Was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too quick to admit his government’s inability in controlling prices? His press conference on January 3 sent a verdict of failure of a government already plagued by indecisiveness, amnesia and a paralysis of thought.

Just a few days after the press meet, reports said prices started falling. Last week, newspapers carried the happy news of vegetable prices spiralling downwards since November. These prices could translate, said a report in this paper, into low single digit inflation, perhaps even a deflation for vegetables in the January CPI data. Courtesy low prices of pulses, edible oils and sugar, we might even witness an overall and significant drop in food inflation.

The Congress-led UPA could have claimed credit for this happy setting. It still can, and give the BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi one issue less to add to his agenda as the race heats up. The price fall can also offer the Finance Ministry some justification for nudging the RBI towards a rate cut.

But the Congress is yet to find its moorings. Ever since Singh’s strange press conference took place, the party has not been able to put together a list of its achievements that could prove to be a sturdy bulwark against the BJP’s aggressive and personality-driven campaigns, or the increasingly juvenile conduct of Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP.

The party that lost it In the past few decades, no party could have boasted about its achievements to as large a section of the population as the Congress can. A decade ago, during the 2003-04 polls, the National Democratic Alliance could say it had prepared the grounds for industrial growth; its telecom policies launched communications into the digital age; and its divestment programmes were reasonably successful.

That said, all these and the rise of the Indian IT sector were made possible only because of favourable global trade and the fact that among emerging economies, India’s IT sector was the most prepared to become an off-shored centre for the digitalisation of the US economy. But the NDA’s India Shining credo must have sounded more like an epithet in the ears of the vast numbers of underprivileged for whom the coalition almost had no time.

But UPA-1 did; its common minimum programme may have been inspired by its leftist allies. But the coalition soon found the enchantment of high growth too alluring to bother with the CMP. However, the UPA did a course correction. It tried to reach out to the vast numbers that had not benefitted by the high growth model — women, the young, the poor and the illiterate.

In his press meet, the prime minister did make a reference to inclusive growth. But he obfuscated the issue. Had he mentioned the various rights-based legislations the government had introduced in the last few years, precisely when the UPA was being accused of policy inaction, he could have set the record right. Instead, he held up the nuclear deal as the best thing he had done.

Trivial spat Indecisiveness carries a heavy price in politics and the Congress should be the first to know it. One of the costs is the tendency to focus on the trivial. Last week, taunted by the BJP, the Congress tied itself in knots, and gave Narendra Modi an opportunity to appeal to a wider audience than just the middle class.

Asserting his OBC background, Modi termed the Congress elitist. To a detached viewer, what could have been more ironical than the wide divergence between pedigree and action: a “tea-boy” talks the language of elitist urban-based growth, while a snobbish Rahul Gandhi does the right thing by the underprivileged with a string of enabling legislations.

In fact, the only party that tries to address concerns of the deprived is still the Congress. So it has to step back and away from the personality and focus on the programme. All the more so since the Kejriwal’s AAP seems bent on ruining its own chances at the polls with the party’s anarchic ways in Delhi. The antics of the AAP ministers and Kejriwal himself are embarrassing to the party and its supporters. Those who voted the AAP to power are now getting in return a vivid demonstration of that old cliché that the cure could be worse than the disease.

As for its programme, the news is that the AAP has formed 31 committees to create one. Kejriwal’s booklet of fanciful decentralisation, Swaraj , may or may not find a place in the reckoning of the members assigned to the task — one of whom is a banker with global experience.

But so far Kejriwal has shown little indication of using that booklet as a guiding light. Had he done so, his first act would have been to give the State of Delhi its decentralised mechanism. But he is busy wrecking whatever fragile mechanisms of governance exist in the state and national capital.

Anarchist bunch The AAP’s shenanigans in the capital will muddy the party’s campaign for good governance. Its main constituency is the articulate middle class that would like to believe in honest, efficient officials and ministers running the affairs of state and administration smoothly.

When ministers begin to act like activists or like the Opposition of old, holding up traffic, the ones most affected are the party’s very constituency.

A cross-eyed middle class voter would find it difficult to believe the AAP is anything more than a bunch of ‘anarchists’ or candidates with a skewed sense of humour.

But the more disconcerting aspect of the AAP ministry’s behaviour is that the voter may be left with no moral tales to take away from its agendas. Already, State governments are copying Kejriwal’s populism, which is no different from what has been around for decades.

All that the AAP may have to offer the Indian people is the novelty of a government imploding from the unbearable frivolity of its being.

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