‘I
was Always Leftist. Economic Reforms Made Me Completely Marxist’
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
03 May, 2007
The
Indian Express
In a speech at a CII
meet, Mani Shankar Aiyar argued that policy is hijacked by a small elite.
That the cabinet he belongs to is quite comfortable with this hijacking.
That India’s system of governance is such that Rs 650 crore for
village development is considered wasteful but Rs 7,000 crore for the
Commonwealth Games is considered vital. The classes rule all the time,
Aiyar says, the masses get a look-in every five years
A
few weeks ago the newspapers reported that the number of Indian billionaires
had exceeded the number of billionaires in Japan, and there was a considerable
amount of self-congratulation on this. I understand from P. Sainath
that we rank eighth in the world in the number of our millionaires.
And we stand 126th on the Human Development Index. I am glad to report
that last year we were 127th.
At this very fast rate of
growth that we are now showing, we moved up from 127th to 126th position.
This is the paradigm of our development process. In a democracy, every
five years the masses determine who will rule this country. And they
showed dramatically in the last elections that they knew how to keep
their counsel and show who they wanted. We, my party and I, were the
beneficiaries and we formed the government. Every five years, it is
the masses who determine who will form the government. And in between
those five years the classes determine what that government will do.
In determining what that
government will do, the CII has played an extremely important role.
I am not surprised, as that is its job. It represents industry, and
therefore it argues for the interests of the industry. Industry has
been enormously benefited by the processes of economic reform that we
have seen in this country over the last 15 years or so. But the benefits
of these reforms have gone so disproportionately to those who are the
most passionate advocates of reforms that every five years we are given
a slap in the face for having done what the CII regards as self-evidently
the right thing for this country.
It is a sustainable economic
proposition, because our numbers are so vast, that there are perhaps
10 million Indians who are just as rich as the richest equivalent segment
anywhere in the world or in any group of countries. There are about
fifty million Indians who really are extraordinarily well off. That’s
the population of the UK.
But if you look at the 700
million Indians who are either not in the market or barely in the market,
then the impact of the economic reforms process, which is so lauded
by the CII, makes virtually no difference to their lives. That is why
there is a complete disjunct between what the democratic processes are
trying for in the short run and what those who have made an enormous
success of our achievements in the last fifteen years deem to be, at
least in the short run, their own requirements.
So when you talk of a nine
point two per cent growth rate, it becomes a statistical abstraction:
0.2 per cent of our people are growing at 9.92 per cent per annum. But
there is a very large number, I don’t know how many, whose growth
rate is perhaps down to 0.2 per cent. But certainly, the number of those
who are at the lower end of the growth sector is very much larger than
those who are at the higher end.
Yet what happens when you
have the budget? As an absolute ritual every finance minister (my colleague
Chidambaram is no exception) will devote the first four or five pages
of his budget speech to the bulk of India and there will then be several
pages, including whole of part B, which deals perhaps with one or two
per cent of our population. Almost the entire discussion that takes
place at CII or CII-like forums, will be about Part B rather than Part
A.
There are comfort levels
that you get from statistics — for instance, suddenly Arun Shourie,
announcing in the NDA government that our poverty rates have fallen
from 35 per cent to 22 per cent. He did it by changing the basis on
which you estimate poverty. You cannot compare apples and oranges. The
next national sample survey has shown that our poverty levels have actually
increased. Are we going to be mesmerised by these statistics or understand
that 700 million of our people are poor?
So we have an Indira Awaas
Yojana which will ensure that there will be a ‘jhuggi’ for
every Indian round about the year 2200. We have the PM Gram Sadak Yojana
which was supposed to complete all the gram sadak in seven years —
we are in the eighth year. And where we are told that the education
of 1000 may be covered, who knows only the education of 500 will be
covered. And if you happen to be a tribal in Arunachal, you are told
that because of your social custom you are to live in one hut atop a
hill, we can’t provide you a road.
I was always something of
a leftist. But I became a complete Marxist only after the economic reforms.
