India's top troika shines brightly, but what about the rest?

JYOTI MALHOTRA
Gulf News, Dubai, June 2007


The human face of pro-marketeers like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance minister P. Chidambaram that shone brightly at a meeting of industry captains a fortnight ago, continues to send surprise waves through a nation increasingly comfortable with capitalist turns of phrase like profit, growth, foreign direct investment, etcetera.

To think that the Indian middle-class, having been nursed on the milk of socialism for over four decades has adapted to the free-market credo like a fish to water, clearly point to the colossal changes at home since the reforms began a decade and a half ago.

But when the state begins to realise that this economic freedom has in fact exacerbated the rich-poor divide in large parts of the country, question is, should the same state intervene to now curtail the manifest greed and vulgarity of conspicuous consumption that exists?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent remarks to top industry indicates that the time may have come to do so. Although, these top industry leaders could show the way by voluntarily adopting austerity measures.

Few people know that Singh, although synonymous with the breathtaking economic reform in India, personally believes in the Nehruvian simple living-high thinking ethic. Singh’s three daughters and their families live extremely private lives. It is said that when one of Singh’s brothers came to meet him in Delhi recently, he took an auto-rickshaw to the Prime Minister’s residence, because the PM didn’t even send a car to pick him up at Delhi’s railway station.

Clearly though, personal example hardly seems enough. Large parts of the country have reacted with a certain verbal violence to Manmohan Singh’s remarks. And yet, as large parts of north India, especially Rajasthan and now Haryana, are increasingly enveloped in a caste war between two local communities, the Prime Minister may have the last word yet.

Fact is, the roots of this caste violence between the backward Gujjar community seeking caste demotion to tribal status, and the Meena community, which already has this tribal status, can be traced to the economic privileges and quotas that certain communities (in this case, tribal communities) get above others.

It’s a terrible conundrum, especially in such a large, diverse country like India. How should the government balance affirmative action for poor and unprivileged castes and communities, with the legitimate demands of meritorious people?

When doctors in Delhi protested increasing student and job quotas last year, confronting India with the issue, the Prime Minister had even then argued that the nature of the problem should be looked at differently. Instead of competing for the same pie, he said, the solution lay in expanding the size of the pie, so that all communities could share in the benefits of economic reform.

Clearly, the Congress-led government, especially in the wake of Mayawati’s demolition job in Uttar Pradesh, is beginning to believe that the time has come to take a proactive approach on economically empowering the faceless ``aam admi’ or ``common man.’’

The election debacle in Uttar Pradesh is clearly a big motivation. Several voices in the Congress party have since argued that the government has done more than enough to unleash the capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship. Indian business has never done better, competing with the best abroad and therefore, cleaning up its act at home.

But as government policies pursued economic growth, it seemed to have somewhere lost the plot. The massive Uttar Pradesh landslide in favour of Mayawati meant that the party death knell began to ring even louder. The Congress seemed to have abdicated its political inheritance without as much as a murmur.

The time had now come for the Congress to reclaim the agenda of the dispossessed and underprivileged classes. When Mahatma Gandhi picked up a fistful of salt from the beaches of Dandi, he meant to tell the poorest of the poor that the Congress party would always stand by its side.

Certainly, luck favours the brave. The Congress has been confronted with this huge, internal challenge mid-way through its tenure. If the government is able to transform this by the time national elections are held in 2009, they would have taken India to a new phase in its development.

Meanwhile, over the next few months, the government will have the opportunity to deal with another major challenge, this time on the external front. The Indo-US deal is delicately poised these days, between enormous success and dismal failure. If it succeeds, the deal will open up India to the world like never before, and catapult it into a brand new league, beyond anybody’s imagination.

It is moments like these in a nation’s history that asks its leaderships to measure up. If they fail the people, the people may have no option but to get a new set of leaders soon.

ENDS