It may be too soon to write the UPA's epitaph, but its key failing is now obvious: it is too frightened out of its wits to govern.

The women said boo, and the UPA government caved in. Barring a minor show of defiance over criminalising marital rape, the government, despite internal misgivings and strong cabinet dissent, has more or less signed on the dotted line in its anti-rape law, as decreed by the Verma Committee.

This is not about the merits or demerits of the Verma report, but about a government that has lost the capacity to apply its own mind to serious issues. What is clear is that it wants to retain the trappings of power and also get re-elected, but it does not have the will to govern. Any group can brandish a stick or raise a ruckus, and the government runs with the tail between its legs.

Regardless of whether you are a UPA supporter or not, surely no one can want a government like this. If it discovers 15 seconds of spine, it goes into rigor mortis for a day. It finds courage for a day, but leaps out of its skin whenever some scaremonger turns up with a tiger mask at its doorstep.

The story of UPA-1 and UPA-2 is a long litany of government abdication and a tendency to take the line of least resistance with any bully - whether the bully is inside the Congress, inside the UPA or just someone lurking somewhere in the distance.

Through much of UPA-1, the Left could say boo and the government spring backwards to lick its wounds.

The Left said "noooo" to any kind of reform, and the resident reformists – Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram among them – rolled over and played dead. Chidambaram wanted to list the country’s then No 1 telecom company, the public sector BSNL, but the Left raised its eyebrows and there the matter ended. The DMK said "wandam" to the Neyveli Lignite disinvestment and UPA sneaked away muttering “aiyo, aiyo".

Chidambaram demurred over the ruinous farm loan waivers in 2008, and the party's you-know-who put him in his place. He had to pretend he liked the idea.

Telecom Minister A Raja collared both Manmohan and Chidambaram on how spectrum should be sold – and both of them slinked off, finding ways to justify Raja’s waywardness.

Towards 2008, as George Bush impatiently tapped his heels over the delay in India ratifying the Indo-US nuclear deal, Manmohan Singh let out a “meow" - to belligerent catcalls from the Left. Sonia Gandhi, for a while, tried to pretend she hadn’t heard either the meow or the catcalls, but ultimately decided to come on the side of the kitten.

For a while, Manmohan Singh’s meow sounded like a roar. It was enough to carry the government through, with the aid of budget freebies, to a comfortable victory in 2009.

When the Satyam scam surfaced in early 2009, YS Rajasekhara Reddy frightened the daylights out of the UPA by telling the Congress chief and the PM that the scam had to be buried. Or else the party would lose Andhra. Sonia and Manmohan failed to call his bluff. The Satyam scam, which started with a confession, is yet to convict anyone.

But mice that roar once in a while do not grow up to be lions. They go back to being mice.

UPA-2, despite the much bigger mandate, showed a government that was afraid of its own shadow, its own party and its own allies.

Right at time of its formation, DMK’s M Karunanidhi did a “tandav” over the efforts to exclude A Raja from the cabinet, and both Sonia and Manmohan Singh did a conciliatory Bharata Natyam and handed him back the telecom ministry.

Manmohan Singh’s backward march, however, had only just begun.

Soon after, his own party decided to undercut him and anointed Sonia Gandhi as Chairperson of the National Advisory Council, almost like a parallel politbureau to the Union cabinet. Now, whenever NAC members said “shoo”, the government scampered away from sensible economics.

When Pranab Mukherjee, soon after taking over as FM in the wake of 26/11, saw businessmen spreading scare stories about depression and economic collapse, he gave them more than an arm and a leg. Even two years later, when the economy had revived, he did not withdraw the post-Lehman crutches. When businessmen lobby you with unbelievable sob stories of slowdown, a sensible finance minister should say “scram”. But battling with all kinds of “scam”, the UPA did much of the scramming itself. It engineered a policy-paralysis and authored a long-term slowdown that made the much-feared slowdown a sorry reality.

When Suresh Kalmadi said boo, the UPA handed over the keys to the Commonwealth Games to him. When Shibu Soren said boo, the keys to the coalmine went to him. When a court conviction forced Soren out of the coal ministry, Manmohan got the keys back, but only briefly. When crony businessmen said “Manmohan who?” he threw the keys away and wound up with Coalgate. This, even though he had himself brought up the idea of allocating coal blocks through a market-determined process.

