The central message from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's September 6
interaction with newspaper editors is that he wants to push the Congress
party and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in a
conservative, right-wing direction. This is evident from many
statements, including his assertion that “it is not possible in this
country to give free food to all the poor people”. The government is
sitting on 55 million tonnes of foodgrain stocks, 33 million tonnes
above the recommended buffer, and has exposed 18 million tonnes to rain.
It admits that 55,000 tonnes have rotted and become inedible. Much more
has surely been devoured by rats.
It takes a special kind of callousness to treat with scorn the
Supreme Court's injunction to provide food free or at low rates to the
poor instead of letting it rot. It is one thing to make a technical
demarcation between the judiciary and the realm of policymaking. It is
quite another to question the legitimacy of judicial intervention where
the government does not follow its own policies. The litigation on the
right to food launched by the People's Union for Civil Liberties has
dragged on for nine years amidst declining food availability and
consumption and persistent undernourishment among half of India's
children, which will prevent them from fulfilling their basic human
potential.
Manmohan Singh has gone further than any other Indian policymaker in
suggesting that Indians must accept poverty as natural within the
present context, in particular the dependence of large numbers of people
on agriculture. He said: “The only way we can raise our heads above
poverty is for more people to be taken out of agriculture.”
So poverty is not a function of structural inequalities, class
exploitation and lack of assets and social opportunity for millions, nor
is it a function of the state's failure to undertake remedial measures
such as land reform. Unless India industrialises, it will “naturally”
remain poor, and so be it. But this makes nonsense of both economics and
history. There are many examples of places that abolished extreme
mass-scale poverty without industrialisation, including China, Cuba and
the Indian State of Kerala.
Manmohan Singh was reluctant to commit himself to a bold, radical
food security law and extremely cautious about accepting the draft of
the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi. (The NAC is
divided on universalising the public distribution system and on pricing
food.) All Manmohan Singh would say is: “We will take inputs from the
NAC… and see what's possible and what's not.”
On environmental protection, too, he revealed a conservative streak.
He said: “Environmental concerns are here to stay,” but they should not
lead to “perpetuation of poverty” or a return to the “licence-permit
raj”. This contraposition is bizarre. Protecting the environment by
preventing destructive projects or building safeguards into them
conserves natural resources (for example, forests, watersheds, and
land), which in the long run are great assets, especially for the poor.
The surest way of perpetuating and deepening poverty is to deprive
underprivileged people of access to the commons and privatising and
handing over to predatory industries the natural resources on which they
are dependent. As for the reference to the “licence-permit raj”, it was
a tool of scaremongering and abuse unbecoming of a responsible leader.
Regulating industry for environmental protection is an important and
necessary function of government.
If Manmohan Singh had in mind Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh's
recent decision to accept the N.C. Saxena committee's report against
licensing the Vedanta mining project at Niyamgiri in Orissa, then he is
wrong. The Dongaria Kondhs, whose livelihoods would be destroyed by the
project, are among the most vulnerable of Adivasis, officially termed
“Primitive Scheduled Tribes”. But they practise incredibly productive
horticulture, in addition to agriculture and animal husbandry, and are
far from poor. Vedanta's mining operations, now blocked, would have
uprooted them and turned them into refugees and beggars, as has happened
in the case millions of Adivasis. The idea that industrialisation must
be promoted even at the cost of high ecological damage, which can be
undone later, stands discredited. Climate science teaches us that most
ecological damage is irreversible; the hidden costs of conventional
greenhouse emissions-intensive industrialisation are unaffordably high.
Travesty of reality
However, Manmohan Singh has long been partial towards such
industrialisation. As Finance Minister in the 1990s, he often pleaded
for rethinking “excessive” environmental protection. This is a complete
travesty of reality: India is one of the world's least environmentally
regulated countries. What else can explain India's spectacular success
in turning its greatest rivers into sewers, degrading its fields through
salination and desertification, polluting its cities to death, and
destroying its virgin rainforests? Or India's failure to enact laws that
mandate serious environmental scrutiny and impose deterrent penalties
on polluters? Or the disgrace that is Bhopal?
