The Hindu Business Line : Original reformer set to manage economy

IF basic minimum needs are the barometers to decide the fortunes of a political party in the fiercely competitive game of capturing power, the day of glory has arrived to the original reformer Congress and the working class symbol Communists who have now been thrown together to test the waters of managing the Indian economy.

Even as the formation of a Congress-led alliance to stake claim for forming the Government at the Centre has not yet been crystallised, the rejection of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is so comprehensive despite the fact that it is a multi-party coalition as opposed to Congress pre-poll alliance which is few in numbers, meant that the India Shining campaign was not the mascot as the governing dispensation so implicitly assumed it to be.

Now that Congress is back in circulation following a prolonged spell of hibernation stretched over more than eight years after the Narasimha Rao Government demitted office in May 1996, the Indian economy and the major trade and economic policy reforms set off in July 1991 are expected to amble on as they used to during the interregnum when two United Front Governments and three BJP-led coalition governments including the latter's 13-day stint.

For the Congress Party which also managed a coalition of a sort during Narasimha Rao tenure, running the Government adroitly and with panache would not be difficult this time round, though it would have to contend with ideologically different political parties such as the Left, RJD, DMK and any other party that might like to associate itself with the Congress in the days to come. But for a party wedded to socialism in the past and which shed its image to become the first party to boldly undertake radical reforms of banishing inspector and licence raj and let market forces determine supply and demand equations and prices, its studied silence and even opposition to some of the reforms pursued by its successors such as disinvestment and abolition of contract labour might come to haunt it now.

For once, the Communists might be more demanding in their response to any attempt to labour reforms though unionisation of workforce in any organised industry has now become a thing of the past.

In the run-up to the General Election 2004, the Congress party on a separate policy paper `Economic growth — an expanding economy: a just society; freedom from hunger and unemployment' said everything it wanted to ram home in this 24-page monograph. The Communist party might derive some solace in the title of the Congress monograph as it explicitly addresses its abiding concern for the underdogs and weaker sections of society.

For the criticism that the NDA government neglected rural areas and the employment problem but focussed mostly on meeting middle-class expectations, the Congress responded in its election manifesto that productivity of capital would increase with increasing investment in labour-intensive and high productivity units such as construction, housing, rural industries, slum clearance, light manufactures and mostly in agriculture through irrigation and water management as well as in skill-intensive industries like information technology. Whether it will be able to work programmes on these lines to tackle the scourge of unemployment remains to be seen now.

Dr Manmohan Singh, the original architect of economic reforms, said more in sadness than in anger in an earlier interview to Business Line that the NDA economic policy is bereft of even any modicum of benefits to the under-privileged sections of society, as it totally failed to make proper use of the best legacy it inherited from the Congress.

In the sharp phrase of Dr Manomhan Singh, investment famine, the cruel curses of illiteracy and poverty and pathetic primary health care need to be addressed headlong before the Government could trumpet its claim of India Shining. Hence, the new Government if it is Congress alliance with Left Parties in tow, has its tasks cut out. But this does not in any way detract the Congress party's basic commitment to sustain and strengthen the economic reform process to which it holds paternity patent.

With bugling foreign exchange reserves, high industrial growth, a normal monsoon forecast and low inflation, the new Government also "inherits" a sound base to build on the dreams of catapulting India into the league of developed countries, besides making a decisive dent on banishing the basic ailments afflicting the polity in a country of continental dimension, economic analysts say.