People's Democracy

EDITORIAL

THE Prime Minister, it appears, has made it a habit to make public his annual musings. The first edition inflicted a year ago was an exercise in fork-tongued hypocrisy. This time round it is a declaration of lofty and laudable objectives with absolutely no indication of how he proposes to go about achieving these. More dangerous is the attempt to divert the country’s attention away from pressing life and death issues confronting the majority of our people, and focussing only on cross border terrorism. Without any doubt the latter is a scourge that needs to be urgently eliminated. Deaths due to starvation or distress suicides, however, are as important to prevent, as are deaths due to terrorist attacks.

While waxing eloquent about a ‘prosperous India, free of fear and free of want’, and claiming that all India’s problems can be eliminated ‘within the span of a generation’, he is loath to detail any specifics. Days before the September terrorist attacks in the USA, he had expressed great concern about the plight of the people and the health of the economy. Special expert committees were set up, promises made to inject at least Rs.75,000 crore as public investment to bolster domestic demand and generate employment; the scandalously large foodgrain stock was to be distributed to the poor to prevent starvation deaths; and the peasantry was assured protection from cheap imports through higher import tariffs. Not only is there is not a single reference to these issues in these ‘musings’, there is absolute silence on the fact that to appease foreign capital Mr. Vajpayee actually reduced import duty on palm oil during his official visit to Malaysia!

This time round Mr. Vajpayee, by his own admission, is not merely musing. He is dreaming (!) of India becoming a ‘prosperous global power’. Nothing wrong with that. But as the head of the government how does he propose to do this? No idea! Such sanctimonious rhetoric is meant only for public consumption, not to direct governmental policy, especially as governmental policies, on the contrary, have been quite the opposite. India has been mortgaged with a public debt of over Rs.16 lakh crore. The burden of this falls directly on the vast majority of the people. The interest payments’ burden is the rationale offered by the government for abdicating responsibility towards the people in all the crucial spheres, food security, education, health, etc. The public sector, the creation of the Indian people through their blood and sweat, and their major asset, is being sold for a song. All sectors of the economy have been opened up for loot by foreign capital and Multinational Corporations. Indian agriculture, according to the wishes of these MNCs, has been made vulnerable as never before, and as a result ruination today faces not just hundreds but crores of farmers. And, on top of all this, the basic guarantee to survival for millions, the public distribution system and procurement of agricultural goods at minimum support prices, is being abandoned.

In short, India under your leadership, Mr. Vajpayee, far from becoming a ‘strong and prosperous global power’, is increasingly being reduced to the status of an abject dependency. While Pakistan-sponsored cross border terrorism poses grave problems for us, to use this, as Mr. Vajpayee you do, as the ‘biggest’ ‘roadblock’ preventing a ‘great, faster and a more egalitarian’ development is begging the issue. The abject surrender to imperialist economic interests, the servile conformism to imperialist foreign policy and its strategic objectives, and the anti-people economic policies of ‘reform’, are the handiwork of this government. These had little or nothing to do with Pak-sponsored terrorism.

In the first of his musings Mr. Vajpayee had assured the country of resolving the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan, and the Ayodhya temple conflict. This time round he is completely silent on the latter. Not surprising. With the assembly elections round the corner, especially in UP, crucial for his remaining in office, Mr. Vajpayee is seeking to use the Ayodhya passions to bolster the electoral prospects of the BJP. In the process, for Mr. Vajpayee, it does not matter if the unity of the country is jeopardized; it does not matter if crores of minorities feel more insecure. The blood and death of innocent people is (a la Madeline Albright and the death of lakhs of Iraqi children), not too high a price to pay for the victory of the BJP.

Mr. Vajpayee’s description of the Taliban and Al Qaeda is very correct, but equally true of all religious fundamentalist organisations, particularly the Saffron brigade. We quote: –

The Indian people, Mr. Vajpayee, have risen as one man against terrorism. They have always done so, will continue to do so. But beware, they shall also rise as one man against your cynical exploitation and misuse of their sentiments – religious or patriotic – for your partisan political interests. They shall not allow the mortgaging of the Indian economy nor the forfeiture of its sovereignty – the declared objective of your policies. India, of course, has the potential to emerge as a ‘strong and prosperous global power’. But this requires a political leadership vastly different, and much much better.