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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Balking
at BALCO
Sonia
Gandhi has a lot of explaining to do on her party's stand on privatisation
By Tavleen Singh
 Writing
a political column is a tricky business. Politics is contentious at the
best of times and there are as many who object to what you say as those
who applaud. If the subject is controversial-like Sonia Gandhi's qualifications
to rule India-the problem becomes acute. When she first appeared on our
political landscape as a prime ministerial candidate and this column took
the view, often and clearly, that it was risky for India-barely decolonised-to
be ruled by a leader of Italian make, hate mail poured in and I was accosted
at airports and other public places by complete strangers who berated
me for attacking Sonia. Then after the last general elections, when she
led the Congress party to its worst defeat and slunk temporarily into
the background, I stopped writing about her only to find myself accosted
by strangers who demanded to know why I no longer wrote about Sonia. Well,
mainly because she was no longer news, but it's hard, as the old saying
goes, to keep a good woman down and last week when she surpassed Mamata
Banerjee in dangerous populism she left me with no option but to write
about her once more.
Two incidents inspired me: Congress shenanigans
in Parliament over Government attempts to privatise BALCO (Bharat Aluminium
Corporation) and Sonia's hectoring and hysterical speech at a farmers'
rally in Delhi. Both incidents prove that Sonia, despite her brave efforts
to learn Hindi and become Hindu (Kumbha semi-submersion), remains a poster
girl for the kind of politics India does not need. It is the kind of politics
that puts the interests of some pathetic political party or leader over
the interests of India. Congress is far from being the only political
party whose leitmotif is cheap populism, but as our main opposition party
is it not fair to expect from its leader a small measure of responsibility,
if not a little honesty?
 Surely
she owes it to the public to explain why she opposes a privatisation policy
that was first put in motion by a Congress government? If she thinks that
P.V. Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh were wrong to advocate it in
the first place, then she has even more explaining to do because she needs
to tell us what alternative economic strategy she has for spending taxpayers'
money more wisely. The fact is that in the past 50 years, more than Rs
2,24,000 crore of our money has been poured into public-sector enterprises
that have shown almost no profit. This is money that could have been,
as this column points out ad nauseam, much better spent on things that
ordinary Indians so desperately need: schools, hospitals, roads, electricity
and drinking water. We are among a small handful of countries left in
the world that remains unable to provide these basic necessities to the
majority of its citizens and the excuse our leaders always give is: sorry,
no money. Meanwhile, there has been more than enough money for the government
to indulge in hopelessly loss-making entrepreneurial activities.
Privatisation is an attempt to rectify priorities
that have gone completely awry but the Congress opposes this as do our
Marxist parties. If the BALCO sale goes ahead, it will be only the second
government company to be sold-the other being a bakery called Modern Food
Industries Ltd. Sonia is apparently so passionately against privatisation
that one of her few speeches in the Lok Sabha was provoked by the sale
of the bakery. Then also, as they are doing now, Congress MPs following
their leader shouted about the family silver being sold for a song. The
truth is that the Government, in both cases, had the companies valued
by firms of international repute and then offered them for sale in full
public view.
So, transparency is not the issue. Privatisation
is. And the Congress now tells us that it opposes it fundamentally. If
this was the truth then it may even have been acceptable but Congress
governments in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh are going full steam ahead
with their own privatisation programmes. So, the shenanigans in Parliament
are nothing but a joke-an attempt to mislead the public.
The same, alas, is true of Sonia's charge that
farmers are being treated ''worse by this Government than they have ever
been before''. Indian farmers face serious problems but these are the
result of an accumulation of bad policies over many, many years. In far
too many of these many years, we were ruled by Congress governments led
by Sonia's husband, mother-in-law and grandfather-in-law. Besides, all
that the farmers' rally was treated to were polemics and populism. What
farmers need are new policies but they will never get them because the
Congress' attempt appears to be to oppose for the sake of opposition and
to prevent the functioning of Parliament at any cost. This is exactly
the kind of politics we do not need.
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