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NDA is a massive coalition. At the last count, the NDA coalition had 37 parties and independents along with 293 BJP MPs (Wikipedia). Of this only 16 parties seem to have one or more MPs in the Parliament. In contrast, UPA 2009 had six partners and 5 supporters from outside the UPA coalition.
Whichever way you look at it, managing NDA 2024 is likely to be a new challenge for Mr. Modi. Thus far, he is used to running governments with BJP majority in the assembly or the Parliament, often characterized by the opposition as a one man show. Mr. Modi will now be faced, for the first time, with the challenges of managing a coalition.
The challenges Modi is likely to face in managing the current coalition can be divided into two broad categories – political management challenges and performance management challenges. Mr. Modi’s record in the government shows that he is very good at political management per se. However, the jury is out on his ability to manage the business of running a coalition government.
Having served as the Secretary to Government of India responsible for performance management from 2009-2014, both with Dr. Manmohan Singh as well as Modi, I saw these management challenges first-hand.
The most compelling challenge in a coalition government lies in defining the performance of a department. In non-coalition governments (NDA 2014 and NDA 2019) the performance of the department has been largely defined by Mr. Modi. He has also monitored the performance of cabinet ministers on parameters that mattered to him. So long as the cabinet ministers delivered Mr. Modi’s priorities they continued to serve in his government.
This style of management has two problems. First, the systems and institutions in the government do not develop and remain stunted by the towering force of the leader’s persona. The moment there is a change in the leadership, these weak institutions flounder. Management gurus like Peter Drucker have thus argued that effectiveness and performance of an organization depends primarily (80%) on the quality of its systems and only 20% on the quality of its people. Under a strong leader, institutional development suffers, and we only discover this weakness once the strong leader is not there anymore. Thus, a review of democratic experience confirms, the country, along with the weak institutions, goes through a rough patch after the departure of the strong and charismatic leaders with long tenures in the government.
The second management challenge comes from the differences in perceptions. In the absence of a strong institutional arrangement to define departmental performance, the performance of the ministers (and their departments) lies ultimately in the eyes of the party leader. Let me illustrate this point with two classic problems arising from a personalized system of management.
Let us say a cabinet minister agrees on a list of 15 tasks to be accomplished by his department during the year. At the end of the year, if the Minister reports that the targets for 12 out of 15 tasks were accomplished, how is Mr. Modi to rate the minister? The correct answer must be that it depends. If the Minister primarily meets the targets of the tasks considered least important by Mr. Modi, then Mr. Modi will find his performance unsatisfactory.
The second problem with the personalized style of management relates to the degree of achievement of agreed targets. Let us say, a cabinet minister agrees to a target of constructing 7000 KMs of roads. At the end of the year, the department reports that it was able to construct only 6550 KMs of the agreed roads. Is this a good performance or bad performance? The correct answer must be that it depends. If Mr. Modi likes the minister, he could say, it is close enough and let us have a cup of tea. If Mr. Modi does not like the minister for some other reason, he could very well turn around and say: Mr. Minister, I like you, but you do not perform.
In short, without a proper system of performance management the performance of a minister, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. This subjectivity is perhaps OK when dealing with your own party, but it is a deal breaker when dealing with ministers belonging to other parties. The ministers from other parties are likely to think that this is a motivated and subjective move to dislodge them from power.
The above arguments are not merely theoretical arguments. This actually happened during UPA 2009, and the demise of the coalition government may well have been linked to a large extent to the non-utilization of the rigorous performance management system that existed during UPA 2009.
A leading magazine came out with a list of best and worst ministers in 2010. In the same month, May 2010, the Cabinet Secretariat produced a list of best and worst departments based on the promises made and achievements against these targets at the end of the year. Since I worked at the Cabinet Secretariat, I can say with some responsibility that our list of the best and worst ministers was based on international best practice in performance management. Alas the two rankings were totally different. Thus, there were at least three perspectives on the performance of each department during UPA 2009 (1) Department’s own view, (2) Cabinet Secretariat’s view and (3) view from the Prime Minister’s Office. The correct thing would have been to go by the professional view of the Cabinet Secretariat, based arguably on the international best practice and accepted by all departments. However, the ultimate result was a management paralysis of sorts and, as they say, rest is history.
The clear lesson for NDA 2024 for managing this mammoth coalition government would be to install a rigorous, objective and transparent government performance management system recommended by the Second Administrative Reform Commission and successive Central Pay Commissions (CPCs) from CPC 4 to CPC 7. Otherwise, it too will face multiple principals with multiple objectives that are likely to be conflicting.
