As I watched Sonia Gandhi’s lady-in-waiting, Ambika Soni, articulate her leader’s ‘‘new vision’’ last week I realised that it was time for me to revise my political views. My main objection to Sonia being prime minister of India used to be that as she was Italian she was automatically disqualified but after the Shimla Sankalp I am convinced there are more serious disqualifications even than her foreignness and these relate to her political disabilities.Whatever the purpose of the grandiloquently named Shimla Manthan Shivir all it ended up doing, in the view of your ever humble columnist, was draw painful attention to Sonia’s incomprehension of changed political realities. Had she learned anything at all since that unhappy ‘‘272 and many more coming’’ episode she would have understood, for instance, that reservations for the backward and low of caste (or anyone else) is an idea whose time has passed. Yet, an important component of the ‘‘new vision’’ is that the Congress Party plans to demand reservations in the judiciary and even, believe it or not, in the private sector. How private companies can be forced to hire backwards and Dalits without the imposition of some kind of economic dictatorship remains unclear but did it not occur to the Congress President that she would have done better to demand that the judiciary start working as the judiciary should. It will take more than 300 years to clear the backlog of cases in our courts, killers roam free because the justice system is such a mess and the Congress Party offers us low caste judges.The rest of the ‘‘vision’’ as articulated in the Shimla Sankalp is, alas, neither new nor original. We are offered the same old cliches about socialism and secularism and the same old dynastic succession. Clearly, the Congress President has not noticed that times have changed since her mother-in-law was prime minister. In those days it was possible to convince voters that India would break into pieces if ‘‘communal forces’’ came to power in Delhi but with a ‘‘communal’’ Prime Minister in charge for more than five years. Only rabid leftists and political idiots believe this kind of nonsense any more. As for Congress-style socialism it can be blamed almost entirely for the shaming, sickening figures that the UNDP’s Human Development Report delivered last week. The number of Indians living on less than a dollar a day is 34.7 per cent. If that is not shaming enough it becomes worse when comparisons are made with Pakistan which has dealt with poverty so much better that only 13.4 per cent of its people live on less than a dollar a day and China where the figure is 16.1 per cent.Socialism, as it has functioned in countries more fortunate than ours, has not proven to be a great creator of wealth but there have been remarkable achievements in the social sector. The Congress party gave us, for nearly fifty years, a socialism unique in its failures in such vital areas as healthcare, housing and education. So, those Indians who live on less than a dollar a day usually have no access to such basic necessities as drinking water, shelter, medicines and schools. Why? Surely, the Congress party owes us an explanation. Surely, a serious churning of ideas in Shimla should have thrown up a ‘‘new vision’’ that included ideas on how poverty could be better fought.While saying this I am aware that the Vajpayee government has not thrown up many new ideas either but, at least, the Planning Commission now admits that the Rs 30,000 crore that are spent annually on poverty alleviation is mostly wasted. It would be better, a report admitted, a couple of years ago to simply send money orders of Rs 8,000 each to all those below the poverty line because it would help them rise above it quicker than government programmes had. Nothing has happened since but the admission is at least acknowledgement that things have gone wrong, from the Congress party we do not even get that. And when we say party we really mean Sonia herself because that peculiar thing they call ‘‘Congress culture’’ ensures that if your name is Nehru or Gandhi — even by marriage — then you are the Congress party. Sonia, herself, clarified in Shimla that she was the only one in charge of the shop. She listened to everyone, she said, but in the end it was she who made the decisions. Well, its about time she took time off the shivir-circuit to do some serious introspection. It might make her realise that political parties need to change with the times just as everybody else does and those that resist change end up becoming irrelevant.The Congress party has been so remarkably resistant to change that its leaders and workers still wear khadi even though it is no longer representative of humility but of power. And, if you observe the uniform of the Sewa Dal — responsible these days mainly for organising shivirs of the Shimla type — you will notice that it has not changed since the days of the Freedom Movement. Their songs have not changed either so at Congress events it is not unusual to hear patriotic songs that are completely meaningless today. These may sound like small things but they are symptoms of a deeper malaise, a malaise that could one day prove terminal. It’s called stagnation. And, if Sonia’s ‘‘new vision’’ as articulated in the Shimla Sankalp is indicative of the future direction of the Congress party it can be safely concluded that it is going nowhere. Write to the author at tavleensingh@expressindia.com
