From nuclear to neyveli moment
By Amulya Ganguli
What was trumpeted as Manmohan Singh’s nuclear moment may turn out to be his Neyveli moment. Just as the DMK shot down the government’s disinvestment proposal for the Neyveli Lignite Corporation during the UPA-I’s tenure, Mamata Banerjee has now thrown a spanner in the works of the FDI in the retail sector. Then, as now, the mantra of coalition dharma, signifying excessive pandering to the allies, is behind the latest discomfiture for the government.
It may be recalled that the same dharma, viz. compulsion, allowed the former telecom minister, Andimuthu Raja, of the DMK to run amok till he was reined in by the Supreme Court. The reason why the Congress turned a blind eye to his shenanigans was the fear that the DMK’s withdrawal of support might lead to the government’s fall. As the prime minister subsequently explained, it was not feasible to hold elections every few months.
Related to this reluctance to discipline the allies is Sonia Gandhi’s obsession with remaining in power at any cost. But, what she is apparently unable to realize is that the resultant compromise with principles, as in Raja’s case, can undermine the party’s standing in the public eye, as its and the DMK’s resounding defeat in Tamil Nadu showed.
Similarly, a willingness to sacrifice FDI in the retail sector on the altar of populism can be counter-productive since it may alienate the middle class because of the retreat from the avowed goal of reforms. The surrender to pressure tactics has been made all the more obvious by Pranab Mukherjee’s admission that “narrow political gains” are dictating the obstructionism of some of the parties. In this context, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed’s criticism of “too much domestic policies and abuse of freedom to protest and argue at will” is likely to seem true to many.
To make matters worse, the scene in India has been complicated by several other factors – attempts to corner the government either on the basis of blind dogma, sheer cussedness or an unthinking subscription to an outlook which has outlived its validity. If the Left is guilty of the first offence, the BJP is of the second and Mamata Banerjee of the third. While the communists can at least be said to be true to their ideological convictions even if they are no longer followed in their two fatherlands – the Soviet Union and China – the BJP’s attitude is the strangest of all, for the party is willing to alienate even its own middle class base of support if it can somehow harass the government.
But, Mamata, on the other hand, provides an unedifying example of pursuing the Nehruvian socialism of the Congress, to which she once belonged, although the Congress itself is slowly changing, as its embracement of pro-market policies shows. True, there are still sections in the party with Sonia Gandhi among them, who seem to have learnt all the wrong lessons during her political apprenticeship in the Indira Gandhi household, viz. faux socialism and the advantages of being in power. But, Mamata’s socialistic convictions appear to be based more on a limited understanding of a changing world where even Cuba has said that communism isn’t working than on a deep faith in egalitarianism.
Curiously, by trying to block FDI in retail and the raising of the FDI component in the pension funds, she is playing the same anti-reforms role which the Left did during UPA-I. However, her “narrow” political considerations, as Pranab Mukherjee noted, are not difficult to decipher. By out-doing the comrades in West Bengal, she wants to deprive the latter of taking any political advantage of a move which the Left are bound to criticize as anti-people and pro-foreign capital. What such tactics show is the typical mindset of a myopic regional politician who cannot see beyond her own state and to whom the larger questions of economic direction and the worldview of a national party are of little interest.
Irrespective of such angularities, what the latest kerfuffle indicates is that the government has to be far more firm in dealing with such intransigent allies. Having already paid a heavy price for catering to the DMK’s sensitivities about Raja, the Congress might have been expected to have learnt the lesson about when to lay down the Lakshman rekha for an ally. But, its latest irresolute conduct shows that it is still scared of a head-on confrontation. Such hesitancy is strange considering that Mamata had said that her party would not vote against the government during a parliamentary debate. But the government still developed cold feet in the matter of ignoring her diktat.
The reason perhaps is that the government itself is not sure about its own policy presumably because of the opposition it faced from A.K. Antony, Jairam Ramesh and others. But, once Union cabinet had taken a decision, any stepping back would confirm L.K. Advani’s castigation of the prime minister as weak. (IPA Service)