Even half a success like New Delhi’s Jamia Nagar encounter may win Shivraj Patil, arguably the most disastrous Union home minister in living memory (or, in fairness, next to Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and probably level with P.C. Sethi), a reprieve of sorts. No wonder he was seen in the Delhi Police headquarters even while the encounter was on, and one of its bravest officers was battling for his life, sadly, unsuccessfully. But the fact is that his job, by itself, was not in any danger anyway. Prime ministers can’t fire their home ministers for non-performance in the last six months of their tenure. Over the past four and a half years there were a dozen occasions when such a step may have been justified. Now, having defended his waffling, covered up for the most lily-livered handling of our internal security in our history and ducked in embarrassment each time he — and his Sancho Panza — opened their mouths after a terror attack, the leadership of the Congress cannot suddenly say they were wrong all along. This argument is not exactly on this home minister and his performance. It’s about high politics as practised by India’s largest and oldest political party and how it has shot itself in the foot three times over, in three key areas. These are the three areas that the voter today is most concerned with, and if the party and its coalition lose in 2009, it will be largely because of its failures on these. And for none of these will it have an alibi. No Left pressure, no blackmail by allies. The party’s internal balance of power took precedence over the demands of governance and, amazingly, also of re-electability.The three areas of self-inflicted failure are internal security, HRD and Power. On each the UPA won’t even be rated one out of ten by even its staunchest supporters. Each was manned by one of its own senior leaders, so there are no allies to blame. All three to have been given these key jobs were veterans, in fact the senior-most Congress figures in this cabinet. Then what went wrong?Simply, that each one was a man most unsuited for his charge. Before I explain why, it may be instructive to look at what a mess the UPA has been left with in each area. Much has been said already on internal security, yet we need to underline the fact that in these four years more policemen have been killed by terrorists of various kinds — killed, mind you, just ambushed or bombed at will, very few have actually died fighting — than ever in our history. The Congress’s managers can commission any polling agency to check out the party’s most loyal voters on what they think of this government’s performance on internal security and the answer will most likely be a unanimous expression of shock and disgust. This kind of woolly-headedness from a party which fought terrorism as no other, which gave India the image of being a tough state behind a soft exterior. Under the UPA and Patil, India became a sheep in sheep’s clothing. This government began its management of internal security on a false, fake note, allowing an encircled Naxalite leadership in Andhra safe passage. Since then it’s been all downhill. Nothing will salvage the UPA’s record on internal security now, not the sacrifice of any more brave policemen like Delhi’s Mohan Chand Sharma, not even if its home minister junks his bandhgalas for some crumpled dhoti-kurta. Arjun Singh is the second on this list of three. He was nearly sent as governor to Maharashtra when this cabinet was being constituted but it is a tribute to his brilliant political mind that he wrangled a cabinet berth, and the one he wanted, where he could do the most mischief. He ran as ideological an HRD ministry as his saffron predecessor and just as controversially. In the process, the UPA lost a five-year opportunity to modernise India’s education system, something the prime minister so passionately wanted to do. He ended up dealing with Arjun Singh’s reservation mess instead. The prime minister was astute enough in the end to salvage something from that debris, by at least being able to expand the capacity and number of higher institutions, but again by bringing Veerappa Moily out of the woodwork and hiding behind his report.Now what do you say for a government which has to resort to such methods to get around its own ministers in key areas? Manmohan Singh is a sensitive, reflective man. When he looks back on this tenure he will know better than anybody else that he failed to bring nearly any of his great ideas on higher education to fruition. And while he rues the great, lost opportunity of doing to higher education what he had done to the economy, Arjun Singh will finish his innings with the satisfaction of having filled so many higher institutions with his hangers-on, the ideological left, and getting at least a street and a building named after himself in Jamia Millia, a university his ministry funded.Power is a similar story and the man to blame, to be fair, is not the current incumbent, Sushil Kumar Shinde. Nor, in a way, is it his late predecessor, P.M. Sayeed. When he was sworn in power minister, he was too — in fact terminally — sick already. He could rarely attend office and was spending a lot of time going abroad for liver treatment. He was such a non-functional power minister that even the Left protested at his choice. But my friends in the Left tell me they were told it was necessary to give the job to him so as to underwrite and facilitate his treatment. The party, after all, was not going to dump such an old loyalist. But why dump him on such a crucial ministry, the Left asked then, as the voter will ask in the next elections? The UPA’s first three years were a total waste in power generation. The shortfall today, overall as well at peak hour, has doubled in its tenure; its own generation targets have been revised downwards.In none of the three cases was the Congress taken by surprise. Sayeed was the most ridiculous choice of all. So you can blame that on straightforward stupidity on somebody’s part. Patil, senior, respected and loyal, looked like a reasonable choice to begin with. But the fact also is that the Congress, because of its internal politics, couldn’t give the job to at least three candidates who would have done more justice to the Home Ministry. As failures began to pile up soon enough, Patil should have been moved some place safer — for him, and for the rest of us. He rode his luck for sure. He was first all dressed up for Rashtrapati Bhavan until the Left vetoed him, expressing doubts on his secularism because of his devotion to Sai Baba. And once they had questioned his secularism, the Congress felt it had no choice but to keep him in the job, or it would sound like it accepted the charge that it had a non-secular Hindu in charge of politically the most sensitive ministry. It will now pay for that folly. And it will pay big time. Arjun Singh, too, had to be accommodated. A fine political mind, he would help the high command keep things “in check”. Except, nobody figured what was on his mind. And by the time they did, he had too much of a head-start. He opened the reservation can of worms, and any effort to touch him would have looked like punishment, something the Congress couldn’t afford. Meanwhile he continued throwing the odd barb at the prime minister, even at the high command, and ran pretty much an empire of his own for more than four years, unchecked, unquestioned, blocking all reform in higher education and politicising what is left of it. These three failures will hurt the UPA grievously in the next election. Not surprisingly, none of these three men will have any accountability for the ’09 election. One is no more, the other two will neither contest, nor campaign, or even figure in that election in any way other than as embarrassments. It will be a brave Congressman who would allow Patil or Arjun to come and campaign for him. And if the next election goes wrong, the Congress will know who to blame: itself for playing its own internal politics so poorly, for treating the three most crucial areas of governance in so cavalier a manner.sg@expressindia.com
