Words full of sound and fury

During his absence, though with his concurrence, of course, his government’s track record on this front has been quite pathetic. Barely a week after Vajpayee left for Mumbai, his government announced major reliefs for Punjab paddy farmers whose crop had got damaged. A Rs 350 crore package was announced asking the Food Corporation of India (FCI) to make major relaxations in its quality specifications for paddy, to ensure that all stock with the farmers got lifted. Basically, key-ally Parkash Singh Badal demanded, and got, his pound of flesh from the PM, exactly the same way he did two years ago when the PM got FCI to buy damaged paddy from Punjab farmers as well.

And, emboldened by the Punjab example, it appears that a similar decision will be taken to buy damaged paddy from Haryana farmers as well. By the way, the decision to buy wheat and paddy which consumers don’t pick up has ensured that FCI’s food stocks are around 80 per cent more than they should be. Carrying this excess stock costs the government a whopping Rs 3,600 crore a year — that’s close to half the amount it spends on subsidising food for the poor.

Around the same time that the Punjab farce was being re-enacted after a gap of two years, this newspaper carried a series of exposes on the gay abandon with which railway minister Mamata Banerjee was distorting policy to benefit her constituency, the whole of West Bengal. One story, for instance, recorded how Mamata forced the railways to up its wagon-procurement order by over a fourth, precisely to benefit the wagon manufacturers that are mainly located in West Bengal. Another story detailed how the FCI (yes, the same one that had to bail out Badal’s constituency) was asked to procure more jute bags from guess where — never mind if FCI had taken a decision to cut back on jute bags and to use HDPE bags instead as these were far more economical.

Running almost parallel to this, is the saga of telecom minister Ram Vilas Paswan who has been passing the most incredible orders over the past few months. As this newspaper has documented, Paswan wanted cellular phone firm J.T. Mobile’s license to be restored immediately even though it had been cancelled because the firm was a habitual defaulter of its licence fee dues. Under Paswan, the Telecom Commission reversed decisions which then went on to encourage cartelisation in equipment supplies. And now Paswan wants the Department of Telecom to purchase 2 lakh CDMA phone lines at a per unit cost of Rs 33,000 while competitive cellular phone lines of the GSM kind cost a fourth — that’s an additional expense of around Rs 500 crore on this one item alone.

To those familiar with the Prime Minister, this is his style of consensual politics, to allow his cabinet colleagues a lot of rope (surely a 5,000-year old civilisation/state is resilient enough to take a few more years of battering?), to wear them down eventually … Paswan, after all, was eventually unable to get his way on the JT Mobile case, and was asked to come to Cabinet with a note on the subject, something that he has not done so far. And the Prime Minister’s Office did intervene to change the rules in the equipment cartelisation case and managed to save Rs 300 crore, or 30 per cent of the original equipment cost.

The problem with Vajpayee’s laid-back consensual approach, however, is that while it does work, it does so only occasionally. With Vajpayee not able to take his cabinet colleagues head on, for instance, his government delayed hiking of oil prices for over a year though global prices were constantly rising. As a result, the deficit on this account reached a whopping Rs 19,000 crore, leading to a situation when the oil companies were so broke, they couldn’t even import any more oil.

This old-style consensual politics, to re-visit the ancient India analogy, works just fine, but only when you have 5000 years to deliver results.

Blurb

So far, the PM’s `hard decisions’ have been restricted to replacing the UP chief minister