How Singh Blew India’s Moment

Thus the government under Singh focused mostly on costly programs designed to offer a "new deal to rural India." The result was what New Delhi political analyst Yogendra Yadav calls "some of the most progressive legislation" in Indian history. But the programs often fell short of their promise. The government's signature rural employment scheme, which guarantees 100 days of work to the country's poorest villagers, provided jobs to some 34 million Indians last year, but it has been dogged by corruption allegations. A crash program to electrify 50,000 rural villages in three years has reached only 6 percent of the households it targeted. And by connecting villages to a decrepit electrical grid without adding new power-generation and transmission capacity, it may actually reduce the number of hours of electricity many poor Indians receive. Plans for improved irrigation and access to clean drinking water are also woefully behind schedule. An $18 billion loan-waiver program for farmers was initially greeted with applause in a country where many heavily indebted farmers resort to suicide. But its ultimate impact will likely prove limited because it excludes loans from private lenders. "Have these programs put in place a virtuous circle of growth and incomes? No, they have not," says the Eurasia Group's Desai.

Nor have the social-welfare programs slowed Congress's decades-long decline in political support. Part of the problem, says Yadav, is that "this government seems happy just to enact things and not follow up." Implementation has often been left to India's 28 state governments, just eight of which Congress controls. Another problem is that Singh, by all accounts an honest official himself, has placed too much faith in India's ineffectual and often corrupt civil servants. G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, a political analyst with Development & Research Services, a New Delhi consulting firm, argues that vast amounts of money have been wasted on administration and siphoned off by dishonest officials. Congress lacks the kind of organization that could send loyalists to remote villages to ride herd on local officials, ensure programs are implemented correctly—and guarantee that Congress gets credit for them. "Not only do you need policies," Yadav says, "you need politics."

The division of power between Singh and Gandhi also created a leadership vacuum that let ministers pursue their own interests. Arjun Singh, the minister for Human Resource Development and an old-time Congress boss, dragged his feet on the prime minister's education reforms. Anbumani Ramadoss, the Health minister, engaged in an embarrassing public feud with the director of a top hospital while the government missed its health-care spending targets and the ruling coalition repeatedly broke its pledge to bring forward a bill designed to combat the rampant sale of counterfeit drugs. The Steel and Defense ministers have also been accused of following their own agendas at the expense of the government's.

Now double-digit inflation, the highest in 16 years, promises to undermine whatever limited good will Congress has bought with its social spending. Rising food costs have hit the poor particularly hard. Many expect the government to use the time it has left to take harsh steps to combat surging prices. But with India's central bank already having raised interest rates to a record-high 8.5 percent, the government has few arrows left in its quiver.

Singh's foreign-policy efforts seem similarly moribund. Even the recent nuclear breakthrough was years in the making, and Singh may have waited too long before forcing it past his domestic opponents. Now there may not be enough time to rush the deal through the U.S. Congress before George W. Bush leaves office in January. (Bush is pushing lawmakers to approve the deal this month.) And after an initial flurry of peace overtures to Pakistan, during which Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf met four times and the latter said Islamabad might be willing to relinquish claim on Kashmir, momentum stalled. Musharraf was distracted by his own problems at home, and terrorist attacks against Indian targets made it difficult for Singh to continue peace negotiations. Yet the prime minister himself deserves part of the blame. He became personally disengaged from the peace process and left it to the bureaucracy—with predictable results.

Singh's government doesn't have much time left to turn things around: it has seven months at the most before the next general election, and electoral law limits its ability to introduce new programs after January. In an ominous sign, Congress has lost all four state elections held so far this year. Relations between Congress and its new coalition partner—the scandal-prone Samajwadi Party (SP), which draws most of its support from lower-caste Hindus and Muslims in Uttar Pradesh—have already grown strained. Singh has pushed back the start of the next session of Parliament from Aug. 11 until October, perhaps in order to limit the time he must share power with the SP or in the hope that the U.S. Congress approves the nuclear deal before the session opens. Either way it will leave Singh less time to pass reforms. Some analysts expect Congress to call for early elections—perhaps as soon as December—in the hopes of catching the BJP off guard. Whenever it comes, however, the vote will be a referendum on Congress and Manmohan Singh. And if they lose, it certainly won't be by accident.

© 2008