THREE YEARS OF BJP MISRULE 

Brigade Stands Demoralised

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

 THE BJP and its allies seem to have lost all nerve now. Though the third edition of Vajpayee-led government (that is, leaving apart the 1996 fiasco and the government that assumed power in 1998 and beat an ignominious exit in 1999) recently completed three years, they observed the anniversary in a low key. There was not much of birthday bash on the occasion; not many patted one another’s backs. As for the masses, most of them did not even notice when the occasion arrived or passed away. 

NOT A NOVEL EXERCISE

The fact is that the government did not have courage to publicise the event (rather, the non-event) and contented itself with issuing only a few booklets from its ministry of information and broadcasting.

This is by no means a novel exercise, as all regimes have been undertaking such publications from time to time. But this is also true that no publicity barrage can prevent the people from giving vent to their sense of outrage when a government loses their confidence. As we said last week in context of J&K elections, people can go to any extent if they decide to settle accounts with their rulers. Pontifications from the AIR and Doordarshan as well as all nerve-stretching by I&B mandarins simply prove worthless at such moments in history.

As is customary on such occasions, the prime minister sent a “Message” and all the I&B ministry’s booklets carried it. Yet, one simply fails to understand whom at all the message was addressed --- to the people, to the NDA jugglers, or to I&B officials who must have burnt a lot of midnight oil in the recent past! The same about the messages from the deputy prime minister, I&B minister and her junior.

BOMBASTIC CLAIMS

Incidentally, the prime minister’s message is not only the longest of them all; it is also full of bombastic claims. For example, it says: “In the past three years, our government has fulfilled many promises that we made to the people.” He also claimed his government’s “achievements and ongoing initiatives” have raised “India’s standing in the international community.” But this is not all. Innocuously (!) presuming that the BJP will go on enjoying power, the prime minister says: “We are determined to accelerate the pace of India’s all-round progress and lay a firm foundation for realising our cherished goal of becoming a developed nation by 2020.”

But, as they say, eating gives you the proof of pudding. The prime minister definitely has the democratic right of making whatever claim he likes to make. But the people too have an equally weighty democratic right to have their own opinion about such claims and about their rulers in general.

As for the claim of fulfilling many promises, it is doubtful if even a gullible person will really believe it. Just to take one example, the NDA manifesto for 1999 polls promised to create one crore jobs every year. But, will the prime minister kindly inform us how many jobs his regime has created in three years? The very fact of a rise in unemployment, corroborated by the government’s own figures despite all the conceptual and methodological defects in their compilation, simply belies this claim. And now that the Tenth Plan approach paper talks of creating five crore jobs in the next five years, it shows the BJP has not yet given up its deception game.

ECONOMY A MESS

In fact, the past three years have simply landed our economy in a hopeless mess, and we had occasions earlier to touch on its state in these columns. Our “Economic Notes” column also takes care of this aspect, and hence we do not intend to go into details here. Suffice it to say that the future of our economy does not look bright either.

In the fiscal 2001-02, for example, the government claimed to have achieved a 5.7 per cent growth in GDP, as against its initial claim of 6.5 per cent. But the final figures the Central Statistical Organisation later released showed that the rate was only 4 per cent. And now that the claim is to achieve a 6 per cent growth rate, no agency is prepared to believe it. The IMF has already brought down the predicted growth rate from 5.5 to 5 per cent. The NCAER thinks it will be only 4.8 per cent by the end of fiscal 2002-03, and the Asian Development Bank and the CMIE are not prepared to believe that it may be above 4 per cent.

The reasons cited for it are simple. One of them is demand constraint. The recession in some of the developed countries and sluggish growth in others may only worsen the situation by affecting our exports. This only confirms our contention that no lasting economic upturn is possible unless the government takes vigorous steps to boost domestic demand.

Downturn in agricultural production is another major reason cited for the gloomy growth scenario. Our kharif production is set to decline because of deficient rainfall and parts of the country are likely to have a near-famine situation. But this cannot be attributed to the nature alone. The fact is that the government has rendered a singular disservice to our peasantry by liberalising the import of several hundred agricultural commodities. The consequent fall in the prices of agricultural produce, plus the rising costs of agricultural inputs, are pushing our peasantry to the brink of a disaster, as reflected in a series of suicides in various parts of India. 

At the same time, even the experts who have been vocally supporting the LPG policies are of the view that the magnitude of joblessness may go up further. This is not surprising in view of the jobless growth we have been having for several years. If anything, the situation can only worsen with the spate of industrial closures and retrenchments. The ‘reforms’ the regime is trying to effect in labour laws to give the employers freedom to hire and fire, and to exit from business with ease, can only complicate the situation.

The approach paper also claimed to have a savings rate of 26.8 per cent of GDP in the next 5 years and 33 per cent in 10 years to achieve a growth rate of 8 per cent in future. It is true that a 26.8 per cent savings rate is not a big target and is easily achievable for a country like India. But the thing is: Will we be able to really achieve it? This seems unlikely. At a time the savings rate in the corporate sector is virtually stagnant and is negative in the government sector, it is the household sector that maintained a steady savings rate of 22 to 23 per cent and even took it above 26 per cent rate once. Yet our government is busy launching one attack after another on small savers by reducing interest rates in the name of fudged inflation data, by engineering scams in financial institutions and wiping out the life-long savings of small savers (see the UTI scam) and in other ways. In such a situation, it is doubtful whether we will at all be able to achieve the target the approach paper has set.  

STINKING SCANDALS

In sum, there is no exaggeration if one says that India may join the rank of developed countries by 2020 or even earlier. Given our natural and human resources, this is indeed possible. But when the claim comes from a prime minister whose regime is out to give the foreign and Indian corporates an open general license for loot, it simply appears ridiculous.

