By M D Nalapat
Regulation
following regulation, law after law, procedure upon procedure got
changed for the worse during the UPA decade, to silence from Past Rahul.
After
several false alarms, is it possible that this time around also,
Congress president Sonia Gandhi will allow her longtime
retainer-confidants to yet again delay handing over the formal
leadership of the party to AICC vice-president Rahul Gandhi? After the
2014 collapse of the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls, it was clearly
time for a change in the party leadership. Given that members of the
Congress Party are temperamentally unable to coalesce around any
individual other than from the Nehru family, it was inevitable that only
Rahul could make the cut, given the Vadra factor affecting sister
Priyanka. With little more than a year to go before the Lok Sabha polls,
Rahul needs to take over before it is too late for him to have a viable
chance of setting a course that could enable Congress to challenge and
even surprise the BJP. His success as party chief will hinge on whether
Future Rahul will be different from Past Rahul. Throughout the ten years
of the Manmohan Singh government, in which the remote control was
firmly in Sonia Gandhi’s grip, there was little trace of the Present
Rahul. If the Congress vice-president had any objections to the many
restrictive laws and policies operationalised during 2004-14, he has
kept them to himself. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, for instance,
increased the powers of his officials to a level that substantially
increased chances for the harassment that is the Standard Operating
Procedure of corrupt officials . Rahul watched silently even while Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh equated through law the bribe giver with the
bribe taker, thereby ensuring that nobody, who had been forced to pay a
bribe, would ever reveal that transaction.
In coal, spectrum, petrochemicals and in
numerous other fields, official decisions got taken that had no basis in
any calculus except that of greed. Favoured businesspersons would buy
assets and companies abroad at low prices and later offload them to PSUs
at a huge premium. When Pranab Mukherjee was made Finance
Minister—possibly because of his world record of imposing a tax rate of
97.25% while serving Indira Gandhi—and expectedly crafted a budget that
severely damaged long-term business confidence, Rahul was as silent as
when Home Minister Chidambaram introduced the Kafkaesque visa provision
that no foreigner could visit India within six months of an earlier
visit. Such a prohibition makes as little sense as the present rule for
e-visas that only two single entry applications are allowable per person
in a single year. Is India so awful that two visits would be the
maximum that could be expected?
Regulation following regulation, law
after law, procedure upon procedure got changed for the worse during the
UPA decade, to silence from Past Rahul, although Present Rahul nowadays
condemns similar genuflections to bureaucratic excess, most recently in
the matter of how GST has been conceived and implemented. A senior
official was fully justified in pointing out that “the present GST is
neither good nor simple”. But this is what comes of a process of
governance in which only the civil service, and not civil society, is
seriously involved in conceiving policies and processes.
Together with the RBI’s total failure to
ensure adequate liquidity when demonetisation was introduced, and the
fact that compliance is a nightmare for small and medium GST taxpayers,
the possibility of a further erosion in the economy is what opens the
possibility of Lok Sabha 2019 repeating 2004.
Once his party was humiliated at the
polls and driven out of office, Present Rahul emerged, and this has been
a welcome improvement over the past. Present Rahul joined hands with
Subramanian Swamy (who is not among Sonia Gandhi’s more ardent admirers)
in seeking to do away with another of the many archaic provisions in
the law, “Criminal” Defamation. Post-2014, Rahul has talked in favour of
lower curbs on the internet, a huge departure from his acquiescence in
earlier Chidambaram-Sibal monstrosities such as the revised Information
Technology Act, whose provisions have unexpectedly found favour with the
present government as well. As indeed have a plethora of other pre-Modi
regulations and laws that need to be eliminated if efficiency and
growth, not to mention the rights of citizens in a democracy, are to be a
part of the Indian experience. Even on matters as toxic to
traditionalists as doing away with outdated IPC provisions on same-sex
relationship, Present Rahul has taken a stand that reflects the
realities of the 21st century and not the 19th clung on to by the UPA.
On economic policy, Present Rahul has
warned against tax terrorism, although he was silent during the period
when Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee were handling the Finance
portfolio, and raids and prosecutions were common. Not having a direct
line to power seems to have made Rahul Gandhi realise that it is India’s
hyper-regulated and hyper-expensive governance mechanism that is
keeping the people of our country so pathetically poor. But should his
party once again get back into the portals of governance, will Present
Rahul soon make way for Past Rahul? Will the Chidambarams and the Sibals
return to impose their colonial vision on the country, after a hiatus
in which both have donned the garb of “minimum government” votaries, or
will there be new people chosen? Will Sachin Pilot and Manish Tewari
return to their UPA-era aloof mien from their present approachability?
Will Rahul Gandhi once more forget that the English language is a boon
and not a curse, or that secularism does not mean adherence only to the
views of minority fundamentalists and not the moderate majority within
the minority? Will he follow Sonia Gandhi in again pushing the majority
community back towards second-class status? Or will Future Rahul accept
that secularism means equal rights and treatment for all, rather than
favoured treatment for some at the expense of the others? What is clear
is that if Present Rahul morphs back to Past Rahul in the—still
unlikely—eventuality of his party returning to power in 2019, he as
Congress president will be attending the swearing-in ceremony of Prime
Minister Adityanath in 2024, if not earlier.
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