The UPA government must perform, show tangible results in the remaining two years in office or perish. The three years record of the Congress-led UPA-II has not been satisfactory compared to UPA-I which saw implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the passing of Forest Rights Act, the Waiver of farm loans and the implementation of the Right to Information Act. The UPA’s second term has been marked by scams of unprecedented magnitude, 2G and Commonwealth Games Scandal in particular. Till these scams burst into open, the UPA-II was doing reasonably well and people had high hopes from it. The Left parties were not breathing down its neck and it has a comfortable majority in Parliament. Sadly, the time government should have utilized in implementing the pro-people schemes, was lost in fighting the fall out of the scams. The Right to Education Act would have surely counted as a big positive if only its stated aims were close to fulfillment more than two years after its passage in Parliament.
Indeed the act typifies the working of the UPA; big on promise, tardy in implementation. On the Lok Pal bill, every step forward was followed by two steps back. Despite growing public pressure for creation of anti-corruption institutions, the government ensured that an effective Lok Pal would not come into being. After the 2G spectrum sale scam, the government needed a credibility boost, but the opportunities were wasted.
Into its fourth year, the UPA-II is in a make-or-break phase. Opposition parties might be judged on the basis of promises, but governments are always evaluated on the basis of performance. For the UPA-II, the time is clearly over with only two years left. At the time of 2014 general elections, the Congress and its allies will stand or fall in strength of what’s on the ground.
UPA-II surely needs a course correction in its domestic policies. Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who seems more clued than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about India’s need for social democratic initiatives, showed a readiness to give the government a welfare direction when she spoke at the function to mark UPA-II’s third year in office. Without it, the UPA will surely drift and lose its way in the next two years.
Indian people have reason to be thoroughly disillusioned with two national parties—the ruling Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. A sharp decline in the performance of the Congress party would not have been a matter of much concern, had its major national alternative, the BJP, inspired reasonable confidence that it was capable of sustaining the centre. The BJP has turned its back on all notions of responsibility and seriousness.
There is not the remotest possibilities of non-Congress and non-BJP parties, mostly regional, coming on a platform and forming the much touted Third Front. The Marxists, who could have given a lead, have been themselves struggling for survival. The two non-Congress experiments in New Delhi– The Janata Party experiment (1977-79) and the Janata Dal/ National Front government (1989-90), failed miserably, and the nation put its faith in the Congress party and later in the BJP-led NDA.
In the year 2012, the BJP’s incurable infirmities caste a heavy burden on the Congress. Does the Congress leadership realise the heavy burden the history has put on its shoulders? Will it rise to the occasion?
What the Congress needs is clarity on political and policy fronts. In the run up to 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress will primarily be confronting the BJP in Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka later this year, and then in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi next year. Therefore, it will be illogical to expect the BJP to help the Congress to push through its legislative agenda—especially if such policy initiatives are going to help the ruling dispensation in the elections. Only the Congress can help itself by undertaking a course-correction, and a bit of house cleaning. The Congress leadership may begin by accepting that the organization has become ineffective. Sonia Gandhi has been the party’s President and undisputed leader since 1998; yet, she has been reluctant to give her party a thorough shake up. Instead she allowed herself to be persuaded that fair and free organizational elections would destabilize her and the party set up; a rival centre of power may emerge.
It has been argued that elections would only give rise to instability and that moneyed individuals would capture the organization. There may be some merit in the argument, but it cannot be anybody’s case that this precaution has produced genuine and sincere cadres at any level. On the contrary, the leaders at the state and central levels seem to have devised a mutually self-serving protocol to keep their stranglehold on the organizational hierarchy at the expense of the party’s democratic vitality.
A deep-rooted political party, like Congress, should reflect on Indian society’s changing aspirations and ambitions; It Is still not too late to revive and reorganize an internal election authority. Between now and the next Lok Sabha poll in 2014, the Congress leadership has ample time to initiate a meaningful election process in order to weed out obsolete elements and co-opt new generation of activists and cadre. (IPA Service)
MENU 