Say bye to jholawallahs and their silly ideas

There is no reason why the National Advisory Council should have been established in the first place, and there is even little reason why it should have survived nine long years as an extra-constitutional body, in the process compelling the Manmohan Singh-led Government to implement its various harebrained suggestions. Senior member Aruna Roy's exit from the panel on the ground that the Prime Minister had refused to heed the council's suggestions on certain occasions is, therefore, a little ironic, because the regime has actually bent over backwards all these years to accommodate the NAC for the simple reason that the council is chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

It's only when the NAC recently recommended that the minimum wages law be applied to the beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act that the Government put its foot down and refused to heed the demand. The country does not need a super Cabinet — which is what the NAC has become —when we already have a democratically elected Government (however inept) in place. Not only has the NAC been imposing its will on the regime but it has been doing so without being accountable to any democratic institution. It derives its raison d'être from Ms Gandhi's desire to have and control a mechanism to push through populist measures in the name of empowering the aam aadmi and thereby garnering votes. Unfortunately for the country, these measures have neither effectively targeted the intended beneficiaries nor have they contributed to the national economic good.

The MGNREGA is just one example; the right to food Bill is another half-baked offering by the NAC which is doomed to fail because it is structurally flawed and is being pushed through without the creation of the necessary infrastructure needed to implement the massive scheme which is set to cover nearly 70 per cent of the country's population. While there is no arguing with the need to have programmes which will empower the weakest sections of society, surely the Government with its various ministries and experts at its disposal can formulate such schemes without the assistance of bodies like the NAC that are not answerable to anybody — not even to the Government, let alone other oversight agencies. The NAC has functioned like a cloistered club with its jholawallah members throwing their weight around in matters of executive decision-making. It must be disbanded for good.

The problem is: Just as the Manmohan Singh Government has been largely helpless in resisting the super Cabinet's recommendations (‘demands' would be a more appropriate expression), it shall be unable to seek the NAC's dissolution. No Congress leader, and certainly not Mr Singh, has the courage to demand scrapping a panel which is headed by Ms Gandhi; and more so, on the accusation that the body functions in an extra-constitutional manner. The NAC is, after all, a fitting symbol of Prime Minister Singh's abdication of decision-making.

It  had been formed to supposedly take care of the ‘common minimum programme' that the Congress had formulated in consultation with its allies when it came to power in 2004. But clearly that aim was just a smokescreen to allow Ms Gandhi a toehold in the governance of the country through an indirect method. If the idea is to promote common minimum programmes, how is it that Congress allies such as the Nationalist Congress Party have opposed the right to food Bill in the format that the NAC has prepared, and which has been rubber-stamped by a Cabinet dominated by Congress membersIJ