For the first time after the Emergency,practically every major political party that isnt under the UPA umbrella has decided to mount a mass challenge to the governments economic management,notably the announcement of fuel price deregulation. Castigating the governments cruel blow to the people of India,the Left parties have thrown their combined weight behind an India-wide bandh. All the regional powers,from TDP,AIADMK,BJD,JD-S,AGP and Samajwadi Party have joined their protest. Hours after,the BJP chimed in with the same boilerplate rhetoric on a major betrayal of trust, and the UPAs siding with hoarders and racketeers rather than common citizens,announcing its own Bharat bandh. While the Left was also quick to dissociate itself from any icky association with the BJP,it also appealed to the BJPs base of trading communities,saying that they were especially aware of how fuel decontrol led to soaring transport costs and made commodities that much more expensive. In short,today we witness a remarkably choreographed uprising,as ideologically divided parties come together to announce their revulsion and rage at the rise in prices. Of course utterly unlike parties like the BJP and the Left can make common cause even when their larger agendas are incompatible,when there is a compelling provocation. But this unanimous display of outrage at the governments cold-blooded economic policy would be more believable if these parties had not all participated in the same rationale when they were actually making policy. What was the Left doing when the United Front government that they held up made the decision to deregulate fuel,a plan that the NDA later put into action,dramatically raising kerosene prices? Needless to add,thats just the kind of hypocrisy that exposes naked opportunism: when parties refuse to endorse in opposition policies that they saw to be sensible while in government. But this is of a piece with the Lefts perfectly internalised hypocrisy,their calm acceptance of the need to speak in forked tongues. Perhaps much of our political class feels the need to finesse their talk and their action,but the Left leaves them in the dust when it comes to the distance between their politics of expediency and their rhetoric of ideological purity.
