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| Economy in minnow raj | | | Gautam Mukherjee
As we launch into the first-phase of our tumultuous, Maoist attack-ridden, month-long general election, we need to be justifiably proud of the endeavour. It will cost us at least $ 2 billion to conduct the polls. But, after the sound and fury is over on May 16, there is a clear threat looming large in the event of a terribly fractured verdict.
It is the resurrected threat of another bout of a regressive Luddite/Lohiaite/Socialist economic muddle confronting India’s future. It is an anticipated muddle. And we must brace for it. Because it will be brought on not just by the natural infirmities of coalition politics, now par for every course, but largely due to the nature of its constituent parts.
Most of the regional and small parties of today, without whom there will be no forming a Government this time, were spawned on a diet of anarchic and self-defeating Socialist politics. Their views were inspired by Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. These worthy politicians revolted against our benighted Socialism of the time, fashioned by the Congress, which they found to be elitist.
Of course it is true that even after 61 years of independence we have been unable to reconcile the needs of the hinterlands of Bharat with the internationalism of India. And this is the principle reason, along with the desire for a share of voice, for the rise of the regional and small parties.
Jawaharlal Nehru tried to reconcile the two worlds — the urban and the rural, the classes and the masses — by embracing Socialism. As a former imperial colony, we took on an early anti-capitalist policy direction. Of course, it didn’t work then, and not just for us, and it won’t work now. But the Bharat versus India schizophrenia persists, with some new overtones of India Inc versus the rest.
Back then, even without more extreme hands at the helm of the ship of state, we endured the infamous ‘Hindu rate of growth’ for over 30 years, pegged at no more than two per cent of GDP. We started to grow at a better pace with increasing doses of economic liberalisation since 1991; the future demands an acceleration of market reforms if we are to maintain a high rate of GDP growth.
But the followers of Lohia and Narayan, aided and abetted by a new generation of have-nots — those as yet untouched by the effects of market reforms — populate the small and regional parties, all seething with assertion. But do their leaders realise the way ahead as they seem poised to wrest a greater share of power at the Centre? Do they see the practicality in policies that can help them deliver on their promises? Do they know there is nothing to gain by blocking progress and going back to a discredited and woolly ideology that simply does not work?
In this 24x7 television and Internet age, they had better realise that they will not get away with it for long, as each regional party in power is already witnessing. Bharat and India alike will reward or punish its rulers based on development and its pleasant effects on daily life. Populism can only go so far and no more.
But in other matters, in the assertions of their first flush, these Lohiaities and Socialists did succeed in extending the march of Indian democracy. Looking back, the ferment engendered by them in the Sixties, and more particularly in the Seventies and Eighties, led to the end of the dominant, and undeniably arrogant, one-party rule in favour of multi-party alliances, heralding the advent of coalition Governments. And, it might be argued, national parties are no longer in a position to secure a majority of their own with their vote-banks redistributed.
But economically, by inclination, the regional and small parties have always been retrograde. Irrespective of global trends, they tend to position themselves further Left than the Fabian Socialism and Soviet Union-inspired ‘mixed economy’ favoured by Nehru and later by Mrs Indira Gandhi. They refuse to update their economics. Unless, that is, we take Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav’s handling of the Railway Ministry, and not that of Bihar, as the economic policy pointer for the future.
In the early days of their struggle, the Lohiaites and Socialists also wanted to overthrow the ‘upper caste’ stranglehold of the Congress. The consequent ferment they engendered did help them achieve this goal, aided later by VP Singh’s Mandalisation during the late-1980s and the BSP’s Dalit empowerment of more recent times.
But whenever these ‘social progressives’ ran Governments, or helped run them, at the State level or at the Centre, in stable coalitions or majorities or short-lived minority configurations, their economic policies have been sadly backward, lacklustre and riddled with corruption.
This may not have mattered when India saw itself as a Third World country. But now, with clear-eyed aspirations of becoming a leading world economy, it must think differently. Since it is clear that the regional parties have come to sit at the high table for good they must resist the temptation to trash it. They must change course and adopt development economics that will keep them in good stead with the electorate now and in the future.
Let us remember that all the Socialist misdirection of the past before 1991 has already put us 50 years behind more market economy-based former colonies, and at a vast economic and strategic disadvantage to a politically Communist but economically capitalist China.
With the increasing significance of regional and small parties, it must be noted that their survival, in such luxuriant numbers, on a very crowded political bus is unlikely. The victors will be those who have effectively savaged, vanquished and subsumed one of their own kind, and/or taken to the service of one of the national parties.
It will be either the DMK or the AIADMK and friends. Likewise in State after State of this electoral contest that will have to add up to a national election with a winning coalition and coherent policy thereafter. But all this comes afterwards.
For the moment, the most that the big fish can hope for is to lead a flock of disparate minnows into Government formation after May 16, rather than the other way around.
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