30.3.10

Sonia back as NAC chief


Sonia Gandhi is back at the helm of the National Advisory Council . The NAC’s sharp focus has ensured that key programmes are not only not diluted but, as in the case of the NREGA, expanded through the country. It can be expected to deal with development issues in areas like Bundelkhand which also coincide with the Congress’s political priorities. There has been a sense in the Congress that the pace of governance could be speeded up, and better aligned with the party’s priorities. Crucially, after Sonia turned down the premiership and brought in Manmohan Singh, the NAC helped give the party a primacy it would have lacked otherwise. Apart from the food security act, another bill that the NAC may like to see piloted by the government soon is the communal violence bill and possibly the whistleblowers bill as well. To that extent, the NAC, which will draw its powers from Sonia’s leadership, can influence the legislative and political agenda of the government. The tenure of the NAC members will be for one year, showing that the chairperson wants to keep elbow room for changes in view of her previous experience. The chairperson’s term is expectedly coterminus with the panel itself. The advent of the NAC holds a special place in the Congress attempt to reinvent itself as a left-of-centre party since it returned to power in 2004 after a barren eight-year spell. With the aam admi campaign pipping the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ triumphalism, the Congress has been convinced on the need to ensure that those who are not immediately seeing the fruit of reforms do not turn against it. The party decided to ensure that aam admi remained its governance theme, with the NAC giving a welfarist philosophy the pride of place. At the same time, the co-option of civil society activists ensured that the scope for dissent against the Congress-led Centre stayed at a minimum as the party moved to the left. It marked a shift in the business-as-usual governance identified with the Congress and gave the party the political talking points it was looking for. RTI, NREGA, social security for unorganised sector, domestic violence bill, forest rights act, right to education have added a new halo to the party even though implementation has remained patchy. While the NAC was very much on the minds of the party brass, the leadership did not move with alacrity in UPA-2 as it was wary of the legal challenges to the ‘office of profit’ law which exempted certain offices including the NAC chairperson from its ambit. It was only when the SC gave its nod to the OoP law that the party moved to revive the NAC.

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