I write this on 5th of July after a bike-ride of 20 km through Pune on the day of the Bharat Bandh organized by all opposition parties. The roads are less crowded, shops are closed, public transport vehicles do not ply, schools have a holiday, small vendors’ services are at a standstill; in short the usually buzzing city wears a sleepy look at mid-day! I can see the headlines of tomorrow; the opposition will call the bandh a total success, the government will pat itself on the back and claim to have exploded the conspiracy of the opposition, the so-called neutral media will resort to the phrase ‘partially successful’-as if to reiterate that willy-nilly media are ‘partial’. There will be usual estimates of loss to the economy and also to the daily-wagers (for who the bandh has been organized per se); tomorrow we will be back to square one ?
Supporters of this hackneyed drill of protest make strange bed-fellows in that except the BJP all the other passengers on the bandh-wagon have been Congress-collaborators generally in the recent past (ironically to keep the BJP away from power !) and even the Shiv Sena, the trouble making bitter half of the BJP, was supportive of Congress during the infamous Emergency of the mid 70s. So ideology ,if at all, has nothing to do with this nationwide tamasha. In the heart of their hearts they all probably know that de-control of fuel prices was a bitter pill that the country had to swallow sooner than later and that, at least for the cooking gas the consumers had been unnecessarily pampered and were getting it almost free. Had they been in the driver’s seat they probably would have taken the same step—some of them might be feeling relieved that the unpleasant task was left to the Congress and not to the Left or Right of our political establishment.
It is high time that we realized and professed that populist economic policies will spell ruin and and spending is as much a function of money as earning and the poor have to be helped through pragmatic economic measures creating more jobs through emphasis on decentralized entrepreneurship and not through sops. On this, despite its bold step on fuel prices, even the Congress is not at all clear—look at their policy-schizophrenia—they still continue to talk of low-price grain shops (remember the ‘fair price’ shops of yester years ?) and claim that the present hike will not hit the poor.
And what about the poor—personally, the poor I come across are busy in taking a small upward step in earning—the maid servants turned up for their (essential ?) service in the morning- so did the milkman. The poor are not beggars or handicapped persons—they are looking for opportunity to work and to earn both wealth and health. If somebody have a stake in poverty, it is not the poor themselves but the self-proclaimed do-gooders in politics and economic theory !
Anti-Congressism failed in the past and will fail in the present because it never addressed the policy-issues. Will it be too impractical to hope that this will not be a revival but the last breath of shameless politicking ?
Vinay Hardikar
Pune. 5th July 2010.
