Author: Prem Shankar Jha
Publication: Hindustan Times
Dated: February 11, 2008
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=5f57c832-e4fd-4d53-ac73-6c3d6767b00b
Introduction: The UPA's sins of inaction are
far greater than those of action
Everyone loves a good race, and we are no
exception. The 22 primaries in the United States have, therefore, captured
the headlines in all Indian papers. But should the American battle not have
provoked some reflection in our country on where we are headed? After all,
we too face a general election only months after the American President is
elected. Should we not, therefore, be taking stock of what the UPA government
has achieved in the last four years and whether it is sufficient to bring
it back to power?
The discouraging answer is "almost nothing".
"But how can you say that?" some readers might expostulate. "Have
the past four years not seen the country achieve the highest growth rate India
has ever known? Has the government not successfully combined this growth with
greater equity and social justice by sharply increasing outlays on education,
health, urban development, and road-building, especially in the rural areas?
Did it not start the long overdue National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme?"
This is true. But politics is all about perceptions.
Even where these programmes are making a palpable difference to the quality
of life in the rural areas and smaller towns, the credit is not going to the
UPA at the Centre but to whichever party or coalition is ruling the state.
For it is the state governments that have to implement these programmes. The
Centre only doles out the money. Indeed, one of its prime beneficiaries has
been Narendra Modi in Gujarat.
This was the fatal flaw in the Common Minimum
Programme (CMP) to which the Congress so hurriedly acquiesced in May 2004.
The CMP was rightly criticised by many analysts for pouring even more money
into programmes that were proven sinks of fraud and embezzlement - where not
even 15 per cent of the outlays had reached the poor. But the flaw was intentional,
for it was designed to benefit responsible governments like those of the Left
and leave the Centre to act only as the banker. The Left benefited in Bengal
and also in Kerala. But so did Modi.
This willing surrender of the credit for reform
to the states has made it almost impossible for the Congress to buck the cycle
of anti-incumbency voting that has become the main single determinant of victory
or defeat at the Centre. The Congress was surprised by its victory in 2004,
but should not have been. For the assembly elections that had preceded it
had shown that the anti-incumbency factor was running strongly in its favour.
However, this wave, which had begun to build in 1998, has since then reversed
itself. The Congress should have anticipated this and realised that to remain
in power it needed to show results for which the credit could not be stolen
by the state governments.
That is what the UPA has failed to do. The
most cursory glance at its record shows that it has been a government of 'near
misses'. It has almost delivered a signal agreement with Pakistan that would
have ended the 60-year-old Kashmir dispute, changed Hindu perceptions of Indian
Muslims as being potential traitors and thus destroyed the very ground under
the feet of Hindu chauvinists and radical Islamists alike.
It almost delivered a nuclear deal to India
that would have made it the sixth accepted nuclear power in the world, and
opened the gates to high technology that have been shut for the past 40 years.
But after conducting two years of skilled, transparent and sensitive political
negotiations with the most difficult power in the world, and after getting
everything it wanted from the treaty, for reasons that defy understanding
it has developed cold feet and all but backed out.
Its excuse was the Left's threat that it would
withdraw support from the UPA and bring the government down. But was this
a good enough reason to back down? The answer is 'no'. The Left would not
only have had to withdraw support but also to vote with the BJP against the
UPA in the ensuing vote of confidence. That would have compounded the damage
it had already done to itself in Bengal by firing on and killing more than
a score of villagers protesting against the forced acquisition of their land.
The UPA would not have found itself in this
humiliating position had it not made the most fundamental of political errors
on the very first day after its surprise victory. That was to humiliate Mulayam
Singh Yadav through his emissary Amar Singh, and gratuitously spurn the offer
of support from the Samajwadi Party's 38 members in Parliament. By doing so,
Sonia Gandhi delivered her party into the clutches of the Left. Since then
India has been ruled by proxy by the Left.
But what about the economy? Hasn't Manmohan
Singh's dream team delivered a 9 per cent growth rate? Not really. The economic
rebound began in early 2003, a little more than a year before this government
came to power. All that the UPA can claim credit for - and this was no small
achievement - is that for the first three years in power it did nothing to
hurt the build-up of growth.
But here too its self-restraint lasted for
only three years. For it has not been able to prevent the Reserve Bank Governor,
Y.V. Reddy, from ratcheting up the interest rates in the economy in order
to fight an inflation that existed only in his imagination. This has done
very little to curb inflation, which is being driven by the collapse of agricultural
growth after 2001, by booming steel and cement exports to China and by the
relentless rise in the international price of oil - none of which he can even
begin to control through interest rates. But, in the meantime, his high interest
rates have killed the construction industry, caused a 20-25 per cent downturn
in the sales of consumer durables and is inexorably driving the economy into
a recession.
Today, J.R. Hicks' accelerator is gaining
a momentum that will soon become irreversible. If the government cannot force
a change of interest rate policy in the next couple of months by March 2009,
its only remaining 'achievement' will also have vanished in smoke.
There are a score of other 'near misses' to
the government's non-credit. It had promised to introduce state-funding of
elections and political activity in order to cut the roots of criminalisation
and corruption in our democracy. But when the issue finally came up for discussion,
the UPA's leaders found that everyone was too comfortable with the current
system of privatised, clandestine, funding to want to make a change.
In the same vein, the UPA thundered that it
would bring in social security for the unorganised sector, all the many proposals
it has received for self-financed health, maternity, life insurance and old-age
pension benefits, have been wrecked on the reefs of bureaucratic indifference
and its own political passivity.
But its potentially greatest failure of nerve
still lies ahead. For two years, Afzal Guru (of the attack on Parliament fame)
has been sitting on death row in Tihar Jail awaiting a presidential decision
on whether or not to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. The government
knows all the reasons why this should be done. It cannot have forgotten that
the first Kashmiri militants crossed the LoC in search of weapons and training
only weeks after Maqbul Butt was hanged in February 1984. It also knows that
hanging Guru now will finish peace in Kashmir, and possibly in India, forever.
But it still does nothing. Sometimes the sins of inaction can be far greater
than those of action.