On The spot
Tavleen Singh
The first column of a new year makes even cynical hacks like me acknowledge the need to say something optimistic and cheerful. And, since I write this piece on New Year’s Day in a friend’s house by the sea let me begin by telling you that it was especially easy for me to be cheerful this morning because I woke to the sound of the tide coming in and the chirping of birds in a garden filled with flowers. Having breathed my fill of garden scents and sights I spent an hour on a treadmill watching New Year festivities from cities across the world. So I watched the spectacular fireworks on the banks of the Thames River in London and watched the thousands of revelers in Times Square in New York and found myself wondering why in India municipal officials are so allergic to festivity that the High Court had to intervene to allow hotels and restaurants to remain open till dawn in Mumbai. In Delhi too celebrations were strictly restricted to private parties. Do the police have nothing better to do than prevent people from having a good time at the end of a year that has been so filled with economic gloom?
For me personally there were early intimations of economic gloom in the first weeks of 2013. I remember talking to one of our leading bankers last January and asking him if he saw signs of the economic growth rate picking up in the near future. He said, ‘No. I do not because there is no indication that the Government of India has understood yet that 4.5% GDP growth today is as bad for India economically as those decades of 3% average growth used to be. There are no indications either of steps being taken to improve the investment climate. So 2013 is going to be a bad year in my view.’ It was in the last few months of the year just gone that I realized how right he was.
By then the economy was trundling along at the lowest growth rate in more than a decade, prices of onions and tomatoes had soared unbelievably and the job market had dried up. Foreign investors had long fled because of the Government of India’s ill-advised attempts to introduce retrospective taxes and a policy of changing goalposts halfway. It was only after these things had already happened that the Finance Minister made some serious attempts to change the mood and even Rahul Gandhi noticed that Rs 10 lakh crores worth of projects had been stalled by the Ministry of Environment but by then it was too late. Economists and businessmen now concur that the only hope is for the government to change after the coming general election.
Since I promised you optimism in the first paragraph of this piece I kept the good news for after the bad. If economically 2013 was one of the worst years ever for the Indian economy politically there was a surfeit of good tidings. After an aeon of rule by a single family Indian politics threw up important challengers from both the right and the left leaving the Congress Party looking pretty confused in the middle. Senior Congress leaders who had told me confidently at the beginning of 2013 that they did not expect Narendra Modi to win ‘a single seat outside Gujarat’ were forced to admit by the end of the year that he stood a serious chance of becoming India’s next prime minister. They continue to assert that even if the BJP emerges as the single largest party after the next election they will find it hard to win allies with Modi at the top but now these assertions are made hesitantly.
By the end of 2013 I found it hard to meet anyone from the Congress Party who believed that they had a serious chance of winning the next general election. When the results came in from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi on December 8 the Congress Party became enveloped in a cloud of defeatism. The only glimmer of hope some of the more leftist members of Congress appeared to see was in the Aam Admi Party. Mani Shankar Aiyer, a leftist even by Congress standards, admitted recently on a television channel that he was delighted with the emergence of Arvind Kejriwal and AAP because he believed they could ‘stop Modi’. AAP’s spokesmen have made it clear that they intend to contest the Lok Sabha elections but it is hard to see them achieving at a national level the sort of success they did in Delhi.
AAP’s economic ideas are so similar to those of the Congress Party’s current president that it is hard to tell them apart. Like Sonia Gandhi they believe in involving NGOs in government, like her they believe in distributing freebies and like her they detest the private sector. Their manifesto reads, as I have pointed out before in this column, like a Congress relic from Indira Gandhi’s time but despite its obvious drawbacks AAP is a welcome addition to the political arena because it has proved that it is possible for new political parties to become big players without the backing of big corporations. Kejriwal’s decision to hold a referendum before deciding to form the government in Delhi, with Congress support, is also welcome even if he might find it hard to govern effectively if he continues to insist that every decision must be taken by referendum. His decision to set up a grievance cell for corruption cases is very welcome even if it could end up becoming clogged and non-functional before it makes a difference. AAP has brought an idealism and desire for integrity into Indian politics that has long been missing so it has the good wishes of even someone like me who has serious doubts about its economic ideas.
So we begin 2014 with an infusion of hope and good cheer that has served to lift in some measure the despair that has been the defining mood in India for the past couple of years. There is a sense in political pundit circles these days that no matter what happens after the next general election it will be better for India than what we have had under a decade of rule by Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh. On that optimistic and cheerful note may I wish all of you a very Happy New Year.
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