Vajpayee had been nominated as prime minister by the BJP in part because of his length of service (he was a member of parliament as far back as 1957), in part because of his oratorical skills, in part because he was seen as more acceptable to the BJP’s allies than Advani. Aided by an able principal secretary, Brijesh Mishra, Vajpayee ran a fairly firm ship as prime minister, keeping the allies in check and moderating the extremists in his own party. Thus he became the first non-Congress prime minister to complete a full term in office, a not inconsiderable achievement. For the first three decades of Independence the Congress utterly dominated Indian politics. But now, at last, an Opposition capable of taking on and beating it had emerged. The BJP had once challenged the Congress at the level of ideology; then it had successfully challenged it at the polls; now, under Vajpayee’s leadership, it had shown it could run a government too.
The term of the NDA government was to end only in October 2004; but, perhaps worried about the impact of an adverse monsoon, in February itself the prime minister dissolved Parliament. A campaign was crafted for re-election, featuring the slogan, ‘India Shining’. The steady progress the economy had made under the NDA, and the perceived disarray of the Opposition, led most observers to predict a handsome victory for the ruling alliance. A poll conducted by the widely read India Today magazine estimated that the NDA would win between 330 and 340 seats, a comfortable majority. ‘Everything in the road map’, wrote the magazine, ‘points right back to where it all began for Atal Bihari Vajpayee: 7 Race Course Road [the Prime Minister’s residence] and another term in its fully groomed environs’. The NDA was ‘enjoying the ride of its life’; on the other side, for the Congress, the magazine anticipated ‘by far the worst drubbing the 119-year-old party will ever record in its history’.
India Today thought the general election whose results it was so certain of would throw up a question apiece for the leaders of the two major alliances. Thus ‘for Vajpayee, the question may well be how long he wishes to stay as prime minister’; and for Sonia Gandhi, ‘will she – should she – withdraw from the cut and thrust of electoral politics and make way for another leader?’90
29
Progress and its Discontents
[In India] the growth process is so biased, making the country look more and more like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.
JEAN DRÉZE and AMARTYA SEN
I
WHEN POLLING ENDED IN the 2004 general elections and the votes were counted, the results were contrary to what the pollsters had expected. They had predicted a comfortable victory for the ruling alliance; in the event, the National Democratic Alliance won a mere 189 seats, whereas the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by the Congress, secured 222. The president now asked the UPA to form the government. It was generally expected that the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, would become prime minister.
In her early years in politics, Sonia Gandhi had not made much of an impact. But she worked extremely hard, and travelled extensively across the country. Her persistence was rewarded; although the BJP-led NDA was in power at the centre, as many as fifteen state governments were headed by the Congress.1
When, in May 2004, the time came for the UPA to take office at the centre, Sonia Gandhi chose to decline the post of prime minister. She instead nominated Dr Manmohan Singh, the self-effacing economist who had been finance minister in the 1990s and had since served three terms in the Upper House of Parliament. Sonia Gandhi did not reveal why she would not be prime minister herself; or why she had chosen Dr Singh above other Congress leaders. Perhaps she thought having a prime minister born and raised in Italy would raise unnecessary controversy; perhaps, never having worked in government, she was not sure how she would handle the complexities of the job.
The personal relationship between party president and prime minister was cordial. However, in terms of their economic policies they diverged. Manmohan Singh was a reformist, who would, left wholly on his own, have pushed for a further freeing of market forces, the reduction of subsidies, the removal of restrictive labour laws, and the full convertibility of the rupee. On the other hand, Sonia Gandhi was a populist who wished the state to restrict the role of the market, protect the interests of workers, and provide greater subsidies and social services to farmers and agricultural labourers.2
Sonia Gandhi had constituted a National Advisory Council, chaired by herself, and composed largely of social activists who shared her welfarist ideas. The NAC pressed its ideas on the prime minister. Among the schemes adopted by the government was a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which would guarantee to adult members of rural households one hundred days of paid employment a year. The programme would cost the state exchequer an estimated Rs 20,000 crores annually.3 Another was a Right to Information Act, which would make it mandatory for details of government programmes, allocations and appointments to be placed when asked for in the public domain, excepting those matters pertaining to security, defence, or strategic national interests. A third was a Forest Rights Act, which sought to allot tribal families plots of land in state-owned forests.
Following the NDA model, the Congress kept the Finance, Home, and Foreign ministries, those assigned to these posts chosen by the party president rather than the prime minister. However, important economic ministries such as Information Technology and Agriculture were ceded to alliance partners.4
II
In March 2005, less than a year after coming to power, the UPA Government announced the setting up of a ‘high-level’ committee to study the socio-economic and educational status of Muslims in India. It was to be chaired by a retired judge of the Delhi High Court, Justice Rajinder Sachar.
The establishment of the Sachar Committee was shrewd politics. Muslims across India had voted in large numbers for the UPA in the general election of 2004. But it was also an honest acknowledgement of the palpable failure of the Indian state to fulfil the assurances that Gandhi and Nehru had given to those Muslims who had stayed behind in India after Partition. Six decades later, the community remained economically vulnerable, socially insecure and politically marginal.
