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Deals within deals

Developments in the course of the past month appear to have brought into the open a dilemma entrapping the Bharatiya Janata Party regime in New Delhi: It is as if it cannot quite decide whether it wants to stay or get out. If market gossip is to be lent any credence, a kind of working arrangement has been worked out with the Congress, or at least the occupant of 10 Janpath. So, for as long as the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government does not make too much of a fuss over Bofors, it would be allowed to survive.

There is an important pragmatic reason, it will be said, for this Congress decision -- the party is not sure whether, in case the BJP-led coalition is voted out and a general election follows, it will succeed in improving its position in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Without significant strides by the Congress in these two states, the BJP and its quarrelsome partners have a fair chance of holding on to power.

The predicament the BJP is facing has no doubt other sources as well. With an ally like the Shiv Sena in tow, the country's international rating, both political and financial, is bound to plummet continuously under Vajpayee-L.K. Advani helmsmanship. There should be, BJP acolytes may argue, some objectivity in assessing the relative performance of the various national political parties, and to single their favourite party out for condemnation on account of the wayward behaviour of a coalition partner is unfairness unbound.

True, the BJP is in no position to rein in Bal Thackeray and his wild ones. But then, apologists of the BJP could chip in, the Congress's record in this respect is no better. Not only did the P V Narasimha Rao government watch philosophically as the Babri Masjid was pulled down on that grim December day in 1992; it was equally otherworldly when the Shiv Sainiks went on the rampage the next month. Bombay and Maharashtra were held to ransom and Thackeray gave a throaty call for the extermination of Muslims. The agenda included killing and arson and appropriation wholesale of the assets and properties of the infidels.

The scope of the holy war against Muslims was soon extended to cover the non-Maharashtrians settled in the state as well. It was total non-rule of law and order. The Congress regimes, both at the Centre and in Maharashtra, however dared not step in. Thackeray was left undisturbed. No prosecution was launched against him, and there has been not a single occasion in the last six years when he was made to spend a night in a cold cell for his misdoings.

If offering a carte blanche to the Shiv Sena for indulging in murder and mayhem is the core of the issue, obviously the Congress cannot flaunt a clean record.

In sizing up their judgement on the evolving political situation in India, foreigners may or may not agree with each of the sentiments reflected in the preceding paragraphs. What conclusions nonetheless would you expect them to reach? This is precisely where the irony latent in the circumstances strains to reveal itself. One outstanding feature in recent developments is the increasing convergence of views between the two major political parties in the country on the entire gamut of economic policies, both domestic and foreign.

A glaring illustration of this was the closing of ranks over the Patents bill. The Congress went to the length of issuing a whip to its members in the Rajya Sabha to support this particular piece of legislation. The concordat over economic policy is even more strongly mirrored in the attitude towards foreign investment. Neither party has failed to try to satisfy any wish or predilection of foreign investors, however otiose.

Concessions have been piled up on concessions. The declining trend in actual long-term foreign investment has not led to any critical reassessment of the open door policy by either political party; on the contrary, disappointments of this nature have been the precursor of further and yet further acts of liberalisation.

Both parties have assured countrymen that, if not in this round, certainly in the next round, the concessions accorded to foreigners would be reciprocated by a gushing flow of foreign capital into the country. But no such things has happened till now. Prospects of increased foreign investments have dimmed even as prospects of export growth have shrivelled over the past couple of years. Negative ratings by foreign investibility rating agencies have moved got worse. The post-Pokhran sanctions have very little to do with this course of events.

Here, then, is the dilemma. Both the Congress and the BJP are pinning their hopes on unlimited supplies of foreign capital. The common expectation of the two parties is that as long as national policy, including national economic policy, is patterned to placate the foreigners, the good Samaritans from Western lands would bail out India.

Things however are not turning that way. The practice of not speaking out against the United States -- exemplified once more by the failure of both the Congress and the BJP to take a principled stand over Bill Clinton's barbaric excesses in Iraq -- is proving to be of little avail. Foreign capital continues to be scarce and scarcer every day. The reason, at least one part of the reason, is without question the image of the Indian policy that is crystallising in foreign minds ever since the those gory final weeks of 1992.

Fundamentalism of the species demonstrated by the Shiv Sena and its cohorts such as the Bajrang Dal has a lethal quality that has put paid to the hope of ruling politicians to extract kudos from foreigners.

A race has seemingly ensued between two separate strands in the consensus politics of two leading political parties. They are determined to follow economic policies that will gladden foreigners; at the same time, the support they are providing to rebuild mediaevalism of the vilest kind cannot but alienate foreigners. As it does millions and millions of countrymen too.

The Congress may protest that no such consensus exists between it and the BJP. The proof of the pudding is in the eating though. If it were worried in any measure over the consequences of permitting fundamentalism to be on the rampage in the country, the Congress should have felt no hesitation to straightaway pull down the BJP government in the aftermath of Manoharpur.

What, after all, are the likely spin-offs if the present government is brought to an end? Possibility number one: its substitution by a Congress regime backed by the Left and an assortment of state-level parties. Possibility number two: fresh elections which, again, could imply either of two alternatives -- the Congress, with outside support from the Left and the state-level parties, performs well in the polls and forms the government at the Centre, or a return of the fundamentalist and quasi-fundamentalists to power.

The nation deserves to be given a chance to choose between these alternatives by the Congress. Should that chance be deferred, the danger of the nation coming apart would multiply even as its economic development remains stifled.

It is however conceivable that the matter of Bofors apart, the Congress has another hidden agenda. Some elements within the party may be anxious to see foreigners return to political and economic dominance in this country as that would hopefully herald a return of efficiency and competence. But they cannot say so openly, and would not for the present stand in the way of a regime which is anathema to foreigners but which is supportive of the Congress policy of all out economic liberalisation.

As long as foreign direct investment does not zoom, these manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres will constitute the staple for old wives' tales, and India will continue to be in the jam it is in today. If the rate of exports falls further and imports remain unbridled, while short term external capital movements too are rendered volatile by the Shiv Sena's doings the crisis for the country could actually be brought forward.

Which leads one to mull over a final puzzle. Has the BJP too a hidden agenda -- its acceptable Vajpayee-esque face notwithstanding, and is the Shiv Sena its revolutionary vanguard, with a 'Compleat Strategyst' lurking somewhere behind the screen? And what if the so-called 'Strategyst' is a marionette whose strings are pulled by an invisible hand operating from alien shores?

Ashok Mitra