Beyond Liberalisers’ Comprehension

While commenting on the sharply critical Washington Post article on the PM’s performance, and the PMO and government spokespersons’ over-reaction to it, it was written in these columns two weeks ago that such over-reaction exposes the “inherent weakness and infirmity” of the Manmohan dispensation. But, it was also pointed out, there was “a danger: would such sharp attacks on the PM from the side of the US media prompt the Manmohan Singh Government to embark on full-scale reforms to belie the observations made and without any consideration of the political consequences of such a step?” That, it was underlined, “would indeed be disastrous for the country”.

The apprehensions voiced above a fortnight ago have turned out to be true. Last week, on September 13, the Union Government hiked diesel prices by a record Rs 5 a litre and capped the number of subsidised cooking gas cylinders at six a year evoking sharp protests across-the-board. And the very next day the Union Cabinet cleared 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail, opened up the aviation sector to 49 per cent investment by foreign airlines, and announced disinvestment in four major PSUs (to mop up Rs 14,000 crores). The entire corporate-driven media hailed these with great jubiliation as the “most ambitious reform rush by the belea-guered government”; but the Opposition cried foul, charging the government with betrayal as it had promised not to go for such a measure as FDI in retail unless there was a consensus across the political spectrum and especially within the UPA itself. However, it was left to Trinamul Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, who gave the Centre a 72-hour time-frame for rolling back the measures, to launch the sharpest attack on the decisions by saying that a “loot is on”.

Thereafter at the end of the deadline on September 18 she disclosed, after a three-hour meeting of the TMC’s parliamentary party meeting in Kolkata, that the party was severing its links with and withdrawing support to the UPA-2 and the TMC Ministers in the Union Government would resign on September 21 in protest against the Centre’s decisions.

Regardless of what the media have to say—and except The Hindu they are all united in assailing Mamata as the “great destabiliser”—the fact is that it is the aam aadmi who will be hit the hardest by the Centre’s latest reform-measures. But then the Manmohan Singh dispensation is least bothered about him since it is only interested in dancing to the tunes of its benefactors abroad. And yet the success of today’s countrywide bandh has projected the aam aadmi’s mood in sharp relief. Mamata went against the bandh but stood by the basic demands of that agitation. She is thus defending the interests of her constituency, the underprivileged, now in the government’s line of fire.

The Hindu has aptly pointed out that “...in pursuing the chimera of Walmart-induced growth, the UPA runs the risk of losing the one big battle that is looming in 2014”. (After all, Walmart spent one million dollars between 2009-10 and 2011-12 for lobbying in India.) But this simple truth as also the need to defend the underprivileged as Mamata is doing today (following the Gandhi-Nehru approach to the nation’s problems) the liberalisers of the Manmohan-Montek-Chidambaram brand fail to comprehend. Nemesis is therefore awaiting them whenever the elections take place—in 2014 or earlier.

September 20 S.C.