Strolling the sunset boulevard of his term, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has had enough with being lonely at the top. He has few confidants who can give him a sense of personal empowerment, nor too many hands to supply him with ideas on the move or willing to carry his advice and views forward.
Nonetheless, stung by the audacious campaign of the saffron challenger Narendra Modi who has contemptuously given Singh sobriquets like “night watchman” and attacked him on secularism and Sardar Patel, the PM has realised—although belatedly—that he has no storm troopers of his own unlike Rahul Gandhi or Sonia. Hence, he is on discreet recruitment drive to form a crisis team of his own; not necessarily in tandem with the Congress party, but with a handful of senior members and ministers of his party.
Voluble Cabinet colleagues like Law Minister Kapil Sibal, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma and Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari are in parleys with their boss on a routine basis on how to checkmate Modi on issues ranging from secularism, foreign policy, economy and public image to governance.
If need be, Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo and the politically and intellectually savvy Science and Technology Minister Jaipal Reddy would be fielded to highlight the Manmohan-led government’s stellar programmes to the public, so that the UPA’s roster of successes can be saved from drowning in Modi’s propaganda hurricane.
The chief ministers who have been commandeered into the Manmohan Parivar are those of the states where the Modi blitzkrieg is expected to be extensive: Prithviraj Singh Chavan of Maharashtra where the Gujarat general would try to polarise votes, Oommen Chandy in Kerala where the survival of the scam-ridden Congress is at stake, Tarun Gogoi in Assam where anti-Bangladeshi riots had claimed many lives and Siddaramaiah in Karnataka where the Congress is determined to defend its hard-won citadel.
It’s not an easy task. It’s not just because the PM’s time and energy is perennially consumed by the usual conveyor-belt of issues, like CHOGM, the CBI’s legal status and investigations, food inflation, or Andhra bifurcation. Modi has already covered much ground. A driving force in himself, he has already traversed most of the country, addressing over 15 rallies in Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad (AP-Telangana), Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Singh was yet to address a single rally. When he did in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, on Saturday it was not a routine campaign by a PM in a poll-bound state, but an attempt to take on the NaMo brand of politics with an alternative plan and direct attack on Chief Minister Raman Singh.
A senior minister with whom the PM had a strategy discussion recently was surprised to see that, far from being dispirited, he was taking a keen interest in developing a ‘how-to’ strategy to counter the Modi campaign. The Gujarat CM, the PM’s team concedes, has successfully used the state elections to promote himself on the national arena, setting the stage for next year’s big showdown.
The focus, the PM feels, should be to bring the whole debate back on to issues and not allow it to get reduced to “name-calling”. As part of his initiative, the PM is in the process of meeting CMs of Congress-ruled states (barring perhaps Andhra’s Kiran Reddy, who’s in an exceptional situation). The idea is not only to plan how their record on social sector schemes, human indices and business environment could be highlighted, but also to seek their opinions on how to put Modi down in his own game.
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