There146;s a pattern to Aiyar146;s ire

Mani Shankar Aiyar is not a child in politics that he is free to rubbish his own PM. But consider his career trajectory: he was Rajiv Gandhi8217;s protege

Mani Shankar Aiyar deserves to be congratulated for his confessions and claims at the recent CII meeting. He begins by deriding the economic reforms of his own prime minister. He says that the 9.2 per cent growth rate claim is full of holes, and that the 700 million poor have achieved an economic growth rate of only 0.2 per cent. Perhaps he wants to be both government and the opposition rolled into one.

He mocks at India8217;s claim that poverty levels have fallen after the reforms. He skips the fact that even four weeks ago, the Manmohan Singh government 8212; of which he is a part 8212; projected statistics from two different methods, both of which proved that poverty levels have fallen substantially between 1998 and 2005. So what are we to believe? Is it that Aiyar8217;s government is resorting to lies, or is it that he himself doesn8217;t believe either his government8217;s statistics or indeed those presented by national institutions?

Then he ridicules programmes like the Indira Awas Yojana and the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. An 8220;ugly choice8221; he terms the programmes of his own government. He goes on to illustrate this by projecting how his own colleagues scoff at rural programmes, rejecting any proposal for investment in the villages. All governments, including the UPA government according to Aiyar, are focused on the small number of Indian billionaires and millionaires. Can there be a more damning condemnation of the government than that?

Finally he seeks to bury once and for all, the claim that his government and many outside it make: that the economic reforms of Dr Manmohan Singh in 1991 helped change the face of the country. And the contrast he draws between the golden days of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi and also those of Rajiv Gandhi in the eighties with the 15 years since 1991, will not escape even the purblind. He totally debunks the reforms that Dr Singh initiated under the Narasimha Rao primeministership in 1991.

Aiyar is too blinded by ideology to perceive that at the end of five decades of the Nehru-Indira Gandhi-Rajiv Gandhi era, India was on the verge of selling its family gold to buy day-to-day requirements like oil. He forgets that Communist China that followed the capitalist path since 1978 was economically more successful and able to reduce poverty far more sharply than India, compared to what was achieved during the permit-licence raj of the Nehru-Gandhis.

He is blind to the fact that when this era came to an end 8212; that is in 1991 8212; most of the earnings of Indians were salted in banks outside the country because bringing them into India would have attracted a 95 per cent tax. Finally, he fails to recall that though Indira Gandhi started with 8216;Garibi Hatao8217;, she herself changed the slogan to the 8216;Twenty Point Programme8217;. Why? Did Aiyar even care to find out? Was it because the 1970 slogan had led to the economic disaster of 1974?

Aiyar is not a child in politics that he is free to rubbish his own prime minister. But consider his career trajectory: he was a Rajiv Gandhi protege. He resigned from the privileged company of the IFS for Rajiv Gandhi and joined the rough and tumble of politics. His attempt to contrast the economics of the Nehru-Gandhis with that of Manmohan Singh, was deliberate. He was conveying the thinking in the higher echelons of the Congress party that it is time to dump the economist-prime minister.

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After the Uttar Pradesh election results, Sonia Gandhi would need to find a scapegoat for the succession of failures notched up by her party at the polls recently. So there is a method in Mani Shankar Aiyar8217;s madness.

The writer is a former BJP MP