Dear Congress, 'communication' is not your problem, corruption is

Jairam Ramesh calls it ineffective political communication. P Chidambram calls it disconnect. Defeat for the grand old party, possibly its worst ever, is still 17 days away, but the alibi is becoming apparent. The Congress wants India to believe that it did a good job in government but simply failed to tell the country about it. And that the clever marketers in the BJP sold India a dud.

For once, let’s hope that the Congress is only trying to delude India and not itself. Because if, after 16 May, the party convinces itself that the only reason it lost was because of communication problems, it will dash any hope of real change in the Congress.

That the Congress’s top leadership is uncommunicative was not something voters discovered in the course of UPA II. The troika of Sonia, Rahul and Manmohan were equally deafening in their silence in UPA I, but that didn’t stop the party from winning a decisive second mandate. The reason it didn’t matter was because the voters approved of the performance of the government. It presided over very high growth, a couple of radical entitlement schemes — on Information and Work — and steered clear of a major scandal — 2G, CWG and Coalgate were simmering under the surface.

Now, it is possible to make the case that a deft communication strategy can paper over some of the flaws of an under-performing government. But UPA II wasn’t simply an under-performing government. It was a train wreck. Sure, the UPA could have battled the CAG’s claim of a loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore in the 2G scam. But the Radia tapes had already revealed the deep rot in the allocation of spectrum and indeed in the formation of the Union Cabinet. The UPA had too much to hide. It was not in a state of mind to counter-attack. When it did, it chose to make the preposterous “zero loss” claim which was a very poor communications strategy — given how incredulous it sounded in the face of evidence — in the circumstances. Ditto in Coalgate. At best, a good communications strategy could have dispelled the CAG’s gargantuan loss estimate of Rs 1.86 lakh crore, but precisely which communications strategy could have defended the obvious circumvention of due process in the allocation of coal mines?

That’s just corruption. What communications strategy would have convinced the people of India that inflation was just a minor irritant and that the slowdown in growth was because of external factors? To be fair, the government tried even if the Prime Minister and Congress President did not. Its top economists told us that inflation was a price we had to pay for growth, never mind that growth had shrunk. And successive Finance Ministers told us that our growth woes had everything to do with the global slowdown, and not local factors.

The problem with that communications strategy, clever as it was, was that India knew that the growth slowdown had everything to do with local factors such as Jairam Ramesh’s disastrous ’no-go’ environment policies and the Prime Minister’s inability to enforce discipline on his warring Cabinet. It knew that the inflation wasn’t the price that was being paid for growth, but instead was the price being paid for fiscal indiscipline and an unreformed agricultural economy. The best of spin could not have papered over any of that.

The UPA’s problem was not that it did not communicate. The fact is that in its shambolic second term it had nothing to reveal and everything to hide. If it has to reinvent itself after 16 May, the Congress needs to look at its personnel and its cupboard of ideas. There is a lot of dead wood and old ideas which need a rethink and a clean up. Then the Congress will have something worthwhile to communicate. Wouldn’t you agree Mr Chidambaram? And Mr Ramesh?