The real charge against Manmohan

Swapan Dasgupta

For reasons that seem quite inexplicable, a section of the media has suddenly turned
pious over the “weak” versus “strong” debate involving Manmohan Singh and LK Advani. It
is being suggested that the exchanges are tantamount to “mudslinging”.

The assertion is quite incredible. As Outlook editor Vinod Mehta has repeatedly pointed
out in his TV interventions, the exchanges are tame and nowhere marked by the verbal
viciousness which characterises, say, politics in Britain. The fact is that the Congress has
wilfully chosen to over-react to the BJP slogan of “mazboot neta” by painting the Prime
Minister as a hapless victim of a personal attack. The party has cleverly chosen to tap the
reservoir of goodwill for Manmohan as a decent man who has been caught up in the
murkiness of politics. In making the Prime Minister’s anguish an important talking point, it
has sought to divert attention from some of the main issues of the campaign.

It is only after the results are known on May 16 that analysts will be in a position to judge
the efficacy of the Congress strategy. People vote in elections on the strength of different
impulses but there is always a retrospective rationale attached to their vote. If the
Congress comes out well, Manmohan’s combative Press conferences will be pronounced
a “masterstroke”; if the BJP does better, it will be praised for luring the Congress into
battling on its own agenda.

Last week, in one of her campaign speeches, Sonia Gandhi argued that the election was
an “ideological battle” between the Congress and BJP. The point has been driven home in
some of the Amar-Akbar-Anthony type advertisements issued by the Congress. The
implication of such messages and the surrogate advertisement involving the “hand” of
filmstars is that the BJP will destroy the syncretic soul of India.

Like the astonishing assertion that Manmohan is cast in the saintly mould and comparable
to Mahatma Gandhi, the so-called ideological battle has a clear cut purpose. It is an out-
and-out diversionary ploy aimed at ensuring that bread-and-butter issues don’t dominate
the campaign. It is paradoxical that rather than painting him as a wizard economist who
can turn India into a subcontinental paradise in a world of economic uncertainty, the
Congress would rather project the Prime Minister as a quiet, but steely politician. In short,
the Congress wants to repackage Manmohan as a politician rather than a mere
technocrat. This is precisely why they have chosen to keep the UPA’s five year record in
the background. It would rather debate a nine-year-old hijack (which, surprisingly, didn’t
feature in the 2004 campaign) than the present state of the economy. The reasons are
self-evident.

Last Friday, Oxford Economics, an international consultancy, projected that India’s GDP
growth for 2009 would be around 3.4 per cent — a far from the “little less than 7 per cent”
the Prime Minister claimed in Mumbai on April 13. The figure is lowered than the 4 per
cent growth projected by the World Bank and the 4.3 per cent estimated by the OECD.

In a similar vein, while the likes of Manmohan and P Chidambaram have been confidently
asserting that the “fundamentals” of the Indian economy are strong and relatively insulated
from global pressures, the chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry Arvind Virmani
confessed on April 11 in Bangalore that it was “absolutely essential to counter the worst
recession in 60 years.”

The most immediate impact of this has been on the employment front. Each day brings
horror stories of mass dismissals from companies which have hitherto been held up as
India’s pride. Infosys shed 2,100 jobs in April in pursuance of what it somewhat heartlessly
called a “zero tolerance” of inefficiency. Jet Airways, whose sacking of 1,000 staff last
October prompted national indignation, will close down its ticketing offices. Some top
companies have imposed a 15 to 20 per cent pay cut across the board. These pieces of
high-profile bad news have been buried in the inside pages of newspapers and mentioned
in passing by the electronic media. Together they have received less attention than
Priyanka Gandhi’s observations of brother Rahul’s real post-poll alignments.

There is no point going on about the media’s lapses. The media isn’t fighting elections; it is
battling for eyeballs. The fault lies with the political class. True, the BJP has issued print
and radio advertisements on the growing loss of hope but this has not been accompanied
by a relentless assault on the Congress for mismanaging the economy to the extent that
some 1.5 crore jobs have been shed in the past eight months or so. Advani is not naturally
at ease with economic issues but you don’t need to have dined at the High Table of
Nuffield College, Oxford, to put a political spin on economic mismanagement.

The Prime Minister’s knowledge of economics is not a matter of dispute. What is in doubt
is his sense of compassion. Throughout the crisis — over which he remains in denial — he
has not thought it fit to utter even lip sympathy for those whose Incredible India crashed
amid high interest rates, deflation with soaring food prices, an unacceptably high fiscal
deficit and wasteful expenditure. He has not thought it fit to even appoint a Finance
Minister for five months.

The real charge against Manmohan and the owners of his party is not that they are weak
but that they are callous and heartless. In this climate of fear, the Congress has issued a
new advertisement which proclaims Josh. It is the nearest Indian equivalent to Marie
Antoinette suggesting they have cake.

Wars, it is said, are too important to be left to Generals. The economy is far too strategic to
be left to an economist.