State of play: When families fall apart and politics is all

The moves that the once canny, well oiled wrestler Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh made, as they warily circled each other in the slippery akhara that is the political battleground in Uttar Pradesh and then lost both government and power is a salutary lesson that when families, particularly political pariwars fall apart, it can get very ugly. More mud, more blood in this akhara.

 With the Yadav father and son, one party is suspected to have a debilitating disease, a foot in the grave, manipulated into splitting the party and sinking their own government. But with Yashwant Sinha, who out of the flippin’ blue, unleashed a stinging critique on the state of the nation and the parlous financials of the India account that he once managed, saying he felt “it was my duty to speak out”, there’s no question of this man being in his dotage. Far from it!

Bitingly articulate, still sharp, the former finance minister has set off a storm. And on Saturday, he was joined alarmingly for its political arm, the BJP by the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. He spoke out against the growing agrarian distress across the country. He highlighted the plight of big and SMEs, the small retailers and the millions of landless labourers who were cashless after the double blow of demonetisation and GST. He then advised members of “ Niti Aayog and the economic advisers of the states to come out of the "same old economic 'isms'" and integrate up-to-date economic experiences with the country's ground reality.” Ouch!

Kept out of the new BJP government as have a slew of other stalwarts from the earlier Vajpayee era, everyone thought Yashwant Sinha had faded into obscurity, unlike his son, Jayant, a former junior minister in the self same ministry of finance who was shifted out to civil aviation, and has been a part of the Modi government from the word go.

With his son responding with a counter article that defended the government, and the unpleasant father versus son duel, joined by a whole battery of loyalists willing to stand up and be counted as in the Piyush Goyals and Ravi Shankar Prasads and Rajnaths, not to mention the man under attack, Arun Jaitley himself, Jayant was clearly not alone. But for all of us, who watched the jaw-dropping broadside by Yashwant Sinha on the unsuspecting FinMin - “PM claims he’s seen poverty from close quarters, but his finance minister is working over-time to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters" and Jaitley’s ‘Yashwant, a job applicant at 80’ and ‘weren’t you sacked as FinMin’, it was Bhagwat’s counter that dispelled the notion that Yashwant Sinha’s was the lone voice.

As Jayant defended his former boss, the man his father aka ‘the Rollback FM’ dubbed ‘Superman’ and the ‘hard landing’ the older man predicts for the Indian economy, Yashwant had gone on every conceivable television channel, raising even more uncomfortable questions about the government’s handling of the economy, his son’s motivation at coming at him, and of course, the continuing target of his ire, Delhi’s most successful and popular lawyer whom he accuses of sleeping on the job.

Yashwant is probably the last of the Margdarshaks who hasn’t been put out to pasture. With nothing to lose he doesn’t want his old job back, he can’t have his old job back he is quite clearly, unhappy with the marg of the nation. Preceded in his critique by known mavericks and once diehard supporters of the Prime Minister, Subramaniam Swamy alongside old cohorts Gurumurthy and Arun Shourie, one thought wrongly that Yashwant was the only standout, the lone voice in the wilderness. But with Bhagwat’s dissection of the direction that the economy is taking, in an eerie echo of Yashwant Sinha, the BJP may not be able to tamp down all criticism from within.

There’s no argument that the economy needs attention. Jaitley had admitted as much before Swamy and Sinha went public without actually saying what the two of them said - that the seeds of the problem were sown with demonetization and GST and the inability to see or predict what was coming even as sector after sector, from real estate to construction to manufacturing and jobs slumped to its slowest pace and economic growth to a low of 5.7%.

I remember an interview with Infy founding father N.R. Narayan Murthy back in 2008, years before Raghuram Rajan became RBI Governor, when Mr. Murthy lavished praise on the then Booth School of Business professor for predicting the sub-prime crisis that derailed the U.S. economy. Clearly, Rajan had seen the economic storm brewing on our horizon. Now that he’s no longer available on tap for a turnaround, its time for the battery of economists and financial wizards in the finance ministry and the RBI and the newly revived economic advisory council to tell it like it is. Sugar-coating the truth doesn’t help the nation or its leaders from making the right call at the right time.

It’s all about perception. As an influential insider revealed, India, the world’s largest democracy counted for nothing in Washington and other world capitals like Tokyo until the first nuclear tests and the rapid economic growth, showed that India, could one day rise to rival China and become an economic powerhouse and a military power in its own right.

Perception is everything, as is sending out the right message. Sinha’s home truths may have hurt, but halting the Indian economy’s free fall will negate all the gains the government has made. There’s no place at the high table, at BRICS or G20, or the UN, for a failed state. No sense in ignoring what everyone acknowledges is truth.

Our own father-son duo of H.D. Deve Gowda and H.D.Kumaraswamy are a great example of how political pariwars work. The son and heir to the JD (S) is in hospital recovering from surgery. He and his father haven’t always seen eye to eye and have had many a falling out. But the acrimony and the angst rarely spills into the open. This week, as the Mayoral elections got underway, the behind the scenes deal between the Congress and the JD(S) in the run-up to the contest was an open secret. But the name of the candidate that the JD(S) would pick as its wo‘man’ for deputy mayor wasn’t. But Mr Deve Gowda, in a move that marks him for the master he is, produced a sealed envelope that he said was from his son, in which HDK had named the person he wanted for the post! A son, just out of surgery? Some pariwars never change!