Author: Editorial
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date: October 11, 2004
URL: http://www.samachar.com/features/111004-editorial.html
To say that Manmohan Singh is fast
learning politics on the job will be to miss the point. Which is that he
was all along a politician who for long did what his political masters
wa nted him to do so that he could keep on their right side; after becoming
the Prime Minister he was still doing what his new masters in the Congress
and Communist parties want him to do. So where is the change? What is the
difference between Manmohan Singh as PM and Manmohan Singh as FM or earlier
Manmohan Singh as an economic bureaucrat?
When he was an economic bureaucrat
he implemented stringent controls in the name of socialism. After becoming
the Finance Minister through a stroke of immense good luck, he dismantled
a lot of these controls but only at the urgent prodding of the World Bank
and IMF. And now as PM he feels obliged to defend the tainted lot in his
government and implement some of the most retrorade policy measures ever
taken by any government in post-independent India. So what is the difference
between a run-of-the-mill politician as PM and a gentleman and educated
Manmohan Singh as PM? In practical terms, we are afraid, nothing at all.
The case in point is his remark
the other day in Mumbai that reservations in the private sector was an
idea whose time had come. It betrayed his intellectual dishonesty, nay,
it underlined his opportunism. He knows full well that the very idea militates
against fundamental principles of free enterprise and trade, that it would
put brakes on efficient and competitive businesses and industries and,
furthermore, would result in avoidable social tensions in a society which
was still to recover from the upheaval caused by the caste-based reservations
in governmental and educational sectors.
Yet, instead of taming the vote-mania
of his masters in the Congress, Communist and casteist parties which constitute
the core of the ruling alliance, Singh brings to bear the authority of
the prime ministerial office on a reactionary idea which seeks to embed
caste in the heart of India as the sole denominator of rise up the economic
ladder. Even Indira Gandhi at the height of her experiments with "Garibi
Hatao" had kept the genie of the caste reservations sealed firmly in the
Mandal bottle. Was she less solicitous of the welfare of the poor than
the present torchbearers of the Gandhi-Nehru family?
Despite pressures from various directions
inside and outside Parliament, she did not make the Mandal report public.
Rajiv Gandhi too refused to succumb to the pressure. It was V P Singh who
opened that can of worms, but, mind you, not because he was a champion
of the OBC cause. But only to save his prime ministerial "gaddi". Singh
did not succeed in his objective, but nonetheless succeeded in doing lasting
damage to the harmony and peace of the people at large by reviving the
scourge of divisive caste in modern-day India. Others in his wake have
now sought to widen the scope and ambit of reservations by spreading the
caste dragnet to the private sector.
The consequences of such a myopic
move would be dangerous. Voluntary affirmative action by private sector
employers is quite different from forcing caste-based quotas down their
collective gullet through an official fiat. It seems that the need of the
Congress Party to retrieve the lost electoral ground is greater than the
demands of merit, efficiency and competitiveness in the private sector.
Equally destructive is the idea
to extend the sop of reservations to the religious minorities (read Muslims).
After the partition of the country on religious grounds in August 1947,
we should have thought that the Congress Party had learnt the right lessons
from that cataclysmic event. Alas, the lust for its electoral revival seems
to have blinded its leadership to the huge danger these religion- based
reservations pose to the unity and integrity of this country in the near
future.
It is unfortunate in the extreme
that a party which tom-toms its faith in secularism is using the retrograde
measures of caste and religion to pander to the baser instincts of our
people. The real friends of the deprived sections of the people are not
those who offer them the largely symbolic sops of caste- and religion-
based reservations.
Their actual redemption from socio-economic
backwardness lies in making decent school and college education available.
Instead of improving the educational infrastructure the gentleman PM would
fob off these sections with the empty promises of reservations which cause
widespread disruption and disaffection in the society and cannot be commended
as a tool for the socio- economic betterment of the poor.
Meanwhile, it is hoped that the
gentleman PM has taken note of the severe strictures the Supreme Court
felt constrained to pass against the CBI for its softness towards the mafia
don Pappu Yadav and the rap on the Government's knuckles by the Election
Commission for its well- publicised decision to set up a commission for
extending reservations to religious minorities in the midst of the election
campaign in Maharashtra. Gentlemen are expected not to indulge in such
questionable practices, isn't it? So what is different under this gentleman
PM?
