First D.K.Sinha Memorial Lecture

By

Shri L.K. Advani

Leader of the Opposition (Lok Sabha)

New Delhi – 8 July 2008

Shri Aman Sinha and distinguished members of the audience,

It gives me great pleasure to be with you today. I thank the organisers for inviting me to deliver the First D.K. Sinha Memorial Lecture.

The late D.K. Sinha was an eminent advocate in the Supreme Court of India. He served with great distinction as a senior law officer with several state governments and government agencies. Despite being a busy lawyer, he also actively pursued his interest in social service. I am glad that his son Shri Aman Sinha has continued his noble legacy by, among other things, instituting this annual series of memorial lectures.

The theme for today’s lecture — ‘Transparency & Accountability in Governance’ — is highly topical. Indeed, it has become more topical due to the political developments of the past few months, because of which governance at the Centre has come to a standstill. Indeed, the government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has been in limbo for a long time, for at least a year now.

Even as we have assembled here for this lecture, the Left parties, on whose support the government has survived for so long, have taken a crucial decision earlier in the day. They have formally announced withdrawal of their support to the UPA government due to irreconcilable differences over the Indo-US nuclear cooperation deal. The government — which, as I have said, is already in a state of paralysis — has lost its majority. It will be incumbent on the government now to seek a vote of confidence in Parliament.

Minority Govt cannot take next steps in the Nuclear Deal

Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has said yesterday that he would do so. I welcome his statement. However, the question is “When?” There are many instances in the recent past when a state government that has lost its majority, has been asked by the Governor to seek a vote of confidence on the floor of the House within a reasonable period of time. But the “reasonable period of time” cannot be arbitrarily long. Going by convention, it is fairly short. The latest example is that of Jammu & Kashmir. We cannot have one standard for state governments and another for the Central government.

The rapidly changing political situation also engenders an important question of accountability. Once a government is reduced to a minority government, it simply does not have either the political or moral legitimacy to go ahead with a major international agreement, especially when the very cause of the government losing its majority is the sharp difference between the ruling coalition and the supporting parties over the international deal.

Ideally in a democracy, any major international agreement that impinges on India’s national unity, territorial integrity and security must be ratified by Parliament. My Party has sought an amendment in the Constitution to this effect. As a matter of fact, debates in Parliament have clearly shown that a majority of MPs are opposed to the Indo-US nuclear deal in its present form.

Nevertheless, one has to recognize the fact that, as of now, there is no provision in the Constitution for parliamentary ratification of major international agreements. Hence, technically speaking, the UPA government is well within its rights to conclude the nuclear deal. However, the question is: Does a government that has been reduced to a minority government have the right to go ahead with the deal? No. Must it not first prove its majority to regain the political legitimacy to do so? Yes, it must.

Therefore, now that the Left parties have withdrawn support to the government, I would appeal to the President of India to ask the Prime Minister not to take the next steps in concluding the nuclear deal before winning the vote of confidence in Parliament. The principle of accountability in governance demands this.

Contrast between NDA and UPA

Friends, accountability and transparency are the cornerstones of democratic system of governance. These have been casualties in the functioning of the UPA government right from the beginning. This is best illustrated by the manner in which the government has handled the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal. This issue was not mentioned in the election manifesto of the Congress party. It is not in the UPA’s Common Minimum Programme (CMP), which was the basis of the Left parties’ decision to extend outside support to the Congress-led government. In spite of this, the Indo-US nuclear deal is the only issue that has now become the priority for the government.

The government has simply stopped working as far as the other burning issues before the country and the people are concerned: price rise, slowing of the economy, rising interest rates that are hurting every sector of the economy and also the middle classes, reduction in employment generation, plight of farmers who are facing a shortage of every input — the latest being shortage of fertilizers in the crucial sowing season, now that rains have arrived. The government’s record in dealing firmly with the twin menaces of terrorism and naxalism has been most dismal.

I must also mention here that the government held no consultations with the BJP and other opposition parties, and made no attempt to build a national consensus, prior to finalizing the main features of the nuclear deal.

Contrast this with the manner in which the NDA government, under the leadership of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, handled the nuclear issue. For many decades, the BJP, and earlier the Jana Sangh, was the only party that explicitly stated its stand on this issue in all its election manifestos. But when we won the people’s mandate to form a coalition government in 1998, we evolved a consensus within the ruling alliance on the decision to make India a nuclear weapons power and enshrined this point in the NDA’s common minimum programme.

On the point of accountability and transparency, I can illustrate the contrast between the BJP-led NDA and the Congress-led UPA with another example. The BJP abided by the Coalition Dharma by leaving out certain issues from the government’s agenda on which our alliance partners had differences. The Congress, on the other hand, has flouted the Coalition Dharma by zealously pursuing a contentious issue.

