They all need to reform

Kiron Kasbekar
11 June 2004

Just read the 'Letters to the Editor' sections in India's mainline newspapers. A vast majority of readers have hailed Sonia Gandhi's decision to decline the position of prime minister of India despite overwhelming parliamentary support. People everywhere have condemned Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharati in particular and their BJP and Sangh Parivar in general for their personally nasty and politically undemocratic refusal to accept the Supreme Court decision about Sonia Gandhi's right to become PM and the Indian electorate's rejection of the BJP-led NDA, which had made the Congress leader's Italian birth a major election plank.

The BJP and the Sangh Parivar, represented by RSS leader Govindacharya, gave yet another reminder to the public that they have no regard either for the law of the land or for the majority verdict of the people. They are prepared to create disunity and social destabilisation in the name of elaborately cooked-up "sentiments of the people".

The latest happenings, in which Sonia Gandhi has been seen either as performing an extraordinary act of renunciation or as having executed a masterstroke, or both, have actually thrown the Sangh Parivar, BJP included, into a tizzy. The complete silence of senior BJP leaders Atal Behari Vajpayee and L K Advani on this basic issue of democratic norms, along with the decision of their National Democratic Alliance, whose chairman, the completely marginalised George Fernandes, to boycott the prime minister's swearing-in ceremony, has only disgusted people.

But see how the Marxists see these events. Their West Bengal party organ, Ganashakti, in its main editorial on 19 May, writes that Sonia Gandhi's decision indicates an "abject surrender" to the Sangh Parivar's threat to start a mass movement over her foreign origin. The paper says the Congress "surrender" to the Sangh Parivar's pressure tactics "will only lend additional strength to communal forces". To say such things when Sonia Gandhi has, through her renouncing of the much-coveted position of PM, has elicited massive admiration verging on veneration, smacks either of a total lack of touch with people's sentiments or a sense of envy that now the Congress leader has become too big for them to handle. Or both.

Their real ire probably stems from the fact that, while they have been publicly committed to acceptance of any leader proposed by the Congress, the party with the largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha, which they assumed would be Sonia Gandhi, who they may have thought would be relatively pliable, they are now faced with having to accept a prime minister they are not so comfortable with. Manmohan Singh, the new prime minister, is universally acknowledged as the architect of India's reforms (although the BJP's India Shining campaign, funded hugely from the taxpayers' money would have you think the BJP and NDA began it all). The Marxists do not like reforms too much.

The Marxists are compelled to reform in West Bengal, where they are in power, and have to deliver results, but believe reforms are a convenient bugbear to raise at the national level, where they have little popular support and even less obligation to deliver results. With Manmohan Singh as PM, there is little chance of their being able to stop the juggernaut of reform. Yet, because they are now irrevocably committed to supporting the Congress-led secular front, which, they have to admit, is the only bulwark against the antediluvian hindutva forces, they will have no alternative but to go along with Manmohan Singh's policies.