If Manmohan Singh has his way, the Navi Mumbai airport project will
go through, destroying hundreds of acres of mangroves that protect the
coastline. Similarly, foreign direct investment in retail will be
permitted so that Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour can pamper the middle
class while ruining poor vendors and street-stall owners.
Manmohan Singh has obviously lost none of his zeal for neoliberalism
although this has demonstrably produced economic and financial disasters
everywhere. His government has mindlessly divested Rs.30,000 crore from
public sector companies, given huge tax breaks to corporations and rich
people and done nothing to address obscenely high income disparities.
His policies will turn the broadly centrist Congress into a fully
right-wing party, with the rural job guarantee Act as its sole “human
face” feature.
The stances adopted by Sonia Gandhi, and to an extent her son, Rahul,
on poverty, social opportunity and environmental protection are
different and often in contrast to Manmohan Singh's. We do not know
whether the Gandhis have a specific economic philosophy or a general
stand different from Manmohan Singh's GDPism. But their public
pronouncements are pro-poor and sensitive to environmental concerns.
For instance, Sonia Gandhi said on September 9 that land must be
acquired “in a manner that does not result in the loss of large tracts
of fertile and productive agricultural lands”; if “farmers are deprived
of their land-based livelihood out of necessity, they must be provided
with adequate compensation and alternative occupations”. Upholding the
rights of the underprivileged and vulnerable was the refrain.
Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri to show solidarity with the Kondhs.
And Sonia urged: “We must protect the environment…. In whatever we do,
we must not forget that our lush forests and mountains, majestic rivers
and all other water sources, and clean air have sustained and nurtured
us for millennia.” She also pleaded for more renewable energy.
Now, all this may well be populist posturing. On a cynical view, the
Congress wants to play both sides of the street and capture the elite
and aam aadmi constituencies. It is possible that Rahul Gandhi thinks it
is politically smart to adopt a pro-Dalit, pro-Adivasi posture but has
no real commitment to the underprivileged.
However, that is irrelevant. What matters is that people in high
places in the ruling dispensation at least speak the language of
justice, equal opportunity, defence of livelihoods and environmental
protection. That can only induce a healthy element in our
social-political discourse. India needs good populism, a politics
oriented towards the poor and powerless, and hostile to inequality,
privilege and hierarchy. That alone can win the Congress-UPA genuine
popular legitimacy. One can say this without being a Gandhi family
admirer.
The question is whether the Gandhis' avowed defence of the
underprivileged and advocacy of inclusion – including politics as a site
of inclusion in Rahul's view – are enough to counter the right-wing
tilt that Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P. Chidambaram have
given to the UPA. This question is not easy to answer given the
division of power between the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi.
Sonia Gandhi seems to be following a hands-off approach to this
government, even more so than with UPA-1. The Congress, for its part,
has no internal left-of-centre pressure group such as the Young Turks or
the Nehru Forum of the past – only a few individuals who sporadically
take Left-leaning positions.
Even the NAC does not have the dynamism of its previous avatar. Some
of its new members are neoliberals. More important, it lacks the synergy
that it earlier derived from interaction with Left party Members of
Parliament and progressive elements within UPA-1 such as former Rural
Development Minister Raghuvansh Pratap Singh. Nor is the NAC's function
vis-a-vis the government properly defined.
What the Gandhis should do if they really want to promote a
justice-based “New Deal”-style agenda in keeping with their own
professed ideas is to create institutional arrangements for the NAC and
for party-government interaction. The Congress must promote a vigorous
internal debate on issues such as poverty, inequality, the environment,
development, Kashmir, naxalism, and so on. It should invite progressive
intellectuals and civil society activists to initiate and join the
debate.
Only thus can the “New Deal”-style agenda acquire sufficient momentum
to overcome the UPA's rightward drift. That is a tall order. But it is
not impossible.
