India is facing leadership deficit

While the Congress and BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) are content, if not happy, to mirror one another in their national power aims and ambitions, the situation masks a serious crisis in political leadership that should be apparent within a year or two although it is not the subject of any anxious debate within India.

Up to the mid-nineties, both national parties were creatures or caricatures of their separate and very different pre-Independence origins. The Congress became Mahatma Gandhi's vehicle for India's freedom from British rule, but against his wishes sought and gained national power after 1947. The BJP or rather its predecessor, the Jan Sangh, was set up by the extremist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to placate some of its more politically-minded leaders again with the hope that it would be wound up in time.

The Congress was unable to make early adjustments with the emergence of coalition politics in the late-eighties/early-nineties. The BJP, meanwhile, surged ahead as the single largest party in the 1996 elections, and to make political capital out of it, the RSS agreed to an NDA (National Democratic Alliance) coalition arrangement with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the prime minister.

This arrangement continued for six years in two terms in which the Congress gained the wisdom of permitting the government to make and accumulate several mistakes with which to challenge and overcome the BJP/NDA in the next decisive election. Meanwhile, the RSS and sister organisations like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM, advocating autarchy) and Bharatiya Majdoor Sangh (BMS, India's largest trade union) set themselves as opposition entities to the Vajpayee government. The idea was that both the ruling and opposition spaces would be grabbed by the BJP-RSS and its affiliates leaving the Congress high and dry. The 2004 polls proved that the Congress strategy was right.

Six years on and with a Congress-led Manmohan Singh government in its second term, the political strategies of the NDA years are being replayed. The BJP/NDA is hoping that the accumulated mistakes of the ruling dispensation will assist it in the next election. This is one reason the BJP has asked the government to apologise for permitting the Union Carbide Corporation CEO during the Bhopal disaster, Warren Anderson, to escape justice and not pushed for its unseating. It was also careful during the last budget session to support a cut motion while making clear it had no designs on the government.

Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are playing "good cop" to the "bad cop" of government. The first year of Manmohan Singh's second term has been an unmitigated disaster with raging food inflation, unabated crisis in agriculture, jobless growth and no vision to raise mass employment to reduce poverty. By staying away from government and opposing from time to time Singh's Washington consensus-based economic policies, Sonia and Rahul are playing the same role as the RSS, SJM and the BMS portrayed during Vajpayee's six years, which is, being the faux opposition to their own government.

Whether all this smoke and mirrors will pay dividends only the next general elections will tell. However, it will expose the country to a nasty leadership deficit. Currently, while the BJP is groping in the dark to return to power, it claims to have two models of governance, one of Narendra Modi (Gujarat, but probably nationally unacceptable) and the other of Shivraj Singh Chauhan (Madhya Pradesh, but nationally untested).

On the other hand, the Congress is smugly in power, but it has no model to perpetuate, not least the existing one. The present model, where Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister on Sonia Gandhi's sufferance, is a farce and has proved unworkable. After Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi is poised to succeed him and that makes the current model additionally irrelevant. Rahul has so far shown no inclination for office and does not have prime-ministerial mettle. The Congress has a second-generation leadership, but they are all sons and daughters of Congress politicians who have not shown any worth so far.

India is one of the most complex countries to understand and few have governed it with any depth and knowledge. The generation of political leaders from before Independence has mostly passed away with exceptions like Vajpayee who is perhaps the last of them to have been intuitively able to engage with the country. The BJP has no more use for Vajpayee and the Congress has no one of a similar stature to learn from. As the country hurtles forward to become a great power, there is no one truly to lead India.

At the moment, both parties seem to be content trying to outwit one another with varieties of political parlour games. At a most serious and momentous time for India, there is at the top a frightfully unserious set, and nobody seems to care.

— Opinion Asia, 2010.

N.V. Subramanian is editor, News Insight, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love and Courtesan of Storms.