The Hindu Business Line : PM on a pedestal

It is always a complex, and risky, exercise to peer into the crystal ball in the run-up to a national election because of the inscrutability of the voter's true intentions. This is why on so many occasions in the past psephologists have bitten the dust when they have not been able to get the "sums" right, so to speak.

GAUGING THE MOOD

And yet, when election-time comes around, there is this strong urge to look ahead and try to gauge the electorate's mood, even suggest which of the political contestants in the fray has got the upper edge and which has not, and for what reasons. This is the background against which the present write-up should be seen, the exercise having its inherent limitations and yet being somewhat inevitable given the natural proclivities of the human mind when on the threshold of an event like, as in our case, the Lok Sabha elections.

The long and the short of it, then, is the strong feeling one has at the moment that, in the contest looming ahead, the Congress party enjoys the big advantage of having at its Governmental helm a person like the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, essentially an economist who has over the recent past built for himself a reputation which, curiously, is devoid of any strong political hue.

One may be wide off the mark in this estimation, but the view is based on the response and reaction of a large number of people to the medical intervention which Dr Singh was subjected to a few days ago, a phase through which he has passed unscathed physically.

When the necessity of the surgery was announced, the widespread feeling was that here was the only really "tall" leader on the Indian political scene, more a national symbol than anything else, going into the operation theatre, and that it would be a body blow to the nation itself if he did not get back to the Prime Ministerial chair as quickly as possible.

`NORMAL ONCE AGAIN'

Importantly, this was a gut feeling and not the result of any detailed analysis, which perhaps indicated faithfully the true position of Dr Singh in the psyche of the Indian people across political and social divides. Not surprisingly, therefore, when he emerged from the surgery in fine fettle, there was an unpublicised, unarticulated sigh of relief all around, the strong message being that everything was "normal" once again.

The test of this proposition perhaps lies in a different scenario which would have most certainly plunged the political world into a crisis situation, the principal loser being the Congress. It would have not only led to a sea-change in the internal political line-up of leaders within the Congress, the emerging calculations of nearly every "important" non-Congress political party (including the BJP) in the run-up to the elections would have been affected, some more critically than others. Just imagine what the newspapers would have been saying today if Dr Singh had been confined to his sick bed for some more time, with a question-mark on the prospects of a rapid convalescence?

Happily, this is just a figment of the imagination, but the important point is to consider whether this muted but undeniable concern for the Prime Minister's physical wellbeing will play any "silent, subconscious" role in the elections ahead.

In other words, does the Congress stand to benefit from the fact that Dr Singh has been presented as its Prime Ministerial candidate once again? Briefly, it will, and there is little doubt that the national economy could not be in safer hands if Dr Singh remains Prime Minister after the elections, at the head of yet another coalition outfit.

RANABIR RAY CHOUDHURY