Khare's 'Advice' to UPA on Statecraft

Harish Khare’s op-ed on ‘statecraft’ is a good read of how not to conduct it. He starts out fine:

As most political innovations go, the UPA was born out of sheer expediency. It remains essentially a power-sharing mechanism, tactically an anti-BJP conglomeration, and symbolically an anti-communal, secular front. It has yet to realize its promise as the arrangement that will help the Indian state maximize its power potential at home and abroad.

So far so good. Then it goes off the rails.

If the BJP and the NDA find themselves stranded in the margins of political imagination, it is because the Left parties have managed to appropriate the opposition space. Be it people-centric issues or the disquiet over the proposed closer ties with the United States, the Left was first off the block in protest. In any case, because of its class composition and ideological preferences, the BJP has long ceased to speak for the masses, especially the poor. The Left may have caused considerable discomfort to the UPA but it has also helped to checkmate the NDA.

Left has managed to appropriate the opposition space. Left has checkmated the NDA. Eh? The left is limited to three small states in India and that is it. It is hardly in a position to checkmate a major national party like the BJP. BJP has ceased to speak for the poor. How does Khare know? Did the poor call him up to inform him about their changed preferences? The left and the BJP have been taking very similar positions on most issues. Yet, in his eyes, the Left gets all the credit and the BJP gets none. Both of those claims are mutually contradictory which only goes to show that they are not only patently false but utterly confused.

Perhaps in no other country have the Islamist terrorists been so forthrightly isolated within their community as in India. It is no surprise that the “Indian Mujahideen” (the group that claimed responsibility for the Jaipur blasts) reserves its harshest words for those Muslim leaders who have tried to inoculate the community against the jihadi agenda.

If the terrorists were so isolated within their communities, the intelligence community ought to have been able to gather information in advance and prevent it. Yet, the fact that the blasts were carried out successfully tells a different story that they are not entirely isolated and have managed to build and sustain a critical mass of support within the community that allows them to carry out their sinister agenda. Their harsh words for the Muslim leaders indicate their outrage that the clerics have sold out their community. The email and the blasts may well be their way of attempting to win their community’s hearts and minds by highlighting their grievances while highlighting their ability to take revenge for them at the same time – a case for vengeance and a show of strength at the same time. It tells me that the battle for hearts and minds has only begun, not ended as Khare seems to think.

This wholesome beginning needs to be encouraged to deepen and consolidate itself if this country hopes to defeat the terrorist’s challenge. That challenge can be met only if we are allowed to prefer the politics of inclusion and accommodation over the politics of division and exclusion (code words: minorityism, appeasement, vote-bank politics, etc.). The terrorist’s tactics are calculated to provoke rage; the secular challenge is to defeat all those whose politics depends on working on the citizens’ anger, anxiety and resentment over the terrorist’s ability to get away.

The secular challenge is not to defeat terror but to defeat the politics that accompanies and follows the attacks. No word on the need to mobilize the country to defeat these devastating attacks on soft targets that are occurring almost as a matter of routine, only advice on PR strategy to deal with its aftermath. God help India with advisers like Harish Khare.

Thus, between now and the next Lok Sabha election, the UPA leaders need, first, to convince themselves and, then, the voters that the country has done reasonably well in providing a caring, governing arrangement. By accommodating regional voices and aspirations, the Manmohan Singh government commends itself as a worthwhile experiment in initiating regional leaders into the responsibility of governing from New Delhi this vast country.

Someone ought to tell Khare that coalition governments have been the norm for quite a while and this is hardly the first time that the experiment is being conducted. National Front government led by V.P.Singh, United Front led by Gowda and Gujral – remember? Even the NDA government was a coalition. What exactly is so new or commendable about Manmohan Singh ‘accomodating regional voices and aspirations’? It is not as if the Congress does not want to be ruling on its own. It is simply that they have been forced to accommodate regional voices for the sake of getting the magic number.

It may be that often these regional leaders have not met the “mainstream” standards of probity and competence; but these standards can be enforced only in an environment of non-partisanship and non-divisive politics. Be that as it may, the best interests of the Indian state can be defended and promoted only if the “national” and the “regional” leaders and parties arrive at a working protocol.

‘Not met the ‘mainstream’ standards of probity and competence’ is polite language for corrupt and incompetent. National and regional leaders and parties should arrive at a working protocol says Khare. Actually they have. It is called a coalition government where cabinet positions and other appointments are parceled out to party leaders to fill with their chosen nominees. Failed nuclear deal,no firm action on terrorism,a virtually halted reform agenda, overreach on the price rise issue, eviction of Taslima - certainly the list of documented ‘achievements’is a long one for everyone to see how the best interests of the country are being defended by this ‘working protocol’.

However, irrespective of the BJP’s inadequacies in answering the polity’s needs, the country will still yearn for a more decisive and more effective governance than the UPA has been able to provide these last four years. The “mainstream” discourse insists on a “firm” response to a meddlesome Pakistan, and an insensitive United States…

Mainstream India insists on a firm response so that it does not recur. The focus is not on any country but on solving the problem. The answer is the same whether it is people within India or Pakistan or Bangladesh. An ‘insensitive United States’? The US concluded the nuclear deal with India. They have offered sophisticated military equipment for the Indian military to buy. And they have pressured Pakistan into peacefully resolving Kashmir. How is any of this ‘insensitive’?

Khare’s cheap partisan potshots have gotten the better of his analytical abilities. His motives and assertions are so hollow, blatantly partisan and transparently false that his and his paper’s credibility are likely to be the only casualties of his casuistry.