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VIEWPOINT: POLITICALLY CORRECT
Wake-Up
Call
The Government's non-governance
and ambivalence has cost the economy dearly
By P. Chidambaram
 Seven
weeks ago, I concluded my piece ("Return of the Curse", April
9) with this question: Does Atal Bihari Vajpayee have the foresight to
use the next six weeks to revamp his Government and restore his credibility?
Those six weeks have come and gone. The results of the elections in five
states are in. As I had anticipated, the Congress has "done well
in Assam and Kerala, the Left Front in West Bengal and the BJP nowhere".
I suspect that there is someone in the BJP establishment
who thinks he is Isaac Newton and is aping the distinguished scientist.
Newton found that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The BJP's political scientist seems to believe that "if you do nothing,
nothing will happen to you". The past seven weeks have seen a pathetic
lack of leadership and clumsy attempts to plug the breaches with whatever
one can lay one's hands upon-brick, wood or cloth.
In Assam, the BJP allied with the discredited
Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), forgetting the lesson it had learned in Karnataka
in 1999. Along with the AGP, the BJP also got the royal boot. In West
Bengal and Kerala, the BJP had no real stakes and stood alone and isolated.
Yet the party does not seek the reasons for its isolation. In Tamil Nadu,
the alliance with the BJP singed the DMK. In the lone by-election from
Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP candidate came a poor third, behind
the Samajwadi Party and the Congress. In the ultimate analysis, despite
being the head of the ruling coalition Government at the Centre, the BJP's
presence was felt nowhere. In the past seven weeks it seemed that Prime
Minister A.B. Vajpayee had taken a long leave of absence from both politics
and governance.
My concern is with the governance part, especially
the agenda for economic reforms.
 Vajpayee
seems unsure whether he is the head of a truly cabinet form of government
or the fountainhead of all power and authority in a modern-day prime ministerial
form of government. His ambivalence is reflected in his handling of the
controversy surrounding the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). N.K. Singh,
the prime mover of reforms and an exceptionally able networker, is out;
P. Ghosh, a distinguished academic who has been out of the country for
many years, is in, but with a lower rank and less authority. Principal
Secretary Brajesh Mishra continues to be the target of attack from diverse
quarters and the prime minister's response is to hint that Mishra will
be relieved of one of his major responsibilities-that of National Security
Adviser. By all accounts, the PMO is in a shambles. It no longer has the
desire or the authority to pull together the reforms agenda.
The next logical place to look at is the Finance
Ministry. There we find Yashwant Sinha. He had no role to play when the
five states went to the polls. Neither the BJP nor any of its allies drafted
him for the campaign. While the opposition went hammer and tongs against
the WTO, removal of quantitative restrictions on imports, foreign direct
investment, role of MNCs, the disinvestment policy and the fall in prices
of agricultural commodities, there was nobody to defend the Government
or its policies. Virtually every aspect of the reforms agenda was under
attack; yet the finance minister was neither seen nor heard.
If Sinha's name appeared in the newspapers it
was for the wrong reasons. The stock market scam became bigger and bigger
(current estimate is Rs 2,000 crore), the SEBI appeared completely clueless
and the finance minister so utterly helpless that he could not even carry
out his intention to replace SEBI Chairman D.R. Mehta. Disinvestment became
a dirty word. While the Supreme Court tried to help in unscrambling the
scrambled BALCO eggs, the maitre d'chef Arun Shourie was notably absent.
Sinha's budget is heavily dependent on disinvestment receipts. Still he
maintained a stoic silence.
Towards the end of the six week period there
was more bad news: a shortfall in the revenues of 2000-01, a widening
of the fiscal deficit and a sharp decline in industrial growth in March
2001 to barely 1.9 per cent. Sinha tried to shrug these away, but I am
afraid they will not simply go away. They are challenges, and they demand
responses.
The final blow came when Sinha was castigated
as a "criminal" by the chief of the BJP's trade union. There
were rumours of the finance minister's resignation. The rumours were promptly
denied but heartless scribes still wrote that "there can be no smoke
without fire". As I write this, Vajpayee is quoted as saying that
he planned to give his Council of Ministers a new look.
Vajpayee has lost valuable time. More than the
loss or gain to any political party, the economy has suffered due to non-management
and the reforms agenda has been set back by at least one year.
(The author is a former Indian finance minister.)
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