By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 23 2005 (IPS)

A year after defeating the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national polls, the Congress party of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has more to fear from its friends than enemies.

As Singh’s minority Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) observed its first anniversary of ruling a billion plus people on Sunday it came under attack from Prakash Karat, the intellectually formidable general secretary of the Marxist Communist Party of India (CPI-M), for its pro-liberal economic policies.

The CPI-M and its allies in the Left Front provide critical outside support to the UPA government. But that support base is only for keeping the BJP, which wants to turn the country into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), out of power.

Many in India feel that the BJP’s political agenda is in complete variance with the secular republic envisaged by India’s founding fathers.

But according to Karat the people who voted out the BJP also wanted a government that could meet the developmental needs of millions and continue with the country’s traditional non-aligned policy in global affairs, without surrendering to ”imperialist pressures”.

Karat and A.B. Bardhan who leads the Communist Party of India (CPI) stress that the government they support has strayed from the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) that was supposed to help bridge problems stemming from ”differing class perspectives”.

Both leaders have constantly been reminding the Congress party that it managed to return to power mainly as a result of the BJP’s liberalisation policies, which were seen to benefit a narrow urban elite at the cost of hundreds of millions of people who subsist as poor farmers.

At Sunday’s somewhat subdued celebrations Singh, a former World Bank economist, talked about bold economic steps that would help people who were ”impatient for a better quality of life.”

But the communists are angry about the steps already taken over the past year such as allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) of up to 74 percent in private Indian banks and the telecom sector.

The left is also furious over government plans to open up the country’s mining industry to foreigners and allow multinationals to enter India’s massive retail trade, which so far has developed without the frills of global marketing and branding.

”Allowing FDI in the retail trade, will cause loss of employment and adversely affect millions of small traders and shopkeepers,” said Karat.

So far, privatisation of public utilities has only been limited to electricity supply. Nonetheless, the unit cost of power to the consumer has skyrocketed without the promised improvement in reliability.

But there are other causes for communist ire, especially the government’s failure to honour its promises made in the CMP. One important pledge was the revival of the public distribution system, done away with by the BJP, which allows the poor to have access to food grains at low subsidised prices. That however, has yet to happen.

The communists are also angry that the government has reneged on promises to amend labour laws to protect unorganised workers and those in the agricultural sector, while land reforms remain neglected. Also, they claim, little has been done to address the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Though both Karat and Bardhan pledged continuing support for Singh’s government, they warned that the honeymoon is over and that the coming days would see mass mobilisation and movements to ensure the implementation of pro-people policies promised in the CMP. The communists also pledged to oppose measures that ”hand over key sectors of the economy to foreign capital.”

Asked about the leftist fulminations, senior Congress party leader Margaret Alva attributed them to compulsions on the part of the Left Front parties ahead of provincial elections in West Bengal and Kerala – traditional bastions of the communists.

But that only showed Congress insensitivity to real issues, affecting the majority of Indians, that the leftists have been raising.

There is another assessment that the economic policies of both the Congress party and the BJP are similar. Both are pro-reform and no government has strayed from a course set 14 years ago by Manmohan Singh, who was then finance minister.

”It is naïve to expect the UPA government to be markedly different from its predecessors in terms of policy,” commented Jean Dreze, the well-known left-wing economist who teaches economics at Delhi University.

But there are other areas in which the Congress party and the BJP seem to be similar to each other, much to the discomfiture of the communists. And these were reasons Karat saw fit to bring up as an excuse to stay away from the government’s first anniversary party.

While complimenting the UPA government for moving to develop an axis of trilateral cooperation among India, Russia and China, the communists are wary of New Delhi developing close security and military ties with the United States – a policy that started with the BJP government.

”It has uncritically continued to view Israel (just as the BJP has done) as a major supplier of military equipment without seeing the harm it does to India’s standing in the Arab world and in relation to the Palestinian cause,” said Karat.

Little wonder then that the hawkish president of the BJP, Lal Krishna Advani has taken it upon himself to provide Manmohan Singh and the Congress party with some unsolicited advice on how to deal with its communist allies.

”Marginalise the ideological and political influence of the communists, for their policies will neither deliver inclusive growth nor double digit growth,” he said at the annual meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) on Thursday.

Advani went to the extent of offering the support of the BJP and its allies in voting in ”any reform vital for India’s economic progress” – words which to the minority Congress party must have sounded like the right ones coming from the wrong place.

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