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| Tuesday, 19 October 2004 |
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Congress recalled to its "basics" The Congress Party of India's resounding electoral triumph in the Maharashtra state assembly poll recently, points to the party's continuing popularity among the Indian masses. It is also a popular re-endorsement of the socio-economic policy parameters within which India is being piloted into the future.
While the Congress Party, with its regional ally, the Nationalist Congress Party won 141 of the Assembly's 228 seats, the BJP and its allies trailed with 117 seats. Although India did experience a measure of economic growth in the BJP years, this was not seen as trickling down to the Indian masses who are mired in deprivation and poverty. While the BJP years were seen as not short of growth, what those times apparently lacked badly was equity. So wealth, although accumulating in a few hands, was not seeping-down to the most needy sections. Nevertheless, India's growth statistics were considered promising by the advocates of a market-oriented growth strategy who badly missed out on the equity component of development. The Congress Party's notable electoral comeback a few months back and the unexpected voting out of power of the BJP, was widely viewed with some justification, as a popular critical comment on the BJP's development strategy which spurred growth at the expense of equity. On the other hand, the Congress Party with its welfarist and pro-poor legacy was seen as winning more acceptability among the Indian masses. However, a curious irony of Indian politics is that it was the Congress Party which engineered the marked liberalization of the Indian economy in the early Nineties, which launched the country on its present growth phase. In fact, it all happened under the aegis of Manmohan Singh, who was at that time Finance Minister. However, while subsequent BJP-led governments could be considered as having maintained the growth momentum which economic reforms ushered in, little attention seems to have been paid to the importance of redistributing economic wealth. The mantle for doing this seems to have fallen on the Congress Party and there is a historical appropriateness in this enterprise of redistribution falling on the "grand old party of India" because social equity and justice was the clarion call of the Congress in its Nehruvian and subsequent Indira Gandhi years. It has fallen to the Congress party's lot once again to rectify the wealth imbalances which too close an adherence to the capitalist development model has created and to take India along a path of economic equity and redistributive justice. In short, the pressure is on the Congress to steer a "middle path" in the conduct economic policy; a path which would take it closer to its founding ideals or "basics". At a time when economic globalization is coming under increasing worldwide criticism for its social and economic justice implications, the Indian experience in economic management could prove instructive. While India abandoned a rigidly "socialist" path to development quite some time back, it cannot swing to the other extreme - given its economic ills-of following an unmodified and unadapted capitalist road to economic progress, despite the present upswing in its bilateral relations with the US. It is compelled to strike a fine balance between the contrasting approaches to development and in this crucial exercise India could prove a role model for the rest of South Asia, which is quite enamoured with the concept of the private sector as "the engine of growth." |
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