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EDITORIAL
The
Time is Now
Vajpayee's
first year was diplomacy's. The second should be the market's.
It
is something of a delicious irony that Standard and Poor's downgraded
India's credit outlook from "positive" to "stable"
in the very week that marked the first anniversary of the NDA's re-election.
Compared to the tempestuous 13 months he spent in office after becoming
prime minister in March 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee can certainly look
back at the past year with some satisfaction. The coalition he leads is
larger than ever but relatively stable. The blackmail of an N. Chandrababu
Naidu on food subsidies or a Mamata Banerjee on oil prices has been dealt
with with as much firmness as possible. The real success has come in foreign
policy—crowned by the fact that the American president and the Indian
prime minister exchanged visits in a period of six months. The international
isolation predicted after the Pokhran nuclear tests now appears a remote
prospect.
 Yet
if diplomacy has been the Vajpayee regime's success story in the past
12 months, economics is the Achilles' heel. The Standard and Poor's frown
is a result of the Indian Government's sloth on reforms, particularly
disinvestment. With the Reserve Bank of India predicting GDP growth in
2001-2002 will be half a percentage point below its earlier forecast,
Vajpayee's agenda for year II is clear enough. Whether it is in corporatising
the Department of Telecom or selling Modern Foods, he has so far done
no more than tie up the loose ends of the first phase of liberalisation.
The second phase still awaits a time-table-and a political vision. Its
ingredients are easily identifiable: outright privatisation, cuts in government
spending and further deregulation of economic activity. In April this
year, the prime minister received reports from four advisory committees
he had set up. He has only to implement these recommendations. If Vajpayee
grasps the nettle, he need not bother about year III-he would have assured
himself a place in history.
Crime
as Folk Theatre
Is India
tiring out Veerappan or is it the other way round?
Nebulous
at the best of times, the distinction between Tamil Nadu's politics and
cinema is particularly blurred these days. The tiresome Veerappan hostage
drama is doing to governance and rule of law what a tacky, B-grade script
does to cinema. A forest brigand, desperately keen to reinvent himself
as a subaltern political hero, is being facilitated in his efforts by
two feckless chief ministers. The negotiations between the Tamil Nadu
Government and Veerappan are a strange intercourse. The outlaw dictates
the terms. He decides who will represent the state—whether it be
his favourite journalist or, more recently, "Tamil nationalist"
advocates. The logical conclusion of this process will be Veerappan's
demand that India speak to him through the LTTE.
 Film
star Rajkumar has been in captivity for over two months now. In this period,
the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have taken not one initiative—other
than cravenly agreeing to free 51 criminal cronies of Veerappan—to
rescue the 73-year-old victim of this constitutional horror show. Instead,
it fell upon the Supreme Court to prevent the capitulation. Now the court
has spoken for the nation once more by asking the most obvious question:
what are Karnataka's and Tamil Nadu's alternative plans for ridding India
of the Veerappan menace? The trauma of Rajkumar's family and his numerous
fans is understandable but even they must be getting exasperated by Veerappan's
games. It is appropriate for Karunanidhi, as the elder statesman of the
Dravida movement and repository of Tamil pride—if not as the mere
chief minister—to talk turkey with Veerappan. Otherwise, it is not
beyond the arsenal of the Indian state to preserve both Rajkumar's life
and his country's dignity.
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Relics
of old empires exist everywhere. Why can't the Mani Shankar Aiyars of
India let them be? asks INDIA TODAY Senior Editor Ravi Shankar in
