In an era when politics is becoming more about communication, a competent economic administrator like Manmohan Singh is bound to be lost in translation. His government will appear to be heading nowhere and there will be incoherence and fumbling on policy preparation. Worse, with real power concentrated in the hands of Sonia Gandhi, the prime minister will forever look east from his 7 Race Course Road residence. As for communication with the millions out there, outside the bandwidth of intrigue and machinations in Lutyens’ Delhi, there’ll be no concerted attempt, no astute vision and no understanding even of what needs to be communicated.

In a nutshell, that is the sense one gets of the Congress preparation to face the electorate within the next 15 months. As it is, the party doesn’t get to tee off on a level-playing course. It has two major handicaps. It’s the only Centrist party in the country and its policy statements on most issues, whether it is minority development or economic health, are neither here nor there. Secondly, in a dynastic party, courtiers tend to lack that sense of belonging to the larger cause; they pursue their own individual aspirations even if those are counter-productive to the party’s interests.

After Narendra Modi cleverly manipulated the Gujarat elections by pushing his development agenda through the communal fault-line, the ruling party at the Centre couldn’t have received a shriller wake-up call. The development message has to be communicated to the voter and that needs to be done in a pan-Indian political idiom. We are talking about a minimum of two Indias. There is the one that is living in the fast lane and lending sustenance to the malls and multiplexes. There is also the other, which is somehow surviving in the countryside with a growth rate that is still quite Hindu but where aspirations are being fuelled by colour television and the cheaper CDMA handset. Some sociologists are even talking of three Indias; you cannot forget the emerging middle India of the burgeoning towns.

... contd.