The economic mess is further confounded by the spate of corruption scams in the last three years. Not to talk of earlier scams in telecom and some other sectors, the UTI scam brought tears to the eyes of no less than two crore small investors. Then the whole country saw a stinking scandal in the allotment of petrol pumps and LPG outlets in all parts of the country. Public sector assets were sold to private parties for a song (see the BALCO case), obviously for a quid pro quo. And the Tehelka episode and coffin scam showed how the government is playing havoc with the very defence of the country. No less a person than the then BJP president and the defence minister were found involved in shady arms deals. As for present BJP president, it was revealed that, while an MLA in Andhra Pradesh, he cornered for his relatives large chunks of the land that was meant for the SCs, STs and other weaker sections.

And now has come to light the spectacle of a shady deal in case of Centaur Airport Hotel in Mumbai. Anybody interested in the details of such stinking scandals may consult the pamphlet the CPI(M) has already brought out on the issue. The publication proves beyond doubt that no regime in the past perpetrated so many scams in so short a time, showing that the BJP is really “a party with a difference” in at least this sphere.

SUBSERVIENCE TO IMPERIALISM

The BJP regime will also be remembered, of course with abhorrence, for its subservience to US imperialists. At the time of writing these lines, joint Indo-US air exercises are going on near Agra. But that is not all. The regime has inch by inch corroded the country’s consensual foreign policy of non-alignment, peace and disarmament, at the US’s behest. It withdrew recognition from the SADR and has stopped supporting the cause of Palestinians who are fighting for a homeland.

But the biggest disservice the regime rendered to the country was by giving the imperialist powers a chance to intervene in Kashmir issue. As said last week, the people of Jammu & Kashmir have foiled the imperialist game in the subcontinent for the time being, but the threat of intervention remains. The regime’s sole concern in this regard is to somehow have the US support, in its conflict with Pakistan. That it is nothing more than a pipe dream, that the US has its own game in the region and that it is not going to desert Pakistan even while trying to have India by its side, is something the regime is not prepared to accept.  

This is not surprising. Apart from the BJP’s blind hatred for Pakistan, which has made South Asia a probable point of nuclear conflagration, the regime’s economic policies are also responsible for its subservience to the US. If it is true that the foreign policy of a regime reflects its domestic policies to an extent, the BJP regime’s foreign policy could not but be what it is. The way our economy has been opened for imperialist loot could only spell its capitulation before the world gendarme. The regime’s stoic silence on an issue like Iraq or on the US nuclear base in Diego Garcia despite the threat it poses to all countries of the Indian Ocean rim (including India) can be given only one name --- the height of servility.

It is here that one can judge the real worth of Vajpayee’s claim that his regime has raised India’s standing internationally. The fact is that while India was once a leader of third world countries, and every newly liberated country, every national liberation movement could rely upon India’s support for its cause, today our voice is not even heard on international fora. No matter what the BJP leaders shamelessly say, the fact is that our prestige has taken a nosedive under this regime.

THREAT TO NATIONAL UNITY

 But the biggest threat the BJP regime is posing is to our national unity. Controlled from behind the scene by the RSS, the BJP’s regime cannot escape responsibility for the anti-minority pogroms during the last four-odd years. While it was the small Christian community that bore the brunt of the saffron brigade’s fascistic attacks in the earlier parts of BJP misrule, Gujarat recently witnessed the longest and most brutal anti-Muslim carnage of independent India. Nay, the way the carnage was organised shows how the brigade had been meticulously planning for it, and perpetrated it on the pretext of the heinous Godhra incident. 

But the RSS-BJP pose a threat not to our present only but to our future as well. The brigade is out to saffronise our whole education system so as to produce a generation of bigots and fanatics. The depth of this saffronisation threat may be judged from an article we are publishing in this issue.

Needless to say, all this bodes ill for our very existence as a civilised nation, for our secular fabric and syncretic culture, for everything Indians are justly proud of. The brutal burning alive of a priest and two minors in an Orissa village, the cold-blooded murder of more than a thousand people in Gujarat and the recent lynching of five Dalits in Haryana do show what savagery the brigade is instilling in its cadres’ psyche. Comrade Jyoti Basu is not a bit wrong in characterising this force as barbarian and uncivilised.

But the day is not far off when the brigade will have to account for its acts of omission and commission. The way people have hounded out the BJP and its allies in one state after another does give a preview of what will happen two years hence, if not earlier. BJP leaders are already demoralised. Dissidence in their ranks is growing. Vajpayee had to run away from his own constituency, Lucknow, seven hours before schedule, on the pretext of a sore throat, as he had no guts to face the dissidents. The way Togadia and his ilk are employing an abusive language against their opponents shows not only their lowly political culture but also their extreme desperation.   

This desperation is also evident from the way the VHP is, with the RSS backing, up in arms against the BJP government. The move is to press the BJP to clear the ground for temple construction in Ayodhya and, in general, to come back to a strident communal platform. Clearly, the BJP is hesitant as it fears it may thereby lose its allies; coming to power on its own is simply out of question. Yet there is a limit to which it may go in resisting the RSS. Therefore an aggravation of communal drive in the days to come is not ruled out.

Be that as it may, the people have clearly indicated what they think. Now it is up to the NDA parties to think whether they would like to perish with the BJP. They better see how the National Conference suffered defeat for the first time in J&K --- courtesy its alliance with the BJP. On the other hand, the Left and democratic forces will also have to come into action and mobilise the masses on the burning issues directly facing them. This is absolutely essential to see that the BJP’s rout does not go waste but opens the doors for a new democratic development.