Left, Right vs Centre

The only surprise in the current round of agitation over oil price hikes is that Congress chief ministers haven’t joined in. They must be envying politicians to the Left and Right of them, who, while they refuse to talk to each other over anything substantive, have found common cause over something as unexceptionable as adjusting the domestic price of an imported commodity to its global rates. There is something worse than convenient politics in all this. Politicians across the board are being hypocritical.

The BJP is being hypocritical because it would have surely taken the same decision had it come back to power. Ram Naik made a mockery of the disbandment of the administered pricing regime by keeping oil prices low, thinking that once the verdict was in and in the NDA’s favour, voters could be asked to pay more. But then, it had been hypocritical over the Indo-US nuclear deal, too, despite presiding over the most significant foreign policy initiative in recent history. The Congress’s hypocrisy is perhaps worse — it knows what its government has to deal with. It knows the opposition (include the Left in this category for the present purpose) will pretend other solutions are possible. It knows the government didn’t need another political controversy on top of the one engendered by the quota issue.

As for the Left, its leaders have made great claims about reducing taxes to spare the “common man”. Of course, there’s some adjustment possible in taxes. But isn’t it the Left which is always asking for greater public expenditure commitment? Where’s the money going to come from? Oil is the biggest commodity tax earner for governments. The PMO should perhaps offer to the Left a sharp reduction in oil taxes as well as a sharp reduction in social expenditure — it would be fascinating to know how Marxists react to that. The plain truth is that price signals are necessary to adjust consumption in the face of rising oil import costs. People at large will accept this unless the government is firm. And the government can’t be firm unless major political parties accept basic facts. It says something about oil politics that the only quasi-sensible argument has been made by the RSS. Which is, of course, why the BJP is not listening to it.