View-point

UPA Offers Hope, Not Hype

The CMP is a sober, responsive document that reflects the 2004 mandate. The CMP enjoys the support of all parties. It is a Left-of-Centre oriented document.

We had six years of the NDA government which threw fiscal rectitude out of the window. The CMP is a do-able document over a medium-term period. It is a five-year document, not a one-day match. It marries social concerns with economic reality. This is, in many ways, no different from the 1996 document and it has around 85 percent of the Congress manifesto. So there are no sharp breaks from the past Ð except in privatization, which is no surprise because the Congress and the Left are part of the alliance together. Even there, we are for privatization, but we are against the jehadi type of privatization pursued by the previous government.

In fact, the BJP government had reduced reforms to privatization; Arun Shourie had become its poster boy and markets built up expectation and therefore a market bubble was formed. In the CMP, we have sensible privatization, which is very much along the lines of what was prescribed by GV Ramakrishna, for example.

Corporate India was BJP-friendly. Fund managers were BJP-friendly. They've not voted us into power. They would have been happy with a BJP government. But what we're having right now are merely teething problems. The first concrete step is the Budget, and we'll address the problems in the Budget.

Economic policy-making can't take place in back-rooms; it is the result of mass politics, not elite concerns. One of the great mistakes, and which I'm also party to Ð I myself admit it Ð is that we've given a technocratic colour to our reforms, that we've approached these issues purely from a technocratic perspective. And that anyone who expressed concerns on this kind of reforms was dubbed as obscurantist. We have to recognize that we are part of a political system.

One can't reduce all of India to IT. We applaud all that has been done in pharma, at the way we've unleashed the creative energies of our entrepreneurs, at how Indian industry has become leaner and meaner. But we're not an Argentina, a Russia or even a China. We have our own political system and we have to go by that.

We recognize that middle classes are a very important segment. Surprisingly, they also voted for us Ð in Delhi, in Mumbai. I think you'll find this importance reflected in the Budget. It is also there in the CMP, but has been missed out in all this noise; we've said interest rates will provide incentives, both to investors and to savers and that there must be a balance between savers and borrowers. In the last two years, there has been a shift in balance and this has hurt the interest of savers.

The 2004 verdict reflects the fact that middle class was hurt by wrong policies and our PR campaign highlighted that. And it resonated very well. In my view, the BJP's greatest mistake was to create unnecessary hype. The UPA offers hope, BJP offers hype.

(Based on an interview in The Times of India)

A Memorable Battle of Ballot

Commitment, determination and hard work have set the nation in the right direction. The undeniable charisma of the Congress President, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, provided the much-needed spark for the eagerly-awaited change. In our state of J&K the Congress and its allies have won four out of six Lok Sabha seats. Doubts were raised over the prospects of the Congress in the state, but the voters smashed these doubts.

As the election process started, the people and even party workers were confused by the aggressive `feel good' campaign of the BJP-NDA. Their campaign looked like a storm. Indeed it was and lasted only for a while. It did not take the people too long to see through the BJP-NDA game. Undeterred by the saffron onslaught our party workers went about their task of explaining to the people the issues at stake in J&K particular and the country in general. This systematic and committed approach more than neutralized the caste-based campaign resorted to by the BJP after it realised that the `feel good' and `Shining India' gambits had failed.

Smt. Sonia Gandhi's visit made a tremendous impact on the voter. The gains were effectively consolidated by the far-sighted approach of the PCC president, Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad who personally supervised the election campaign leading it to success. It was a memorable battle of ballot.