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The Art Of Doing The Sin(g)hasana

The sameness in name disguises a stark departure in style and thought — and more than a little carryover from their ex-portfolios

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The Art Of Doing The Sin(g)hasana
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You could call it Fortress India. Even if a pretty one. Some 11 years after reforms began, North Block has undergone a swank facelift, with plush red carpeting, fresh flowers, silk rugs and new installations like a huge Konark wheel. Advisors have been appointed, key secretaries put in place, the press office shifted to a safe distance from finance minister Jaswant Singh's office. All these to smoothen the working of the nation's economy as well as to channel and plug information flow. "The FM will talk only if there is some information to give," an important-sounding officer told us some time ago. And presumably there was none for him to give till early November, when the first of the interviews to three business dailies was released. A full four months after he was sworn in on July 4.

Even those interviews were timed with the controversy over the report on direct taxes by his close advisor and former finance secretary Vijay Kelkar. A report which he himself hasn't read. Grumbled an industry bigwig at the World Economic Forum (WEF) conference last week where Singh, along with his boss, made news for their supreme indifference to it: "There's just no news coming out of North Block any more, good or bad. Like Chanakya, he's surrounded himself with a few trusted people." Businessmen, said another, may have a better chance of getting their pleas heard by the finance minister if they can identify the piece of classical music playing in his office rather than the problems in the economy.

Comparisons are known to be odious yet one is tempted to contrast Singh's stylistic running of North Block with his predecessor's. Indeed, it's a comparison that's been forced on us by the government: almost the entire world took note of India's remarkable exchange of offices between the same-named finance and external affairs ministers. There seemed to be little rationale behind either Singh or Sinha getting their current jobs. Singh's connection with finance was all of 13 days, while Sinha was first secretary and then consul-general at Frankfurt (1971-74). So contrast Singh's elitism with the style and functioning of swap-colleague Yashwant Sinha, his predecessor in finance and inheritor in external affairs and you realise that the inevitable has happened: the external affairs ministry has suddenly more economic jobs to do than ever while the staid North Block has acquired a princely South Block aura.

Since his takeover, say top-level external affairs officials, Sinha has made an understated but forceful plea for India to stop obsessing over Pakistan and focus instead on strengthening economic diplomacy with neighbours and asean nations. He's visited all neighbour countries except China and gone ahead with several bilateral economic projects. He's begun small, preferring to bypass the rich and powerful, but already indicating that he's more than willing to strike a balance between the much-wooed West and the ignored rest of the world, especially the East. Sinha may not have blazed a remarkable trail but he's managed to drum up enough support and goodwill at home and abroad for his pleasant demeanour and clear thinking on bilateral economics.

Clearly at home among bureaucrats, Sinha has several senior external affairs babus, known for their nose-in-the-air attitude, already eating out of his hands. His singing Bhojpuri songs at Laos is already part of diplomatic folklore—even the snootiest of them have had to grudgingly acknowledge the successful combination of candour and expertise in the man. His namesake across the road, on the other hand, still carries the halo around him. For the first time, North Block has a top-heavy system with three ministers of state (including Kelkar) and six secretaries (including chief economic advisor Ashok Lahiri).Singh doesn't meet any official below the rank of secretary and files carry most of the communication between him and his officers. While he lets the bureaucrats do their job, it's strictly a structured responsibility-and-rewards system in North Block. "From the disarming openness of Sinha, it's been a striking change of style and functioning in North Block, with the result that the junior officers don't feel much sense of involvement," says a veteran finance ministry official.

In contrast, Sinha, who was attacked throughout his tenure as FM, gets a far more positive report card from his underlings. Says a senior official, "Diplomacy is not only about impressing, it's also about communicating. Often, candour does the job that style cannot. Sinha has consciously tried to focus on the greater role of economics in diplomacy and how the mea can promote trade and investments. He's working to build a trust among our neighbors that here's a country they can work with." The several economic deals with neighbours—like the Mekong-Ganga project, Indo-Lanka ferry service, the bus service with Bangladesh, the highway project with Myanmar, or the generous aid to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Laos—bear this out. Adds the official, "He's focusing on the big picture: all these small deals also smoothen a lot of the rough edges that are merely adding to our own law and order problem in the border states."

If officials are now finding hidden virtues in Sinha, it's not because they are already disenchanted with Singh. After all, he's barely started. And he started well, making the right noises about protecting people's pockets and following them up with bail-outs. For Singh, the highest imperative was to control the damage already done and not repeat Sinha's mistakes. Quips an observer, "The one-point programme for the party was DAMC—whatever you do, just Don't Annoy the Middle Class."

The wooing was sweet but short. Reforms had to take precedence and for a finance minister, the success of his tenure depends on how palatable he can make his bitter pills. The fdi and disinvestment wrangle, the bail-outs, the tax report, the economic bills—all these point to some very fundamental conflicts within the government and the NDA, the burden of which must be borne by the FM's office. Says a senior government economist, "It reflects the enormous power the insiders, the functionaries or those protected by the laws, have vis-a-vis the outsiders, the clear beneficiaries of these changes. It shows how much farther we've to go to make reforms politically acceptable."

Industry, clearly, has lost faith. It's not just the Kelkar report, businessmen accuse Singh of being aloof and reluctant to attend meets. His participation at many conferences, including the recent wef meet, was cancelled at the last moment.

To be fair to Singh, he's trying. Many aver he's been the only finance minister to show a clear grasp of the need for political packaging of reforms. In every country that has gone through economic policy-churning, the UK for instance, the polity was prepared for it, so how can a poor country like India be any exception? And to Singh's credit, the few times he has spoken, he's been transparent about his jobsheet and the fact that he is, as described by ex-finance secretary C.M. Vasudev, "a big-picture man", and definitely not the master of details.

Take for instance his aim to put the Kelkar report on the Net, a first step towards his goal of a completely open-budget system, an experiment attempted only by Chandrababu Naidu. Critics say it's nothing but a logical culmination of the process started by Manmohan Singh: the first tax commission report by Raja Chelliah, who was also put on a minister-of-state rank, was distributed along with the 1991 budget for dissemination since the Net was not so widely accessed then.But many of Jaswant Singh's plans are being frustrated by the babus. They buried the direct tax report by Kelkar who, as an advisor to the finance minister, is still seen an outsider. Kelkar is now rewriting his tax package. The same fate befell N.K. Singh's fdi report, which he prepared hush-hush in the Planning Commission and which was reportedly valiantly defended by Singh, but the Sangh parivar held sway. Insiders say that even Lahiri, a former economic advisor on fiscal policy in North Block, is yet to get on to the right side of Singh despite the fact that he's now one-and-a-half-months old.

Now that the bills have started moving in Parliament, will there be some long-overdue activity in North Block too? So far, Singh's been politically inexplicable—look how he shrugged off his association with the Kelkar report. But even Singh's friends say his heart is not in the job. He loathes finance and pines for the foreign office. Still, he enjoys the supreme confidence of the prime minister and knows how to keep the deputy PM in good humour. He still has the economic advisors siding with him. Sinha may have already been declared a survivor by making the best of a banishment but Jaswant hopefully will prove to be a successful short-distance runner.

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