Fifth Column: Yesterday's Men and Ideas

India Today
September 21, 1998

FIFTH COLUMN
Yesterday's Men and Ideas

All Nehru's apolitical Italian heir offers is lip service

Tavleen Singh

Anyone who reads this column regularly knows I am totally opposed to the idea of India having a foreign prime minister. It makes me more than ashamed. I cringed as I watched the thin lady from Turino hoist the Indian flag at the August Kranti maidan on Quit India Day and then proceed to make a speech in halting, Italian-accented Hindi. This, on the day we launched a movement to rid India of foreign rule. The irony of it.

I find it humiliating when Westerners ask me how India expects to be taken seriously when out of a billion people we find an Italian housewife to head our oldest political party. I never know what to say except that the Congress is a bankrupt political party and Sonia Gandhi is proof of it. Despite this, I have tried to analyse why a party that once had Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel and Subhash Chandra Bose among its leaders should need to turn to an apolitical foreigner for help.

The answer came to me, oddly enough, as I watched the "brainstorming session" at Pachmarhi this past weekend. I was not there but I watched every last adulatory reference to Sonia Gandhi's skills (she is definitely going to revive the party) on Star News and read every last word of what was said by the party's so-called leaders. It was as I watched the leaders that the first glimmer of the answer began to dawn. You will understand why when I list the Congress party's biggest leaders.

Arjun Singh, Sonia's alleged political mentor, who cannot win his own seat in Madhya Pradesh. Madhavrao Scindia, who may be able to win his own seat but is better known these days for being Sonia's slipper-carrier. He has competition, though, in the sycophancy stakes from her many ladies-in-waiting. The most delicious item of news from Pachmarhi was that Ambika Soni and Girija Vyas raced each other to the stage to give "Madame" a lozenge when she started to cough during her speech. Forgive the digression, it was irresistible. Manmohan Singh, chief economic handmaiden to the queen, a good man but has never contested a Lok Sabha election and, despite his high moral standards, lied about being a resident of Assam to get into the Rajya Sabha. Sharad Pawar, who could be a threat but has turned out to be only the mouse that roared. K. Natwar Singh, resident foreign policy expert but so utterly steeped in Cold War notions as to be quite irrelevant in today's world.

Salman Khurshid, unable to win his own seat but made party leader of Uttar Pradesh in the hope that the potage of caste and communalism that caused his defeat in Farrukhabad will have taught him to use it well in the rest of the state. Kamal Nath, once Sanjay Gandhi's friend, now Sonia's devotee, can win his own seat but that's about it. These, by the way, are her leaders of the future. Below them come layers of yesterday's men. R.K. Dhawan, P. Shiv Shankar, S.B. Chavan, Sitaram Kesri, P.V. Narasimha Rao, V.N. Gadgil. It is a long, dreary list of mediocre men who would be lucky if they could even win their own seats in a Lok Sabha election.

With so many yesterday's men, is it any surprise that Pachmarhi's brainstorming produced mainly yesterday's ideas? The Congress re-dedicated itself to socialism. The Pachmarhi declaration says, "Congress reasserts its commitment to socialism and the socialistic pattern of society as spelled out at Avadi in 1955." This is the Congress session from whence emanated the original idea of giving government companies a monopoly on "the commanding heights of the economy". It is these government companies -- run by ministries that should have been abolished years ago -- which first gave our politicians (and bureaucrats) the idea of how much money could be made out of socialism. Ninety per cent of corruption in India is related to the state in some way. This has happened because of exactly the kind of socialism the Congress is offering us once again.

It is the kind that came without the usual advantages of a "socialist pattern of society". Most other socialist countries have succeeded in providing mass literacy, healthcare and minimum standards of living. Nehruvian socialism seemed to think all that was required in these areas was lip service and so we get more lip service from Nehru's Italian heir. "The abolition of poverty within the next 10-15 years must remain our fundamental objective. The assurance of a better quality of life and improved standards of living for all citizens must remain our primary preoccupation." Words to this effect have been uttered by politicians in every election campaign since 1947. Sonia offers only the same solutions that have already failed. More money, she says, must be spent on anti-poverty programmes and rural development. She was not very political in the days when her husband was prime minister or she would have remembered that he said 85 per cent of this money never reached the beneficiaries.

No, we do not need more anti-poverty programmes. We need money to be spent on rural roads, schools, electricity and hospitals so people are empowered to improve their own lives. It cannot be done by government charity and that is all anti-poverty programmes are. But, as I said, how can we expect anything better from a party of yesterday's men and slipper-carriers. So you see it is no surprise at all that the party of our freedom movement should offer us in the 50th year of our Independence the thin lady from Turino as prime minister. They have, alas, run out of even yesterday's ideas.

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