PM must come clean on the “Deal behind the Deal”

Indeed, in order to prop up its tottering government, the Congress has now compounded its sin by stitching up a brazenly opportunistic alliance with the Samajwadi Party. Public memory is not so short as to forget what leaders of the Congress and Samajwadi Party said about each other as during the assembly elections in UP last year. Hence, the moral and political legitimacy of the nuclear deal has been further eroded by what is being talked about as “the deal behind the deal” between the two parties.

There is widespread suspicion and speculation that something scandalous has suddenly sweetened the historically bitter relations between the Congress and Samajwadi Party. I demand that Prime Minister Dr. Singh come clean on this issue by assuring the nation that that there has been no quid pro quo, that his government is not misusing institutions to bail out certain individuals in cases of economic offences and financial irregularities.

Friends, what the unholy attempts of the Congress party to somehow ensure survival of its government — whether the government will actually survive or not is another matter — are such that they breed cynicism about politics in the minds of ordinary people. What people want to see in government is honesty, transparency, accountability and commitment to democratic values. In contrast, what they are seeing today is dishonesty, opaqueness, politics of manipulations and machinations, corruption and scandals.

This degeneration in India’s political and governance culture is detrimental to our democracy. Once it sets in at the top, it begins to infect the functioning of democratic institutions at all levels, including the bureaucracy, criminal justice system, regulatory authorities, and economic organizations. It also affects citizens’ own conduct in society. My party is determined to halt and reverse this degeneration.

BJP has always been committed alliance politics based on trust and common programme

Friends, recent developments have also brought to the fore another important challenge before our democracy: How to make democracy work for the country and the common man in the era of coalitions? That the era of coalitions has come to stay is obvious and indisputable. It has put to the test political parties’ willingness and commitment to work cooperatively with each other on an agreed programme that meets the needs of the nation and aspirations of the people. As far as my party has concerned, we have always shown this willingness and commitment. I recall that way back in the First Lok Sabha, when the Jana Sangh had only three MPs, our founder-President Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee worked closely with other non-Communist opposition parties to form the National Democratic Front. Indeed, at the time of the formation of the Vajpayee-led government in 1998, the name of that first opposition alliance in Parliament provided the inspiration for me to suggest that we call our own alliance ‘National Democratic Alliance’.

In the early 1960s, the Jana Sangh joined hands with the Akali Dal in Punjab to thwart the Congress party’s attempts to grab power through manipulative and unethical means. Our alliance with the Akali Dal has continued since then, and served the cause of national unity and communal harmony even in the most trying times when terrorism traumatized Punjab.

After the Fourth General Elections in 1967, the Jana Sangh took an active part in the formation, along with other political parties, of Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments in three northern states. Even the Communist Party of India was a part of the coalition government in Bihar.

Both before and during the Emergency, we worked closely with other opposition parties in defense of democracy. After Indira Gandhi was forced to lift the Emergency, we worked actively under the leadership of Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan to form the Janata Party. We were the most stabilizing force in the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai. Later, in 1980, we were forced to form the Bharatiya Janata Party as a separate entity because we were expelled from the Janata Party on the specious “Dual Membership” issue.

The positive feature in recent political developments

Today, 28 years after the formation of the BJP, we are proud that, by growing from strength, we have succeeded in ending the hegemony of the Congress at the Centre and transforming India’s polity from a uni-polar system into a bi-polar system. Today the BJP has governments in more states, 12 to be precise, than the Congress does — either on our own or with our allies. We set high standards of accountability and transparency in governance when we had an opportunity to govern India for six years between 1998 and 2004. We never misused institutions for partisan gains. We made India strong and prosperous with many bold initiatives.

All through this period, our opponents followed the policy of blind anti-BJPism in order to isolate our party and prevent smaller and regional parties from joining hands with us. They sought to subject us to the politics of untouchability by raising the bogey of “secular unity”. They failed.

And today the so-called “unity of secular forces” lies in shambles. I consider this as the most positive feature of the recent political developments. It portends well for the development of a healthy political culture, in which Good Governance will become the touchstone of judging the merits and demerits of contending political parties and alliances.

My party is committed to the ideal of Good Governance, which alone can unleash the full potential of India to emerge as a Great Power, overcoming the legacy of poverty, backwardness and divisiveness at home and securing a front-ranking position in the community of nations. We shall strive our utmost to defeat the politics of cynicism and opportunism that has reigned supreme in New Delhi in the past four years.

I seek the support of all well-meaning people in this endeavour.

With these words, I conclude my remarks.

Thank you.