and India’s Presidential election. Mayawati looks on course to decide the first; perhaps she should take the lead in strategising an alternative for the next Parliamentary election. (I don’t give importance to the anti-Mayawati reports in our casteist media, and I don’t think the voters will either.) And the others, be it Mamata, Jayalalithaa, Nitish, etc, should follow her lead. Doing so would be far better than to delude oneself into following Modi’s lead, because his is a road that will lead nowhere in a hurry.

Aditya Sinha in DNA. Here

How would Rahul Gandhi govern India?

Both Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi plan to focus first on Uttar Pradesh, which holds statewide elections in 2012. If the brother-sister tandem does well, Rahul's chances in the next national elections, and those of Congress at large, would improve considerably.

As for the next question -- how Rahul would actually govern -- the answer will depend on whom he chooses to listen to. Well-informed observers in New Delhi note that, so far, he has relied mostly on advisers close to his mother. If he continues to do the same, the result will be incremental and mostly unimaginative policy choices. Steps toward economic liberalization would be halting, populist programs would continue apace, and internal reform of the party would remain in abeyance.

To seriously address the most difficult of India's endemic ills, Rahul would need to demonstrate a new level of imagination, verve, and decisiveness. That would mean not just good political optics but undertaking actual policy initiatives that solve the dilemma of land acquisition, the stubborn issue of judicial reform, and the country's seemingly intractable security problems. Flashy moves for the cameras may draw the praise of family and party power brokers, but they will leave much to be desired for a bold new national leader on the Indian stage.

Sumit Ganguly in Foreign Affairs. Here