The Congress' renewed faith in socialism?

By Srinivasan K. Rangachary

Arjun Singh, the man who supposedly gives bad advice to Sonia Gandhi, is back. After a long period of quietness, he surfaced recently in Parliament to warn against economic reforms. His fears are shared by a section within the party. They believe that the Congress lost in 1996 because of Narasimha Rao's policies of liberalization.

Arjun Singh knows a thing or two-or three - about defeats. He lost the last three elections. So does Pranab Mukherjee, who drafted the party's economic paper which was discussed at the Bangalore AICC session. Mukherjee has never won an election in his life. Left to these stalwarts, the Congress will bid goodbye to reforms if it attains power at the Centre and return to the days of garibi hatao, which has been described in the policy paper as the leitmotif of the party.

This stirring phrase was, of course, used by Indira Gandhi at the time of her most decisive victory in 1971. Prior to that, she had split the Congress and ousted the 'reactionary' Syndicate of Kamaraj, Nijalingappa, Sanjiva Reddy and Atulya Ghosh. Those were the heady days of victory in Bangladesh and of socialism. Indeed, so heady that even the communists were divided, with the CPI joining hands with Indira.

Today the communists are again back with the Congress. At least the CPI(M) is. The CPI no longer counts, although it is happily tagging along. The hope is that the socialist pretensions will again see the Congress, along with the CPI(M), ride to power at the Centre. The only flaw in this rosy scenario is that much water has flown down even the stagnant Yamuna since the Seventies. Not to mention the Volga.

It wasn't only Nehru's Fabian socialism which made the Congress adopt the 'socialistic pattern of society' as its motto in the Avadi AICC session of 1955. Capitalism was in bad odour in those days. Even in the West, the 'hippies' represented a generation which had turned away from the unabashed materialism of a capitalist society.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix," wrote Allen Ginsberg in Howl(1956). The rich were routinely portrayed in those days as philistines who were not only to be opposed but even pitied because they did not see what was "blowin' in the wind".

In newly independent India, the capitalist West was received as predatory neo-imperialists ready to embark on a policy of neo-colonialism through economic conquest to replace the old gunship variety. Besides, the memories of East India Company had not faded. It was only to be expected, therefore, that nonalignment had as its 'natural ally' the workers' paradise of the Soviet Union.

The Indian businessmen, too, contributed to their own unflattering image. They were seen as rapacious and untrustworthy, always ready to cheat the customer by supplying shoddy goods and cheat the government on taxes. A trader in a film was invariably an unctuous crook and a corporate executive, as in Satyajit Ray's Seemabaddha, a cold-blooded reptile.

Nationalization, therefore, was the mantra. A government comprising honest officials who were driven not by the ulterior profit motive but by the noble idea of development was believed to be the answer to India's economic ills. And the Soviet 'superpower' was the model.

Perhaps there is a cyclic order of things. It did not take long for such perceptions to change. Indira Gandhi's socialism was gradually recognized to be fake and her left-of-centre stance began to be described as left of self-interest. Indeed, it was the degeneration of the political system which undermined faith in the socialist system which, in the Indian context, meant a mixed economy where the public sector controlled the 'commanding heights' of the economy.

Instead of upright officials fostering growth from these 'heights', the corrupt among them began to take charge, aided and abetted by venal politicians. Public sector units lost their autonomy (if they ever had any) and began their downward spiral into industrial sickness. Their chairmanships became sinecures for favoured politicians and for those legislators who needed an inducement to cross the floor.

Inefficiency and technological obsolescence became the hallmarks of a closed, autarkic system. The private sector, protected by high tariff walls and using political clout to stifle even domestic competition, felt no urge to improve. The best example of its antediluvian attitude as a part of the 'mixed-up' economy is the Ambassador car about which writer Amit Chaudhuri said that there was a new model every year - Mark I, Mark II - which were an exact replica of the previous year's car.

As if to confirm that the whole idea of a State-controlled economic regime was a disaster, the socialist system collapsed even in the worker's paradise, and China, while preserving its politics, turned its back on the Marxian economic prescriptions. Other egalitarians, too, notably Britian's Labour Party, changed tack.

If India today abandons the programme of economic reforms and reverts to 'socialism', it will perhaps be the only example of its kind in today's world, outside the proletarian havens of Cuba and North Korea.

What is curious is that such a regression will take place not because of any economic compulsion based on unmistakable indicators but a misguided political approach influenced by the belief that it will pay electoral dividends. Besides, a weakened Congress is in search of friends like the followers of a doctrine which is no longer pursued anywhere.

