Congress, reforming

The Congress’s relationship with economic reforms resembles that of a parent who doesn’t want to acknowledge an illegitimate, if otherwise accomplished, child. Released this week, the party’s ‘Vision Document’ reflects this ambivalence, at once promising — NDA-style — high growth rates and calibrated socialist-era interventions.

The Congress’s economics actually flows from its internal politics. Despite efforts by the party’s in-house economic historians to link the liberalisation process to Indira Gandhi’s second coming in 1980, reforms really owe their origin to the precarious situation at the onset of P.V. Narasimha Rao’s prime ministry in 1991. Rao adopted reforms in his trademark half-conviction, half-exigency fashion. A small group helped him implement policy changes. There were few attempts to convince the party, let alone expand the popular appeal of reforms. In the NDA years, with Rao a non-person and his loyalists having either faded away or sought re-employment as 10 Janpath’s speech-writers, the Congress was almost churlish in acknowledging the success of liberalisation. It shied away from taking ownership of a phenomenon it had fathered. There was a demographic reason for the wariness. Electoral data is clear the party’s natural vote bank is the poor. The tortured debate for much of the past five years was whether the Congress should ‘‘re-invent’’ itself as a party of the poor or sell itself as a vehicle for middle class aspiration. The first approch meant a rejection of reforms, the second a gushing advocacy.

Somewhere between the two stools lay the Indian National Congress. In election season 2004, the Congress has finally endorsed reforms — realising to do otherwise is to seek membership of Jurassic Park. Yet it has made the familiar ‘‘social justice’’ noises, promised to eradicate hunger, illiteracy, unemployment, you name it. It has not delineated, however, where market measures end and where the state’s role begins. In the end it has clarified old confusions with new mysteries.