When the Radia tapes made Raja’s scams difficult to cover up, the Supreme Court raised an alarm, and the UPA cowered in fright. It handed over policy-making to the courts, not having the gumption to ask the courts to stay out. Little wonder, a booming telecom sector is in a complete mess today. The big success of UPA-1 is the biggest failure of UPA-2.

But, by now, everybody who could say “boo” or "shoo" had discovered that in UPA they had a scaredy-cat that jumps any which way they want it to.

Air India’s employees cried "strike" and they got a Rs 30,000 crore bailout. Vijay Mallya bluffed his way to stay alive for two years, and the government that could not say “no” to Air India, failed to tell its banks to pull the plug on him. Till it was too late.

Anna Hazare yelled “corruption”, and the UPA ran before anyone could say “Jan Lokpal.” That nothing much came out of the Anna agitation is another story, but the UPA was not rescued by its strength but the movement’s weakness.

Mamata Banerjee discovered UPA’s Achilles’ Heel – lack of political courage - and replaced the Left as the Congress bugbear in UPA-2.

After consistent mismanagement of the economy, and especially the ever-growing subsidy bills in petroleum, whenever the government tried to raise prices, Mamata said “cholbe na” and UPA took two steps back. When the government whispered "FDI in retail", Didi gave Pranab-da an earful. That's when he must have decided Rashtrapati Bhawan would be in the interests of personal sanity.

Ironically, even in this he needed Didi's help. In mid-2012, when Mamata and Mulayam Singh seemed to gang up on the presidential candidate, this time both Manmohan Singh and Sonia jumped up in fright and embraced Pranab Mukherjee for the top job, even though Sonia wanted to give the job to someone else.

And when Mamata said “cholbe na” for the n’th time, the UPA jumped straight into the waiting arms of Mayawati. And when Maya spread her “jaal”, the government suddenly found merit in quotas in government promotions – something that had never occurred to it for nine years before this.

Before the Gujarat elections, the government tried to show its teeth by hanging Ajmal Kasab, the lone captured and convicted 26/11 terrorist, but the Gujarat voters were not impressed and re-elected the lion they knew.

When it came to the next hanging, that of Afzal Guru, the UPA dropped even the pretense of bravado. Sushil Kumar Shinde buried him quietly without even informing his future widow and family. The Kashmiris didn’t even have to say “boo” to frighten the stuffing out of the home minister.

And let’s not forget the current energies of the UPA, which are focused on appearing to be reform-friendly. Did that come from within?

No, the global rating agencies were about to warn us about a like downgrade, and the UPA panicked. If you want reform, we will give it. Why, we will even bring back Chidambaram, said the UPA. Choo mantar, and policies changed overnight.

Our neighbours discovered that the Indian government can bend over backwards even with a soft push. Even as UPA-2 was just being re-elected, the Sri Lankans, having decided that India would not interfere in the war against LTTE, went on a killing spree without one yip from the UPA. After the war, they went back on the deal to give the beleaguered Tamils a measure of regional autonomy.

At Sharm el-Sheikh in 2011, then Pak PM Yousaf Raza Gilani ran rings round Manmohan Singh and got him to agree to that infamous line in the joint statement which suggested that India is fomenting trouble in Balochistan. Now, our home minister scores self-goals by talking accusing the BJP of running terror camps - warming the cockles of the likes of Hafiz Saeed. After the incident of the beheading of an Indian soldier on the LOC. the PM talked of not doing "business as usual." But last week the external affairs minister schedules lunch with the Pak PM - on a private visit to Ajmer. Who will ever believe we mean what we say?

In the Maldives, an India-friendly government was ousted through a near-coup – allegedly fomented covertly by the same politician and former dictator (Maumoon Abdul Gayoom) whom Rajiv Gandhi rescued from another coup attempt in 1988 with the help of Indian forces. This time, India has not only not been able to help Mohammed Nasheed, but is willy-nilly acquiescing in the constitutional coup.

As for the latest Italian effort to cock a snook at India by refusing to return the two marines who have to undergo trial for the murder of two fishermen off Kerala’s coast last year, the less said the better.

The moral of the UPA story is this: it requires moral standing and the courage of convictions for a government to govern.

This is where the UPA is failing.To remain is power, it is willing to crawl. This explains why its policies are about building costly entitlements that the country cannot afford.After makework schemes like NREGA, farm loan waivers, we now have a Food Bill, and a Homestead Bill. Never mind that these ideas will ruin the fisc.

With no will to govern, the only way to retain power is by bribery - bribery of voters, that is.