But if the Indian communists at least have an ideological motive, the socialists in the Congress do not even have that. They are interested in the idea of the government running industries, banks, airlines, motor car companies, hotels, etc not to take them to a higher level of productivity and efficiency but because they confer enormous resources and powers of patronage.

The government's other favourites are subsidies to political lobbies like farmers and the so-called poverty alleviation programmes, ostensibly for the poor, although Rajiv Gandhi calculated that only 15 paise out of every rupee allotted to them actually go to the needy. No prizes for guessing where the remaining 85 paise go.

What is noteworthy, however, is that even as the 'socialists' are mouthing their doctrine with renewed vigour, the state governments have realized the hollowness of the doctrine. Presumably because they have to run the administration and tackle the problems of stagnation and unemployment, the state governments have learnt from experience that public sector-led growth is a chimera. A much greater involvement of private enterprise, along with foreign investment, is unavoidable if more jobs are to be created.

Even Jyoti Basu used to visit the 'decadent' West every summer to look for foreign investment - although that was only an excuse for a holiday at the government's expense because no one would come to a West Bengal run by the CITU. Now, his successor as Chief Minister, Buddadeb Bhattacharjee, has realized that the sick public sector units have to be closed down and militant trade union tactics curbed - a shocking attitude for a Stalinist.

Congress Chief Ministers, too, like Digvijay Singh and S.M. Krishna have realized the need for a fresh approach towards the problems of the economy - though not Ajit Jogi, the party's new trade union hero.

If the Congress at the Centre trires to turn the clock back, it will be a backward journey to the dead dogma of a dead millennium. INAV

Malaysia: The father as rapist

By Selvi Gopal

A month does not go by in Ma-laysia without a series of ar-ticles appearing in local newspapers highlighting incidents of children being sexually abused.

Most of the articles are based on court cases involving children who have been raped. And harrowing though these cases are, they are just the tip of the iceberg. For every incident of sexual abuse that is reported to the local police many others go unreported in this country where, not surprisingly, child sexual abuse is considered offensive, disgraceful and shameful by most people.

But there is a small minority that sees rape and sexual abuse as an acceptable practice.

People who counsel fathers who rape their daughters have heard the perpetrators arguing about their right to have sexual encounters with their daughters. The reason that these men give is that since they have fathered the children, they are their property. For these men, raping their daughters is their right.

In Malaysia, there are only 10 child psychologists; and of these, only a handful deal with cases involving child sexual abuse on a regular basis. Sadly, even the women's groups in the country are more concerned about rape of elder women and domestic violence. Madeleine Yong, Project Director, P.S. The Children, an organisation that provides advocacy, prevention and intervention programmes on the issue of sexual abuse of children, says that Malaysians are suffering from a severe case of the denial syndrome. "I have given talks on child sexual abuse to teachers and government officers from the health and education ministry and many of them are appalled when they realise that the topic of discussion for the day will revolve around fathers raping their daughters," says Yong.

"When I give public talks, very few people attend the talks and most of those who attend are women. Men rarely make an appearance for such talks," she adds. Yong, who started the prevention programme in 1999, says that the organisation was formed to fill a void that existed in the country. Today, she holds regular awareness talks in schools, government agencies and orphanages. Adds she, "Adults just refuse to accept that child sexual abuse occurs on a regular basis in this country."

According to Yong, children talk about sexual abuse openly when they realise that the person asking the questions is not going to pass any moral judgements. "Children, especially teenagers, are eager for information since they have been led to believe that it's a crime only if they are raped. Many are unaware that molestation also constitutes child sexual abuse," says she.

P.S. The Children recently spoke to 12 girls at a shelter for abandoned children and found that six of the girls had been sexually abused when they lived with their families. "This is another issue that confounds adults. Most adults think that the perpetrators are strangers whom the children meet outside their homes. What they fail to understand is that almost 95 per cent of child sexual abuse cases involve people the children are familiar with. For these children home is not necessarily a safe place," Yong adds.

Even though, P.S. The Children is not keen on providing counselling, Yong says that they are forced to because the country does not have adequate support services for children who are sexually abused.

"In incestuous cases, mothers often do not provide the necessary support by believing the girls as they fear that the father, who is in most cases the breadwinner in the family, will be arrested and this will deprive the family of its source of income," says Yong.

In the course of her talks, Yong has also discovered that people get offended by the very nature of the crime and they keep asking her if child sexual abuse is confined to a certain race, if the perpetrators are Malays, Chinese or Indians -- the three major races in the country. "Some even ask me if I would bring along a victim so that they know what she looks like. My answer to these people is to just look around - any one of us could be a victim," says Yong. One cannot help but wonder if this kind of an attitude towards child sexual abuse stems from the revulsion people feel towards the crime or whether it is just too close to home to discuss openly. (WFS)