IF the government were honest they would say the only clear reason they have for selling off the family silver is that they've fallen on bad days and need the money. We could then see how much they need and together work out the best way of squaring their accounts.But the government do not want to put it that way. They want to dress up their need for a spot of extra cash as some great policy initiative which will close the door on half a century of someone else's achievement. Thus the very disinvestment they opposed when in Opposition is now touted as the strategic objective of their governance. This would be no bad thing if they were agreed among themselves on where they were going and why. But they are not.The finance minister knows that without a certain swelling of his treasury, he will be revealed, come the next Budget, as a bankrupt. So his commitment to disinvestment is stark. So is the commitment to disinvestment of the minister for disinvestment after all what else does his portfolio amount to? However, neither the finance minister nor the disinvestment minister is required to shed any part of his empire to cover up the disarray in the nation's finances. On the contrary, it is they who get the headlines and the laudatory notices in the pink papers.The ones who have cause to worry are the ministers who have to face the consequences of their actions, who have to not only answer the employees of the units they are selling off but also justify to Parliament and the media often against their own inclinations and sometimes against their conscience the derisory sums the country is getting for the games that North Block plays. For, note, most of the affected ministers are those who till but yesteryear swore by socialism and the public sector, be it Sharad Yadav at civil aviation (set to lose both Air India and Indian Airlines) or Ram Vilas Paswan at telecom (giving away ministerial freebies to departmental employees while protesting the conversion of his department into a corporation) or Manohar Joshi at heavy industry (wondering why Maruti, one of our most successful joint sector ventures, should have the ``joint'' wrenched out of its heart).And if you ask when was Ram Naik at petroleum a socialist, the answer is he never was but is still the swadeshi nationalist he set out to be.All of them have reservations about the degree, direction, and methodology of disinvestment. Yet, the government claims the policy thrust of disinvestment is clear, that it is ai-med at divesting the government of its stake in all but core and strategic sectors. If, however, that is, indeed, the objective, then why ``disinvest''; why not ``privatise''? Privatisation would mean finding the route, as Margaret Thatcher did, towards ridding government of all interest in, or any responsibility for, industrial or commercial enterprises.Privatisation, for her, meant gi- ving the general public a massive opportunity of buying into the public sector.The Sinha-Jaitley route is quite different. They do not, except in the odd case, wish to divest themselves of all government interest. What they are looking for is a discreetly negotiated private deal: cash on the nail to help the government surmount its fiscal problems in exchange for the strategic partner securing effective control over national assets worth several multiples of the crumbs thrown to the government. The government's need is so urgent and so great that the patient way of offering the public sector to the great Indian public is denied the ordinary investor. For the only way to let the general public into the bonanza without driving down market capitalisation to derisory levels would be to offload small packets at a time. The government, alas, cannot wait. They need big cash now.Which means they do a deal on the side with a fat cat who knows it is a buyer's market and cashes in on the opportunity.The examples we have had of disinvestment in GAIL, Indian Iron & Steel and Modern Foods show that the ``strategic partner'' who, by definition, is an established giant not only acquires access to unbounded wealth the partner did nothing to create but is, often, the market rival against whom the erstwhile public sector unit had competed in the market place, often with great success. Competition is thus decreased and the market pushed towards oligopoly or worse. Thus is the government's need for flow met by liquidating stock. Is this sound husbandry?The muddle is the consequence of the government not knowing what its policy really is. They sometimes seem to say government have no business to be in business. In which case, why look for strategic partners, instead of just getting rid of the damn thing? And sometimes they seem to say, no, government have the duty to be in some business but not in every business.In which case, why not draw up a list of which of the current 243 central public sector undertakings are in essential and privatise them? At yet other times the government say it is terrible that public sector units should be making such ghastly losses. In which case, rid government of their loss-making undertakings. The disinvestment minister, however, comes prattling in that he cannot find buyers for units making losses so, can he sell of the profit-making ones instead? And the rest of the cabinet asks why if the units are making a profit should the pickings be offered on a platter to someone else? And no one is talking about that vast number of public sector units that resulted from the state taking over loss-making private sector units. Who says only the public sector makes losses or that the private sector does not come wailing to government for bailouts? The biggest bailouts have been precisely for that class and category of capitalists whom the government are now seeking out as strategic partners.The irony is exquisite.All of which means those who think the supple Vajpayee needs but one more meeting of the cabinet committee concerned to convert disinvestments from opportunism into policy (that is, selling off ITDC rather than making a thing out of selling the Ashok Hotel in Ranchi(!) why, in the name of god, Ranchi?) may have many a long think coming. Until the policy parameters are clear, cabinet decisions will be as half-cocked as last week's have been. But until the cabinet stops being pulled in 24 different directions, how can there be any coherence?