To be sure, not all Muslims were poor. There were prosperous artisans in some towns in north India, making products for export. Gujarat and Maharashtra had many established Muslim traders. One large IT firm, and at least two large pharmaceutical firms, were owned by Muslims. Some of India’s most celebrated film stars were Muslim. But, on the aggregate, Muslims were among the poorest communities in India. They were under-represented in Parliament, in state legislatures, in the all-India civil services, in the judiciary and in the professional classes more generally. The typical Muslim was a barber, tailor, rickshaw puller or peasant, making barely enough for subsistence. Literacy rates were low. Few Muslim women were in the work force.5
In the 1950s, there were far more Muslims with university degrees than Dalits. By the time the Sachar Committee had been set up, the situation had been reversed. Inspired by Ambedkar’s example, Dalits had taken energetically to education. Affirmative action also helped Dalits obtain university admission and, in time, jobs as doctors, police officers, civil servants and engineers. Meanwhile, Muslims lagged behind, their situation made more precarious by their reactionary leadership, composed of mullahs who preferred to hark back to the glorious early days of Islam rather than engage with the complex challenges of the twenty-first century.6
Almost the only sphere of Indian life in which Muslims were over-represented was in the nation’s cities. They constituted about 14 per cent of the country’s population, but 18 per cent of the urban population. Here, too, their situation was far from happy. Some 37 per cent of urban Muslims lived below the poverty line, as against 22 per cent of urban Hindus. Their lowly economic status was compounded by their fragile social status. They lived in ghettoes, interacting mostly with members of their own community. When they ventured out into the city at large they were often met with prejudice and hostility, and sometimes outright ostracism. H
indu landlords would not rent apartments to Muslim tenants, even if these spoke English, had high-paying jobs and otherwise were cosmopolitan rather than stereotypical. Muslim children found it hard to get admission in non-denominational schools.7
The Sachar Committee drew on past surveys and its own investigations to compile its report, which was presented in November 2006. The report identified three crucial issues facing Indian Muslims. The first was the problem of identity. Six decades after Partition, Muslims were still blamed for the ‘vivisection’ of India, still seen as having an uncertain and wavering allegiance to the national flag. At the same time, they were demonized for having willy-nilly served as a vote bank for parties that, it was said, sought merely to ‘appease’ them.
The second generic problem faced by Muslims was that of security. In villages as well as towns, they were often subject to taunts, insults, and, not least, physical violence. Everyday life was harsh. In times of religious strife, life was horrific. Because they lived largely in segregated spaces, and because they were almost always in a minority, Muslims suffered disproportionately whenever communal riots broke out.
The third problem identified by the Sachar Committee was that of equity. The community was under-represented in institutions of higher learning, and in the professions. They had less than their share of government jobs. And they had little access to bank credit.
Having identified the problems, the Sachar Committee offered a range of recommendations to address them. They asked for the establishment of an Equal Opportunities Commission, to which grievances could be brought, and in time addressed. They urged the Government to work to increase the participation of Muslims in public bodies, increase their share of employment in the state sector, and recognize degrees granted in Muslim religious schools, madrasas.8
III
Some communities and regions lagged behind, but overall the macroeconomic picture continued to be rosy. That an economist who was an architect of the 1991 reforms was now prime minister reassured investors. The Sensex, the key index of the stock exchange in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, continued to do well. In the year 2004 the Sensex hovered around the 6,000 mark; by early 2007, it had exceeded 14,000. Among the major gainers were Indian automobile, IT and pharmaceutical firms, sectors that had benefited enormously from economic liberalization.9
In the last week of April 2007, India joined an elite club of nations with a trillion-dollar economy. It was the twelfth member of this group, its membership aided in part by a steady appreciation of the rupee against the dollar.10 A week later, the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, made its maiden landing at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, in a further sign of the country’s (or economy’s) arrival on the world stage. The plane’s touchdown was greeted with loud cheers from a crowd specially assembled for the occasion.
In statistical as much as in symbolic terms, the Indian economy was marching along. In January 2007, the Sensex had crossed the 14,000 mark; by October of the same year, it had exceeded 20,000. Boosters compared the surge in the share index to India’s recent victory in a major international cricket tournament. ‘There are some similarities’, wrote one business journalist, ‘between the Twenty20 World Cup and Indian bourses. India won the cup, even ardent fans were surprised. The Sensex seems poised to cross the 20,000 mark despite the recent bearish assessments. Yuvraj Singh hit six sixes in one over; the Sensex zoomed from 16,000 to 17,000 points in six trading sessions. M.S. Dhoni proved he was cool and canny – a fine captain; Indian policymakers are being praised for their sound economic decisions.’11
The Indian economy was growing at home; and Indian entrepreneurs were eyeing pickings abroad. In June 2008, the Tatas announced the purchase of the British luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover in an all-cash transaction.12 In the same month as an iconic British brand became Indian-owned, a well-established Indian brand passed into Japanese hands. This was the pharmaceutical firm Ranbaxy, once a typical family firm that had passed from father to son, now to be run by the Japanese company Daiichi Sankyo, which had paid Rs15,000 crore (about $2.5 billion) for a controlling 35 per cent share.13
These transactions were symptomatic of a larger shift in Indian desires and aspirations. From the 1950s till the 1980s, policy-maker and entrepreneur alike had their horizons firmly fixed on the domestic market. Indian economic growth was then governed by the mottoes of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The hope, and ambition, was that everything Indians consumed would be made by Indian firms alone. Back then, the state was supposed to occupy the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Now the state had retreated from the sphere of production and distribution; and the economy had slowly opened out to the world. Many Indians were now increasingly consuming goods made abroad; other Indians were making, in India, services consumed abroad. That some Indian companies would buy British plants – as the Tatas had done with Jaguar – and that other Indian companies would sell out to Japanese firms – as Ranbaxy had done with Daiichi Sankyo – was not something Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi, or indeed the technocrats who ran the Planning Commission, could or would have anticipated.
