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INDIA: New Gov’t Steered into Pro-people Path by Leftist Backers

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 25 2004 (IPS) - India’s new communist-supported, Congress party-led government has immediately been beset by the need to maintain a pro-people image, while squaring up to serious economic and social realities.

India’s new communist-supported, Congress party-led government has immediately been beset by the need to maintain a pro-people image, while squaring up to serious economic and social realities.

That the new government, called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and led by the economist Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, intends to push ahead with the reforms and liberalisation agenda was clear in the surprise appointment Sunday of Harvard-trained lawyer R Chidambaram as finance minister.

”Continuity of reforms is perfectly clear as we are going back to the original reforms of Dr. Manmohan Singh à we would factor in the experience to carry forward the reforms,” Chidambaram said after he took charge of the key ministry on Monday.

Exactly how Chidambaram’s reforms will shape out will depend greatly on the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) that the new government’s communist backers in the powerful Left Front insist on, and which is expected to be made public this week.

Already the Left Front, which only provides outside support for the minority government, has called a halt to the privatisation of India’s large public sector undertakings (PSUs) – the most visible symbol of several decades of economic liberalisation that the Congress party has concurred with tamely.

Under Leftist pressure, Manmohan Singh’s new cabinet has also scrapped the disinvestment ministry set up by the ousted Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)- led government, which has been accused of ”selling away the family silver” to crony capitalists in the name of privatisation

”We are putting the final touches to the CMP à. . it will reflect the pro-people policies of the new government,” said Harkishan Singh Surjeet, spokesman for the Left Front. He is credited with patching together the Congress-led UPA alliance through his personal rapport with leaders like Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party.

A draft of the CMP already in circulation calls for pro-active government intervention for the welfare and well-being of farmers and farm labour, said to number at least half of the country’s one billion plus people.

In an interview with IPS, Surjeet, who is general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), said the Left Front would be pushing for legislation on behalf of farmers and peasants who continue to live in conditions akin to bonded labour.

”We have to work out schemes that ease the burden of debt and high interest rates on farm loans,” said Surjeet. He was referring to the phenomenon of mass suicides by farmers in several states and stories of starvation deaths amid bumper harvests and grain exports that benefited traders during the past government.

Whatever the final shape of the CMP, all UPA partners agree that an immediate priority is the introduction of a National Employment Guarantee Act that would legally guarantee every household at least 100 days of employment in public work programmes.

The employment guarantee scheme is backed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a former economist with the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development who worked closely with the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and the late Mahbub ul Haq, the Pakistani economist who devised the human development reports of the U.N. Development Programme.

Surjeet said the Left Front would prefer that the number of employed days per year per family be increased to 150 days to make it closer to International Labour Organisation standards.

”We are going to revive the rural cooperative credit scheme to ensure the easy flow of badly needed rural credit that would reach small and marginal farmers,” Surjeet said.

He said the advances made by India in providing global information technology services and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) during the previous government would be continued.

”The main difference is that our emphasis will be on all-round development and not skewed in favour of urban populations while neglecting the rural masses,” he explained.

Differences between the Congress party and the Left Front on economic development are likely to tempered by a common approach to other issues, such as the need to counter the Hindu fundamentalism and right-wing polices of the BJP-led government.

For his part, newly Law Minister H R Bharadwaj lost no time in announcing that he would work towards a quick repeal of the dreaded Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA).

This is the draconian anti-terrorist law brought in by the BJP government in response to a U.N. call following the Sep.11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

”We plan to take steps to either repeal or amend this law,” said Bharadwaj of the law that critics say was grossly misused.

Of the 2,000 odd people detained under POTA, which does not provide for easy bail, the vast majority turned out to be from the minority Muslim community and included politicians, journalists, social workers, teenagers and old people.

Bharadwaj also promised to examine cases of partisanship and corruption in state High Courts and ”restore the confidence of the people in the judiciary”.

During the just-ended BJP rule, the Supreme Court has had to censure several state-level courts, most notably the Gujarat one, for neglecting to protect the rights of victims of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the state.

Earlier this year, judges of the Punjab High Court went on a wildcat strike after investigations were launched on some of them for having acquired memberships in a prestigious golf club that had been built on reserve forest land – and was before them for adjudication.

Another senior minister in the new cabinet, Arjun Singh, a crusader for the preservation of the secular character of the Indian constitution, has vowed to undo the pro-Hindu changes made in educational institutions by his predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi, now that he is in charge of the Human Resources Development ministry.

”He (Joshi) has messed up the whole thing by trying to communalise education. We will have to see what rectification we can do,” Singh said.

He was referring to the changes Joshi made in various faculties of leading institutions to accommodate scholars and academics who had little merit except toe his pro-Hindu line.

Arjun Singh said he was looking at raising public spending on education to at least six percent of GDP and making half the funds available to primary and secondary education, in order to reverse the skewed priority of previous decades.

The true direction of the new government will be clear when the annual budget, delayed in order to hold the elections, is presented in June.