Commentary/Mani Shakar Aiyar
A word of advice to the PM from a well-wisher
Let me join the nation's favourite guessing game: How long will
Gujral last? Let me begin my declaring my bias. I want Gujral
to last. Just as I was despairing of where we were taking this
country in the 50th year of our Independence, we have
found the answer in a true Nehruvian.
Gujral, by training and temperament, ideology and inclination,
as a philosopher and a politician, as a scholar and a statesman,
in integrity and incorruptibility, experience and understanding,
is just the right man for our turbulent times.
His government must last. And he must be made to understand by
his well-wishers, like myself, how to make it last.
The portents are not encouraging. Parliament's most distinguished
Nehruvian has been elected to the Rajya Sabha by a margin of a
half a vote and that too courtesy Laloo's Bihar.
It is a reflection on how far we have fallen from democratic norms
that the three main contenders for the leadership of the nation
are all Rajya Sabha members - Kesri, Moopanar and Gujral - and
that they were in the running to replace a Deve Gowda who, even
as the incumbent prime minister, could not find one constituency
in 542 to secure the mandate of the people to continue in that
high office.
Gujral, as a true Nehruvian, will, I trust, remember Nehru's,
fury when ex-governor general C Rajagopalachari slunk into the
chief ministership of what was then called the Province of Madras
by getting himself elected an MLC - and that too from the graduates
constituency. Rajagopalachari had discovered there was no constituency
from which he could get elected in all of the former Presidency
which he had led, undisputed, for all of three decades from slavery
to freedom.
Unsurprisingly, Rajaji's chief ministership lasted but
a few months. Gujral's may not last much longer unless he first
restores the healthy convention that prime ministers must be from
the Lok Sabha.
Even then, there is no telling whether Gujral will be able to
last out the remaining four years to the next scheduled general
elections.
That, in my view, depends of whether Gujral will be able to rise
above the temptations of being a departmental minister. As a departmental
minister, he has been superlatively good, especially in his second
term in external affairs.
What he needs now to recognise is that a prime minister really
holds only two portfolios - the portfolio for assuring stable
governance and the portfolio for maintaining the unity and integrity
of the country.
These are two tasks that no minister other than the prime minister
can perform. If Gujral allows himself to be distracted into making
up for the many lapses of his wholly incompetent ministerial colleagues,
he will get so lost in the trees as to forget the woods.
And if he allow his skills at diplomacy to tempt him into jetting
round the world in search of photo opportunities, he might just
land back one day to find that his castle has been built on air.
No. The twin jobs to which he must wholly devote himself, at least
for the foreseeable future, are: stability of governance and the
unity of the nation.
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