Some clarity, please

Now that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is back from what was, presumably, a wonderful 5-day break from his fractious allies, may we su...

Now that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is back from what was, presumably, a wonderful 5-day break from his fractious allies, may we suggest that he actually do something about the matter. For, more than the actual state of the economy, what’s confusing everyone is his government’s stand on the critical issue of disinvestment. If it’s not bad enough that we hear different sounds on this with each passing day, and from different allies as well as BJP stalwarts, we’ve had the unsavoury episode of protesters actually roughing up officials of the A.V. Birla group who’d come to conduct due diligence on Nalco.

Even if the government is speaking in different voices on the issue, the fact that the government couldn’t even get the police to back its own diktats is clearly a huge sign of its utter incompetence — after all, the Cabinet had cleared the sale of Nalco, hadn’t it? We may continue to pooh pooh the Chinese miracle (at our own peril, of course), but one thing that even the government will agree on, is that once the Chinese government agrees to do something, it does get done.

One can argue, and several apologists for the government are already doing so, that disinvestment cannot be the only yardstick for judging the NDA’s performance. While we’d agree with this in a qualified manner, the other message coming across is that of utter indiscipline within the NDA. All of Vajpayee’s cabinet, for instance, cleared the Competition Bill some months ago. This very clearly stated that a company would no longer be considered a monopoly simply because it had a dominant share of the market — instead, it said, only if a company abused its position, such as by arbitrarily hiking prices just because there was no competition, would it be considered a monopoly.

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Yet, despite having cleared a Bill which defined what a monopolist would be, you have members of the Cabinet — such as Defence Minister George Fernandes and Industry Minister Vikhe Patil — now opposing the privatisation of companies like HPCL/BPCL on the grounds that this will give private players a dominant share of the market! Clearly, as Mark Tully said in an entirely different context, there are no full stops in India.

With the government’s unfinished reforms agenda looming larger with each passing day, Vajpayee clearly needs to get his allies to think and act in a cohesive manner quickly — the fiscal situation, to name just one element, is getting worse, and expenditure such as that on subsidies just has to be cut.

The list of legislation that needs to be passed in Parliament is also really huge — Jaswant Singh has now sought the Congress’ support in passing the pending legislation. But surely Vajpayee needs to secure the support of his own party colleagues first?