The usual excitement is absent

The budget week this year in India is much like a mid-life crisis, a time when much of the past could have been so much better, while the future, so full of possibilities, but just a little bit beyond your reach. A similar sense of doom is gripping the Congress-led government at the centre. The Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh division of spoils, when the Congress won the country in 2004, was supposed to have laid down new standards for both governance and politics. Singh was to have administered the country, with a little help from the booming Sensex, while Sonia was to have rejuvenated the moribund Congress party, while passing the baton on to her son and heir, Rahul.

It clearly hasn't quite worked out like this. While much-maligned Pakistan next door has stirringly rejected the "failed state" doomsday prophecies by voting out the fundamentalist-extremist combine, "democratic" India has largely fiddled with the numbers and refused to lift itself out of its contented and slothful existence.

The results have been appalling. The government's flagship programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme was supposed to deliver a minimum wage for at least a hundred days to every adult in 200 districts of the country when it was first launched a year ago.

But independent surveys have found that because of corruption and terrible implementation, millions of rupees have been wasted, and less than 10 per cent of the target audience has been reached.

Even for India, the numbers are bad. But when the prime minister's personal integrity and honesty has been widely acknowledged to be beyond reproach, the results are particularly depressing.

And so, as the government presents its budget this week for the fourth consecutive year, a sense of waiting for something to happen seems to have gripped the country. The usual budget excitement, the bitter-sweet anticipation associated with lobbying the leadership on a variety of tax breaks, is largely missing.

Spanner in the works

It shouldn't have been like this, of course. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is due in Delhi this week, and if all had gone well with the Indo-US nuclear deal, this should have been a thank-you trip. The entire board of Brookings, an influential think-tank based in Washington DC, is also in Delhi this week.

If the Left hadn't thrown a spanner in the Indo-US nuclear works six months ago, this would have been both Singh and Sonia's finest hour. On top of a booming Sensex, India would have broken through technology denial regimes that had strangled domestic science since independence. The American visits were to have been the icing on the cake after France's Nicholas Sarkozy and Russia's Vladimir Putin had signed agreements to take forward the Indo-US nuclear deal with their own countries.

Instead, try as you might to do otherwise, the government's mood is much like a deflated chapatti ( Indian bread). The gloom is exacerbated by the antics of the coalition partners, who have begun to treat their ministries like virtual fiefdoms. Sometimes it seems as if Singh and Sonia have been reduced to variously wringing their hands like Lady Macbeth, while the other junior partners blithely ignore the Congress and make off with their own agendas.

Meanwhile, relations between the Congress and the Left parties have begun to resemble a bad marriage. The Congress, which is supported in power by the Left, looks like its dying to thumb its nose at the Left and tell it to take a moonwalk. Apart from the nuclear deal with the US, the Left has been publicly critical of the Congress on all the big issues, from pension reforms to farm subsidies for marginal and landless farmers.

The bitter truth, of course, is that the Congress cannot survive one day in power if the Left withdraws support. Thus, the increasingly dysfunctional marriage. One party wants out, but knows that it will surely be on the streets if it does.

Rumours that Singh could resign if the Congress party (read Sonia) drops the nuclear deal over the fate of the government, have been around for a while. Interestingly, though, in this budget week, with the general mood so low, the rumours have been given a fresh lease of life.

What does that mean? Simply that the Prime Minister, believing that his government has more or less run out of time anyway, having clocked four years out of the given five, is turning his mind to calling the Left's bluff. The way he figures it is, the Left could only get more and more demanding, having tasted blood by stopping the nuclear deal in its tracks. Why not, then, go ahead with the deal, even if that means that the Left parties will pull the plug on the government?

In the end, of course, it may never come to that. But one thing is certain. If Sonia and Manmohan don't take their chances now, they know that history has a particularly unforgiving way of dealing with mid-life crises.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph newspaper, India.