Delhi Diary/By A K B Krishnan
The story, as often told, goes like this: A group of friends decided to go on a hunting expedition. They drove into the jungle in several four-wheel drives and after a few hours of travel on rough terrain, during which they encountered little game, decided to take a breather. A couple of them strayed a bit too far from their vehicles and suddenly there appeared a pride of lions all looking for their own meal for the day. Only then did the hapless hunters realise that they had left their guns in their vehicles. The smarter of the two - or so he thought - whipped out the gun licence from his backpack and showed it to the lions….
The relevance of this story to this week’s Diary notings in a bit.
Meanwhile, the Congress Party finally seems to be waking up to the reality of electoral losses and is looking to take Narendra Modi and his BJP head-on on matters of governance. Nearly five months after the drubbing it received in parliamentary polls and an equally disastrous showing in two key assembly elections, the party has put up its most articulate leader, former finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, to argue the Congress’ case and, at the same time, deny the BJP much of the credit it wants to take for whatever reforms it has enacted so far.
Cynics, and there is no dearth of them, would say the Congress is on the offensive in order to offset the threat of infamy hinted at by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who, for his turn, has been telling television channels that when eventually the names of those who have stashed away unaccounted wealth - or ‘black’ money in local parlance - in foreign tax havens are revealed, the Congress will have a lot to be embarrassed about.
“Don’t blackmail us on black money,” said the Congress Party’s communications department chairman Ajay Maken who challenged the government to reveal the names and reminded the government of what Modi had once bragged about; that if all such ‘black’ money were to be returned to India, every Indian - man, woman and child - would be richer by Rs1.5mn. “I am waiting to hear from my bank that my share has come into my account,” said Maken tongue-in-cheek.
Not many were convinced by Maken’s bravado though. So it was left to Chidambaram to nuance the issue further. “If any Congressman’s name appears on that list, it will certainly be an embarrassment for that Congressman. But how can it embarrass the Congress Party? It is, after all, not the party’s money that he or she has put away,” argues Chidambaram. (Aside: Like the government he was part of, the party too seems to be eschewing the collective responsibility route). And on the whole issue itself Chidambaram is not ready to concede any ground to the BJP.
“This government has not said or done anything that we had not said or done when we were in power. The initial list of 18 names had landed when we were in government and this list was handed over to the petitioner (noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani) on the direction of the Supreme Court. Nothing more has been achieved in the past five months,” Chidambaram told TV channels in separate interviews last week.
Apart from saying that Modi is “a good salesman” and that his sales pitch has had a positive impact on the general populace, Chidambaram feels the new government has done pretty little by way of initiating forward-looking policies. In fact, the Harvard-educated lawyer is of the view that Modi and his Finance Minister Jaitley have lost some “fantastic opportunities” to drive home the advantage of a majority government and cited the legislation/ordinance on coal as an example.
But then hasn’t the government formed a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the ‘black’ money affair, Chidambaram was asked. But that was on the direction of the Supreme Court which had issued the orders when the Congress was in power. “We could not do it because the elections were upon us by then,” he explains. And what about railway reforms (the Sam Pitroda panel had recommended several measures years ago), or the de-control of diesel prices or the goods and services tax (GST) or the gas pricing?
And why did the Congress resort to a retrograde step like the retrospective tax law? To all this Chidambaram had just one answer: “We were a coalition government and we had our compulsions. It was very difficult to get many of these reforms going under such circumstances.”
And just in case anybody thought that he was conceding it to the Modi government for implementing some of these reforms, albeit partially, Chidambaram was quick to add that all these were just a repackaged continuation of what the UPA government under the Congress Party’s leadership had set out to do. “We couldn’t take these reforms forward for several reasons, the chief one being compulsions of coalition politics, but we did empower the various departments with the necessary laws.”
Now, back to the hunting story. Just swap the Congress Party for the hunter friends and the empowering laws for the gun licence. The hunters were indeed empowered to use the gun, but they couldn’t. The Congress government had the power to implement development policies but it didn’t. When faced with a tough situation the Congress flashes the empowering reforms.
When questioned why it failed, the stock answer was: coalition politics. Even Manmohan Singh took refuge under this excuse to explain why he had to concede the telecom ministry to the DMK twice over. He said the DMK was adamant that it should get the telecom portfolio - for obvious reasons, as it later turned out - and because of coalition compulsions the Congress leadership had to surrender to the Tamil Nadu party. The rest, as they say, is (court) history.
Now the question is: what was the Congress Party’s priority, the country’s well-being or pandering to coalition partners just so that it can cling to power? After all, another Congress regime under another prime minister had run efficiently for full five years despite being a minority government. But then for P V Narasimha Rao the country came first, something that the party under Sonia Gandhi and her handpicked prime minister forgot. Instead they did the subsidy and dole routine under the delusion that Indians lived by bread alone when aspirational India was looking for cake with a bit of icing as well.
The Congress is paying the price of these mistakes through electoral decimation. Try as he might Chidambaram will find it difficult to wash away the sins and stains of those omissions and commissions.
Unless, of course, Modi makes a total hash of it!
Punish the hate-mongers
A couple of years ago Shah Rukh Khan was detained for questioning at New York’s White Plains airport. Khan himself joked about it later saying he always came to the US whenever he felt his stardom was making him too arrogant because “the immigration guys (here) kick the star out of the stardom.” (He had a similar experience earlier too).
Readers of this column would know who Shah Rukh Khan is. No introductions required. But the “immigration guys” in the US are not so fortunate! So they “kick” a star here and a politician there if they think he or she has to be kicked. Hundreds of ordinary citizens from all over the world also go through these questioning processes regularly. That’s the drill. When it comes to immigration and customs no country wants to take a chance, least of all the US of A.
But politicians, especially from the then ruling Congress Party, and television anchors went ballistic with the news of India’s top film star getting treated like any ordinary individual at best or a suspected criminal at worst. “The policy of detention and apology by the US cannot continue,” said then foreign minister S M Krishna while others decried the incident with choicer epithets.
Cut to India of 2014 and what do you get? A minister in the Delhi government leads a midnight mob against a few defenceless African nationals, women included, because they were allegedly “a bad influence” on the neighbourhood. Another set of people set upon another set of African nationals, this time because these “Nigerians” had passed some “lewd” remarks at a lady passenger on the Delhi metro. The attack happens right in front of a police officer inside a police outpost. In Goa even the administration joins in calling Nigerians a “cancer.”
Not that it is any consolation, but Indians don’t seem to discriminate between Africans and even some of their own. Look what is happening to people from India’s northeastern states. Fair-skinned they are, but are also easily distinguishable by their features and that is enough for hate-mongers from Delhi to Haryana to Karnataka to maim and murder.
And then the foreign minister tells the US what it is doing is wrong! Why does the law allow such people to get away? If any case warrants exemplary deterrent punishment, for sure this is the one.