Because I see the extent to which the most important conception of Marx
— that the relationship of any given class with the means of production
determines the superstructure — holds.
This ugly choice is placed
before the government. An unequal choice, because you have organised
yourself to say what you want to say but the others are only able to
organise themselves and that too without speaking to each other in the
fifth year when the elections take place. That is why this expression
anti-incumbency, although the Oxford Dictionary says that it is a word
belonging to the English language, is a peculiarly Indian phenomenon.
Because everything that goes in the name of good governance like the
economic reforms either does not touch the life of people or affect
them at all.
We have seen what happened
at Nandigram, we have seen what was happening at Singur and we have
these propositions that say that SEZs are going to come and lakhs of
hectares are going to be utilised for the good of the country. For what’s
the syndrome in all this, it’s still ‘do bigha zameen’.
The chap says that I want my one bigha of zameen to be reinstated, but
you offer double the compensation and “baad mein dekha jayega”.
You go to Hirakud, which is where Jawaharlal Nehru actually used the
expression modern temples of India, and you ask what happened to the
tribals who were driven out of there. Absolutely nobody knows.
Coming to the cabinet, you
see what happens. The minute suggestions are made as to what would perhaps
benefit the people and what would benefit the classes, the tendency
is to say that our great achievement is 9.2 per cent growth. Our great
achievement is that Indian industrialists are buying Arcelor and Corus.
That Time magazine thinks we are a great power.
In these circumstances, when
a proposal came before the government to spend Rs 648 crore on the Gram
Nyaya department, we were solemnly informed by one of the most influential
ministers in the government to remember that we are a poor country.
I was delighted when the next day he was with me in a group of ministers
and I reminded him of his remark and said in that case can we stop spending
the Rs 7000 crore on the Commonwealth Games and he said, “No,
no, that is an international commitment and a matter of national pride.”
This national pride will of course blow up if you spend Rs 7000 crore
on the Commonwealth Games. We will be on the cover of Time and Newsweek.
I have always wondered why
this rate of growth and economic reforms process is dated to Manmohan
Singh. Because actually it should be dated to L.K. Jha’s book
Economic Strategy for the 80s. It is the decade in which we quickly
recovered from agricultural depression and registered a double digit
growth. At the beginning of the decade our biggest import was crude
oil and after that it was edible oil. By the end of the decade we were
exporters of several kinds of edible oil.
Why is it that Nehru became
successful with his Hindu rate of growth? The reason is that the Hindu
rate of growth was five times what our pre-Hindu rate of growth was.
From 1914 to 1947, the figures of which are available, the rate of growth
of the Indian economy was 0.72 per cent. And we got the Hindu rate of
growth which was five times that and it made a difference to the people.
The minute you had solid land reforms, the people had their ‘zameen’.
That is what Mother India was all about. People felt that they were
involved in the process. All the political talk was: gareeb ke liye
ham kya kar sakte hain. Indira Gandhi matched it beautifully when the
entire political spectrum joined hands against her by saying, “Woh
kehte hain Indira hatao, hum kehte hain Garibi hatao.”
There is nobody so marginal
in a government as the minister of Panchayati Raj. I count for nothing.
Nothing! When I was the minister of petroleum, I used to walk surrounded
by this media. I kept on telling them that petrol prices can do only
three things — go up, go down or remain where they are. And it
was all over the place. But try and get them to write two words about
the 700 million Indians — absolutely impossible. And now with
terrestrial television it is even worse. You have to be quarreling with
your mother-in-law or hitting your daughter-in-law to be able to hit
the headlines. It is impossible to get particularly the pink papers
to focus on issues that affect the bulk of the people. And it is so
easy to get them to focus on issues that are of high relevance to only
one or two per cent of the people.
I believe the CII, if it
is serious about the issue, should not be restricting itself to 25 minutes
discussion before lunch but hold discussions for ten days and maybe
something will come out of it.
Edited extracts from a speech
at the CII Northern Region annual meeting 2006-07, New Delhi, April
4
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