Party vs government

In India the established principles of the parliamentary system governing the relationship between the ruling party and its government in power have been subjected to great stress.

A recent clash in public between two powerful general secretaries of the Congress brought to the fore the relations that have subsisted between the Congress and the government headed by Dr Manmohan Singh.

When the Congress emerged as the largest single party in the 2004 general election, everyone expected its president Sonia Gandhi to head the coalition. Instead, she gave the palm to Dr Manmohan Singh who is a highly respected economist but is no politician.

Though a sound working relationship developed in the last nine years, there was no mistaking where the seat of power lay. On a good few key issues, the prime minister pushed through policies which bore his deep personal impress, despite criticisms within the party. The Indo-US nuclear deal is one example. The peace process with Pakistan is another. To some other issues, Sonia Gandhi lent her weight; for example the Right to Information Act.

This equation received a rude jolt recently. Quite out of the blue, Digvijay Singh, general secretary of the Congress, said last month “this model has not worked very well. There should be no two power centres … Whoever is prime minister must have authority to function although Sonia Gandhi has really never interfered”.

Three points deserve note. This well-informed man tells us that the relationship between the party chief and head of government “has not worked very well”. His assertion that the former has “really never interfered” is palpably untrue. She does so, albeit with circumspection, especially in appointments to the cabinet and in key sectors of the
bureaucracy.

The principle he propounded is the bedrock of the parliamentary system the world over — “whoever is prime minister must have authority to function”. Power must reside with the prime minister who is responsible to parliament, and to no external authority.

A correction followed swiftly through another general secretary, Janardan Dwivedi, who said on April 2: “The relationship which exists between Sonia Gandhi as Congress president and Manmohan Singh as prime minister is unique and something which has never been seen before, I think, in any democracy.”

No one had any doubt as to who inspired, rather instructed, this direct contradiction of a colleague’s statement. People asked as to what did the words “for future also” signify, especially since, on April 15, for the first time, Dr Manmohan Singh refused to rule out a third term for himself while Rahul Gandhi has shown signs of reluctance to grasp the reins of power.

Dwivedi was altogether wrong when he claimed that this model “has never been seen before”. In no other country, to be sure; but it was tried in India more than once. From January 1966 when she became prime minister till 1969, when she split the Congress, the proud Indira Gandhi was obliged to pay obeisance to the Congress president K. Kamaraj.

So did P.V. Narasimha Rao to Sonia Gandhi in the first few months after he became prime minister in 1991. Manmohan Singh has neither the ambition nor the aptitude for such games. Nor was Atal Behari Vajpayee his own master as prime minister. In 1998, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh overruled his choice of Jaswant Singh as finance minister.

This was a pronounced deviation from the settled rules of the parliamentary system. Unless it is corrected, the system will survive only as a lifeless skeleton. Its roots lie in the practices established during the freedom movement. They were not discarded completely after independence.

When the Congress first formed ministries in several provinces in 1937, the party leadership nominated the premiers in all but name. The ministries were regarded as a front in the struggle for freedom and were responsible to the Congress leadership.
Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah called “the Congress high command” a “fascist grand council”.

In an article published in Time and Tide (London) on Jan 18, 1940, he squarely said: “It is their desire [that the central and provincial governments should be] responsible not to their legislatures or to the electorate but to a caucus, unknown to the constitution, the working committee of the Congress.”

After independence, breaches became more pronounced. Now, no Congress chief minister can form a cabinet, expand it, dismiss a minister or advise the governor to dissolve the assembly without the approval of the central leadership.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became president of the Congress after he had defeated challenges to his authority. Congress presidents who were elected later were the ones who enjoyed his blessings and knew their place. Once Indira Gandhi became all powerful she reduced the party to an appendage of the government.

Nehru’s dicta were contradictory. In November 1937, he wrote: “It is to the Congress as a whole that the electorate gave allegiance, and it is the Congress that is responsible to the electorate. The ministers and the Congress parties in the legislatures are responsible to the Congress and only through it to the electorate.”

After independence, when the top leadership was in government, Nehru said that “normally a party executive lays down the broadest lines of policy and leaves it to the government to work it out”. That is the correct position.

In Britain, the party lays down the policy and drafts the election manifesto. Its MPs pledge themselves to fulfil the promise made in the document but their implementation rests with the government responsible only to the House of Commons — and to none else.

Prof R.T. McKenzie, an authority on British political parties, wrote of both parties the Conservatives and Labour “neither party in parliament allows itself to be directed or controlled by its mass organisation”. The leader is elected by the parliamentary party; not nominated by the party outside.

The writer is an author and a lawyer