POLITCS-INDIA: After Arms Scandal, Gov’t Hit by Siege Within

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Mar 22 2001 (IPS) - The right-wing government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, reeling from an arms bribery scandal, now has to contend with biting criticism from hard-liners within his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu fundamentalist allies.

Vajpayee, considered the moderate face of the pro-Hindu BJP, has managed so far by balancing the interests of fundamentalists in the party against those of secular regional allies within the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

But more than the issue of religious fundamentalism, the Vajpayee government has come under strain for its policy of economic liberalisation and privatisation.

This policy has been entrusted by the government to the powerful Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) presided over by Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra and Special Secretary N.K. Singh who handles economic issues.

The two officials are the focus of much of the criticism from the BJP’s allies these days.

Until recently, criticism of the government has come from the BJP’s main political rivals — the Congress party and the leftist and socialist formations that have grouped themselves under the banner of the People’s Front after the defence bribery expose.

Mishra’s name was mentioned as a facilitator of deals for the government by BJP president Bangaru Laxman, who did not realise that he was being filmed by spy cameras taken into his office by journalists from the Internet media group Tehelka.com. posing as arms dealers.

Laxman, filmed accepting wads of currency in return for promoting a fictitious deal for night-vision binoculars, had to resign as party president after Tehelka made its tapes public last Tuesday.

Over the week, Vajpayee has come under withering criticism from V K Sudarshan, chief of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS) which Vajpayee acknowledges as his mentor, and from Bal Thackeray, chief of another fundamentalist organisation, the Shiv Sena.

Among those who have called for a thorough probe into the scandal and punishment for those found involved is Ashok Singhal, chief of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). This organisation is closely associated with a Hindu-fundamentalist campaign that first catapulted the BJP to power in the nineties.

At the centre of the fundamentalists’ ire is Mishra and the PMO, an institution seen as wielding overwhelming power without clearly defined constitutional authority.

Factions within the BJP said to favour the ascendancy of India’s hawkish home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, over Vajpayee, have been quick to seize the fact that Mishra was implicated in shady arms deals by Laxman on Tehelka’s tapes.

On Sunday, Sudarshan criticised the PMO as being run by “incompetent officials” and “extra-constitutional authorities”. This compelled Mishra, who carries the image of a suave, haughty bureaucrat, to convene a press conference on Monday to clear his name.

Mishra denied being involved in any defence deal and said the PMO had only intervened when asked to “resolve” difficult matters. Singh, who accompanied him, denied the PMO’s involvement in various power, telecommunications and infrastructure deals.

But the outspoken Thackeray, seen as the most powerful man in the bustling port city of Mumbai, considered India’s business capital, minced no words in calling for Mishra’s resignation.

Last week, Vajpayee made it clear that he would prefer to resign rather than ask Mishra to go as demanded by members of the Samata Party, the closest ally of the BJP within the ruling National Democratic Alliance.

The Samata Party has had to suffer the resignation of its leader George Fernandes as defence minister and its party president Jaya Jaitly, as a result of the arms bribery expose.

On Wednesday, Vajpayee again defended Mishra on the grounds that “he does not hold any public office” and said Thackeray has never directly conveyed to him any demand to have Mishra sacked.

Commented the conservative ‘The Hindu’ newspaper in an editorial on Wednesday: “To the extent that Mr Mishra has become involved in the controversy, the case for bringing his role also into hard scrutiny under the microscope of the judicial inquiry (which has been ordered into the scandal) is unassailable.”

But the worst criticism of the Vajpayee regime came from Jay Dubashi, who served as economist in the BJP’s national executive for more than 15 years.

In an article in the widely circulated ‘Times of India’ newspaper Wednesday, Dubashi accused Vajpayee of failing to strengthen the BJP.

Instead, he said, Vajpayee turned the party into an adjunct of the government so much so that “a party that grew up with a distinctive Hindutva (pro-Hindu) and Swadeshi (self-sufficient) ideology lost its ideological and moral compass.”

“Bereft of supervision by the organisation that had put it into power, the government went completely berserk. It started yielding to pressures of foreign investors and big businesses to the point that they began calling the shots,” Dubashi said, referring to the Vajpayee government’s policy of speeding up economic liberalisation.

Dubashi used as a case in point the recent controversial sale by the Vajpayee government of BALCO, an aluminium plant in the largely tribal state of Jharkhand, to a private company.

“BALCO employs over 6,000 workers, many of them poor tribals. Yet the minister in charge in Delhi (Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie) had no hesitation in handing it over to a private company, without even once visiting the place and without taking the workers into confidence,” he argued.

Dubashi went on to write, “The minister has all the time in the world for chat shows on TV in Delhi, but no time for workers who stand to suffer the most in such deals.”

According to Dubashi, the government has so completely lost touch with reality that it “does not even realise that the economy is in a state of collapse” and that “thousands of businesses, most of them small, have closed down and millions of workers have lost their jobs.”

“Farmers and housewives are committing suicide. Foodgrains rot in godowns while millions go hungry every night. But the finance minister is more concerned with the price of air conditioners than the price of milk,” he added.