On The spot
Tavleen Singh
The only good news that comes with Sonia Gandhi’s food bill is that she has finally made it clear that she is India’s real prime minister. And, for the first time accepted personal responsibility for a policy decision made by her government, a decision that will one day be remembered as the last nail in the coffin of the Indian economy. In the ten years that she has ruled India from behind the prime minister’s shadow, she has evaded accountability for all mistakes and scandals and accepted praise for the things that have gone right. This is probably what she intended when she ‘sacrificed’ the prime minister’s job in 2004 but actually ‘sacrificed’ only accountability. Not power.
So if you are puzzled about why she chose to come out of the shadows last week and make one of her rare (no more than five) speeches in the Lok Sabha while presenting the food bill you would be right to be puzzled. So before going any further I shall analyze why she has suddenly decided to take charge in what could be the last few months of Congress rule. First, let us get some perspective and admit that just as there is no point in pretending that India’s real prime minister is Dr. Manmohan Singh there is no point in pretending that in the past decade India has been ruled by a United Progressive Alliance coalition.
We have been ruled by a Congress Government with the so-called coalition being no more than a convenient whipping boy to be blamed for things that Sonia Gandhi has not allowed the prime minister to do. The most important of these is that she put a brake on all economic reforms that would have liberalized the economy and made India an investor friendly country. And, she forced through a series of leftist welfare policies that not just brought the license raj back through the back door but brought back those ‘gharibi hatao’ times when massive and expensive welfare schemes created the illusion that Sonia Gandhi, like her late mother-in-law, was the patron saint of ‘the poor’. The latest of these is the food security law whose main purpose appears to be to ensure the continuation of the Dynasty.
In Delhi last week a rumour was wafting around temperature controlled drawing rooms that appeared to have been spread by Sonia’s close friends. According to the rumour Sonia Gandhi was ‘tired’ and would like to retire but felt unable to do this until she was sure that the political legacy she inherited from her husband and mother-in-law was safely handed down. If she has gone out of her way to lend her name to the food security bill it is because she believes that it will be a ‘game changer’ at a time when there seems to be no possibility of a Congress Government coming to power in 2014. Days before the Lok Sabha passed the bill Sonia met reporters at the inauguration of a new Media Centre and said in so many words that she believed that ‘UPA-3’ would win the next election.
The price for this will be paid by India that is why the behavior of the Bharatiya Janata Party is beyond disgraceful. Talk to any of this party’s senior leaders and they will tell you privately that they know that the new food security law will bankrupt India. The Minister of Agriculture himself expressed grave fears about what could happen next year in an interview he gave to the Indian Express last week. Sharad Pawar said, ‘My worry is not today or tomorrow, but when it (Food Security Bill) will be in full swing. Demand will grow. By next year, the subsidy bill will go up to Rs 1,25,000 crore.’
If you are among those who believe, as Sonia Gandhi and Amartya Sen do, that no price is too high to pay for solving the horrible malnutrition that India’s children suffer from then let me explain why you are wrong. Every other Indian child will continue to be officially malnourished even after this bill becomes law because it is the wrong solution to a truly shameful problem. Half of India’s children are malnourished not because they do not get enough food grain to eat but because they do not get the right kind of nourishment. I have said before in this column that street children in Mumbai need milk and green vegetables more than bread and rice and it is because their parents cannot afford such things that they are malnourished. The same is true in rural India where children who live below the poverty line often have access to cheap food grain but not to better forms of nourishment. So more supplies of food grain will make no difference.
What would have made a huge difference would have been if the Rs 125,000 crores that we will soon be spending annually on cheap food grain could be spent instead on sanitation and clean water in rural India and in urban slums. Most deaths of children under the age of five are caused by diarrhea and this is always caused by contaminated water and filthy living conditions. Our tragedy is that not a single political party dared take a position against Sonia Gandhi’s food bill on these valid grounds. During the debate in the Lok Sabha not a single political leader made the point that the reason why the new law was a bad one was because it would not solve any problems and because the money invested in it could be much better spent. When I tried to find out why there were no real objections to Sonia’s favorite law I was told that it was because no political party could afford to appear to be ‘anti-poor’, especially not with a general election around the corner.
So Sonia Gandhi’s cynical hoax on the people of India was passed with a voice vote in the Lok Sabha and the same thing is likely to happen when the bill goes to the Rajya Sabha. Will it help guarantee that her son succeeds her as heir to the democratic throne of India? I do not believe it will because the Congress is deeply unpopular today. What I can say with certainty is that it is now only a matter of time before India becomes bankrupt. What I can say with certainty is that it is Sonia Gandhi who is personally to blame for the worst economic downturn India has ever seen.
Follow our WhatsApp channel