The UPA government is clearly on the back foot in regard to the disproportionate force it used to evict Baba Ramdev and his supporters from the Ramlila Maidan in the capital. The entire episode seemed to suggest the UPA is increasingly riven with self-doubts over its own legitimacy and authority as a government elected by the people. This is fast becoming a psychological condition for the coalition government now. The classic symptoms of this condition are there for all to see. A Prime Minister who is always second guessing what the Congress party high command might not approve of would naturally appear weak. A top government functionary told this writer that the Congress party was not unified in its response to the situation even on day one when the yoga marketeer landed in the capital in a private plane last week.
The post facto narrative put out by the Congress party is that there was total consensus among the Cabinet ministers and top party functionaries that Baba Ramdev must be first offered an olive branch, and force must be used, if at all, only if the yoga master starts showing intransigent behaviour. This narrative does not stand a moment?s scrutiny because even as the UPA Cabinet ministers, including Pranab Mukherjee, extended the rare courtesy to meet Ramdev as he landed in a private plane, top Congress functionaries like Digvijay Singh had already started airing disapproval of such action on the part of the government. In fact, Digvijay Singh somewhat surprised the government functionaries by ridiculing Ramdev as one whose yoga credentials too were suspect.
Digvijay?s pronouncements showed dissonance between the government and the party even as Kapil Sibal was trying to negotiate a deal with Ramdev. Ramdev too appeared very benign on the day he arrived in Delhi. He said 99% of the issues had been sorted out between him and the government, and that his demands had more or less been conceded by the UPA. The yoga guru appeared so conciliatory as to prompt some political observers to speculate whether the Congress was trying to build him up as its own secular, saffron-clad Sadhu who will counter both the Hindutva elements and civil society luminaries spearheading the Lokpal agitation. Indeed, Ramdev seemed to have some credentials to be propped as Congress?s own saffron counter to the upper caste-dominated Hindutva leadership. Ramdev is a backward caste Yadav and could potentially bring political dividends in the Hindi heartland. It is also interesting to note that many emerging ?spiritual gurus? with reasonably large following are from the non-upper caste segment!
Even if the Congress had a half-baked plan to appropriate Ramdev?s following through an excessively conciliatory approach, the sheer dissonance over this within the Congress party put paid to it. In the end, the outcome of the brutal crackdown was exactly the opposite of what the UPA government would have initially hoped for. Today Ramdev, Anna Hazare and the BJP are thrown together as a united force opposing the government. There couldn?t be a bigger disaster than this in political terms.
Indeed, this is made worse with the Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari bluntly stating on a television channel that the police response is never calibrated and excesses are often committed when the state seeks to restore order.
The larger issue that needs to be examined is whether the government-party dissonance is causing the UPA incalculable harm. It is very apparent that the Cabinet ministers were not on the same page as the party leadership on day one when Ramdev landed in Delhi.
Even in connection with the spectrum allocation scam, it seems there had been some government-party dissonance when it was amply clear that the telecom minister A Raja was being highly unorthodox and irregular in his functioning. Many other instances can be cited where the Prime Minister has been perceived as second guessing the party leadership all the time. Such second guessing was quite apparent even during the Indo-US nuclear deal negotiation, which was all but abandoned before it got revived, again because of support from an influential section of the party. We are constantly seeing such dissonance on other issues too, like evolving a unified approach to the Naxal problem.
Consequently, the response of the state apparatus appears very tentative at all times. More than Manmohan Singh as an individual, it is the moral authority of the executive head that appears fragile these days. In a philosophical sense, the state derives authority from its inherent coercive power which is meant to be used for the larger good of society. A weak government invariably botches up the legitimate use of coercive power, as seen in the Ramdev episode. And mind you, it is not about the excess use of police power in just one instance. It is more about how the people perceive the legitimacy of the Prime Minister?s authority.
John Locke, the 17th century enlightenment philosopher whose treatises on government provided inspiration for the US Constitution, defined coercive power as ?the only appropriate response to the illegitimate use of coercive power? by non-state actors. The UPA needs to recover the legitimacy of its coercive power. Otherwise there will be more drift in governance.
mk.venu@expressindia.com