IV
The rise of the Sensex and the strides made by Indian firms at home and abroad notwithstanding, the process of economic growth was not always smooth or without friction. Under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 – framed when India was a British colony, but still on the statute books – the state could acquire land from peasants for what it deemed ‘public purpose’. But those whose lands were forcibly acquired often resisted. In 2005, for example, when the government sought to site a nuclear plant in a rich and fertile tract of coastal Maharashtra, farmers and fishermen organized a series of protest meetings and demonstrations. The state came down hard, arresting many villagers, some even under the old colonial law of sedition.14
Nuclear energy was in the state sector, but the Land Acquisition Act was also often used, or misused, to transfer land from farmers to private industry. In West Bengal, for example, the Left Front government had long portrayed itself as a party of the countryside, opposed to the interests of the pampered middle class of Calcutta. Now, in an abrupt shift in policy, it invited an Indonesian conglomerate, Salim Group, to set up a Special Economic Zone in the Nandigram area of the Purbo Medinipur district. The process of land acquisition was set in motion, angering local villagers.
In January 2007, bitter clashes broke out between protesters and the police in Nandigram. Six people died. In this clash, CPI(M) cadres stood with the police, while the protesters were aided by cadres of the main opposition party in the state, the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
The countryside in Nandigram was now dotted with police camps. The combative leader of the TMC, Mamata Banerjee, demanded that the government withdraw all notices for the acquisition of land. Meanwhile, a prominent national politician, Sushma Swaraj of the Bharatiya Janata Party, visited Nandigram and deplored the ‘atrocities’ being committed on farmers.15
Apart from inviting the Indonesian Salim Group, the West Bengal government had also asked the Tatas to set up an automobile plant in their state. The group’s patriarch, Ratan Tata, had nurtured a dream – or fantasy – of manufacturing a ‘people’s car’, to be called the Nano, and priced at less than Rs100,000, within reach of every middle-class family in the country. When offered land in Singur in West Bengal for the Nano plant the Tatas took it at once. But, as in Nandigram, the promise had been made without consulting the farmers whose land was to be acquired. This was a fertile agricultural tract, well irrigated and with bountiful rainfall too.
The protesting farmers of Singur were led and mobilized by Mamata Banerjee. Ms Banerjee organized many processions and demonstrations against the Tata project. She also undertook several fasts. In August 2008, after the protests had been underway for almost a year, the Tatas suspended work at Singur and announced that they would shift the plant and machinery outside West Bengal. They directly blamed the state administration for this retr
eat. As a company statement put it in the first week of September, ‘the situation around the Nano plant continues to be hostile and intimidating. There is no way this plant could operate efficiently unless the environment became congenial and supportive of the project. We came to West Bengal hoping we could add value, prosperity and create job opportunities in the communities in the state.’16
In October 2008 – a month after they quit West Bengal – Tata Motors announced that they had found a new location for their Nano plant. This was in Gujarat, in a region called Sanand, where the government had alloted it 1,100 acres of land. This was a relief for the Tatas, whose chairman, Ratan Tata, had invested so much personal prestige in the Nano project. But it was also a shot in the arm for Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi. Ever since the pogrom of 2002, Modi had been suspect in the eyes of the Indian intelligentsia. Large sections of the media were also less than sympathetic to his angular, abrasive, ways. On the other hand, sections of big business, such as the Ambanis, had maintained excellent relations with Modi. For Ratan Tata – the head of India’s most respected industrial house – to now endorse him was a major victory for Modi. The endorsement came in the way of a public embrace, the two men hugging one another while appearing on stage to announce the new location of the Nano plant.
In fact, Modi’s personal re-branding had been going on for some time. As the journalist Sheela Bhatt perceptively remarked in 2005, ‘Narendra Modi thinks a detergent named development will wash away the memory of 2002.’ While focusing on new infrastructure, energy, and industrial projects, Modi had launched what Bhatt called ‘a massive self-publicity drive’, publishing diaries, calendars, booklets and posters where his own photograph appeared prominently alongside words and statistics speaking of Gujarat’s achievements under his leadership. ‘Modi has made sure that in Gujarat no one can escape noticing him’, remarked Bhatt.17
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 87