Bad timing by the Congress..
Let’s look at the exit options the Congress had in the P J Thomas case. True, we have 20:20 hindsight. But reviewing the Congress’s actions via the exit options logic will yield some interesting insights . The really smart exit option came when PJ Thomas’s name was empanelled as a CVC candidate. Both the 18-year-old but still judicially alive palm oil case and Thomas’s bureaucratic ruling that the CAG and CVC cannot question the telecom policy were known facts then. Also known was the fact that A Raja’s telecom policy was becoming a potential political liability. The cacophonous critique of the telecom policy had by then lost the distinction between what was wrong — giving licences to ‘friends’ of Raja and allowing pre-operations profit-making through spectrum sale — and what was and is right — not making spectrum a high-priced resource and making a distinction between policymaking and accounting /vigilance functions. Politics can be like that. And it’s worth taking a risk over someone embroiled in that kind of politics only when you know the payoff can be very high, i.e, Thomas was someone special — to the Congress or for the government . But was he? So, the really smart exit option would have been to not invest in Thomas at all. But let’s be fair. How many fund managers are really that smart?
However, the Congress didn’t take the exit option even when (a) Sushma Swaraj objected on record to Thomas’s appointment, (b) when the Supreme Court questioned how the CVC, given his actions during his telecom posting, could supervise inquiries into the telecom policy, (c) when government law officers were reduced to making untenable arguments in the court, and (d) just before the court reserved its judgment on the Thomas case. That’s really strange. Almost as strange as when the Congress, during UPA-I’s term, didn’t take the many exit options it had till the Supreme Court severely criticised its decision to impose President’s rule in Bihar. The Congress’s Thomas call is stranger because in the Bihar call the potential payoff was clearer — Lalu Yadav , a key ally then, needed help. But, still, not taking the exit option was simply not worth it. And here’s an even stranger thing: the same Congress is smarter when it comes to judging exit options in certain other kinds of situations . Sonia Gandhi chose the exit option twice — not becoming the Prime Minister in 2004 and resigning in the wake of the office of profit ordinance controversy — and both paid off politically.
Manmohan Singh, supported by Sonia Gandhi, chose not to exercise the exit option in the nuclear deal political standoff . That paid off, too. Is it the case that the Congress is smarter at exercising the exit option when the top leadership has something personal-political at stake? And does the Congress tend to lose its smarts when the bets are party-political ? How would you feel about a fund management firm that’s smarter when its top guns are taking their own bets than when they are making decisions on investing the fund’s corpus? You would feel, wouldn’t you, that the fund’s top management isn’t serving the firm very well? That’s how Congressmen — and Congress supporters — should feel about the Congress leadership if they assess the latter’s exit strategies . Their question should be, does the leadership serve the party as well as it can? And that leads to the question of how incentives are aligned for the Congress’s top management. Are the incentives such that patently unsmart exit strategies on party-political issues have relatively moderate downsides for the top leadership? That points to a situation in which the organisation feels it simply can’t do without the current top management. Of course, as everyone knows, the Congress’s assumption is that, ceteris paribus, it will be worse off if it’s not led by Nehru-Gandhis.
Most observers agree with this assumption, for good reason. Since the Congress thinks that the costs engendered by such an incentive structure can never exceed the gains that accrue from such a leadership structure, unsmart exit strategies by the leadership on party-political bets are made likelier. That means the smart strategy for the BJP is to not always target the PM or Sonia Gandhi . Attack the Congress, the party leadership is likelier to make more mistakes then.
However, the Congress didn’t take the exit option even when (a) Sushma Swaraj objected on record to Thomas’s appointment, (b) when the Supreme Court questioned how the CVC, given his actions during his telecom posting, could supervise inquiries into the telecom policy, (c) when government law officers were reduced to making untenable arguments in the court, and (d) just before the court reserved its judgment on the Thomas case. That’s really strange. Almost as strange as when the Congress, during UPA-I’s term, didn’t take the many exit options it had till the Supreme Court severely criticised its decision to impose President’s rule in Bihar. The Congress’s Thomas call is stranger because in the Bihar call the potential payoff was clearer — Lalu Yadav , a key ally then, needed help. But, still, not taking the exit option was simply not worth it. And here’s an even stranger thing: the same Congress is smarter when it comes to judging exit options in certain other kinds of situations . Sonia Gandhi chose the exit option twice — not becoming the Prime Minister in 2004 and resigning in the wake of the office of profit ordinance controversy — and both paid off politically.
Manmohan Singh, supported by Sonia Gandhi, chose not to exercise the exit option in the nuclear deal political standoff . That paid off, too. Is it the case that the Congress is smarter at exercising the exit option when the top leadership has something personal-political at stake? And does the Congress tend to lose its smarts when the bets are party-political ? How would you feel about a fund management firm that’s smarter when its top guns are taking their own bets than when they are making decisions on investing the fund’s corpus? You would feel, wouldn’t you, that the fund’s top management isn’t serving the firm very well? That’s how Congressmen — and Congress supporters — should feel about the Congress leadership if they assess the latter’s exit strategies . Their question should be, does the leadership serve the party as well as it can? And that leads to the question of how incentives are aligned for the Congress’s top management. Are the incentives such that patently unsmart exit strategies on party-political issues have relatively moderate downsides for the top leadership? That points to a situation in which the organisation feels it simply can’t do without the current top management. Of course, as everyone knows, the Congress’s assumption is that, ceteris paribus, it will be worse off if it’s not led by Nehru-Gandhis.
Most observers agree with this assumption, for good reason. Since the Congress thinks that the costs engendered by such an incentive structure can never exceed the gains that accrue from such a leadership structure, unsmart exit strategies by the leadership on party-political bets are made likelier. That means the smart strategy for the BJP is to not always target the PM or Sonia Gandhi . Attack the Congress, the party leadership is likelier to make more mistakes then.
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