Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 23, 2004
Congress must choose: rein in the
Left or seek a new mandate with communists as partners
As an act of blackmail, the left-instigated
removal of a foreign consultants from ad hoc review committees of
the Planning Commission as few parallels. In their unedifying triumphalism,
and in blaming Planning Commission deputy chairman Montel Singh
Ahluwalia for the controversy, the communist parties can't
hide their absolute, unadulterated hypocrisy. When the Left Front
government consults ADB or DFID it's fine; when anybody else does,
it's surrender to Big Bad Capitalism. When Kolkata draws up plans
for urban renewal, it's fine; Hyderabad and Bangalore are advised
by left economists at the very same Planning Commissioner, to leave
flyovers half-built and "focus on the villages". When fellow
travelers take up long-term sinecures at the World Bank, it's fine;
when a Congress minister talks to Washington, he's a "Bretton
Woods stooge". Left politics in India is fast becoming a race for
the moral low ground.
Left isolated pockets, such " holier
than thou " humbug can be indulged as a fringe fad. Running a country
is decidedly more serious business. Rather than continually
take the line of least resistance, the Congress needs to look
long and hard at the credibility of the coalition it
leads. The UPA's success or failure will pinned on the Congress. When
the NDA lost the Lok Sabha election, the BJP was left carrying the
can, not the Biju Janata Dal. Is the Congress alive to the political
implication of a government that just drifts along? It is nobody's
argument that the previous NDA government's economic policies should be
carried on without any change. A greater sensitivity to aggrieved
constituencies is politically prudent. Yet by no reckoning does this
necessitate a 'Fortress India's mentality. A ban on foreign inputs
amount to intellectual autarky. How is it different from the hardline
swadeshi mindset the BJP had to deal with? Does the CPI (M) see itself
as the natural successor to the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch?
The bigger questions are for the
Congress to answer. The party promised a structural delinking of
politics and government, a division between Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan
Singh. Yet when the prime minister and the Planning Commission deputy
Chief-they constitute the best face of this government, upright and
intellectually well-regarded-are attacked viciously, the Congress
leaves them to the wolves. This cannot be do, this is
not what India voted for . Even H.D. Deve Gowda showed spine when
Sitaram Kesri pushed him too far. The Congress must make a choice;
put the Left in its place or seek a new mandate with the communists
as poll partners and the CMP as an election manifesto. India wants
the UPA to be a ruling coalition; right now it's non-governing organization.
