Opinion A benign neglect
There was a lot of fuss about the first 100 days of UPA-2. Now,its 200 days have come and gone and no one has noticed....
There was a lot of fuss about the first 100 days of UPA-2. Now,its 200 days have come and gone and no one has noticed. But as far as one can see,parts of the government machinery have stopped working while others are flying forward. I feel that where the government is failing it is because it does not really care to succeed. There is a benign neglect of problems,a studied indifference,a careful carelessness.
The good news is of course that the economy has recovered faster and better than expected. India has done as well as anyone else in executing its reflation strategy. It has of course totally failed in its inflation performance. It has failed to see the problem coming despite the valid predictions of a drought. It has stocks of food-grains,which despite the rotting of around 15 per cent due to the totally incompetent Food Corporation (Corruption) of India,could be released to bring the prices down. Somehow the will seems to be lacking and ministers keep promising that soon they will act on this front. Normally governments are sensitive to inflation and a level of 20 per cent is unprecedented. And yet there is no urgency,no remorse,no fear.
Is the government only worried about the country if there is a big election at stake? Having won in the May general elections and again in the Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana,it seems that elections in Jharkhand are not big enough to get the government going. For a government with such top class economics expertise,it is astonishing that one gets feeble excusesdrought,the shortage of output of daal outside India,even NREGA making farmers too prosperous and no action. So I conclude that this is a deliberate policy of neglect to get the electorate used to higher food prices as a way of taxing the urban middle classes and paying the farmers and,even more,the food traders.
Telangana is another issue where after a hasty decision,or,who knows,perhaps a planned intervention,when all hell has broken loose,there is total quiet on part of the government. Andhra politicians are left to their own devices to split in many ways and there is a lot of cross-dressing across parties. Indeed,the succession to YSR is being fought out at the same time as the Telangana problem. That way the Congress High Command can kill two birds with one stone. There is no action,no urgency and deliberate neglect.
Where the government chooses to work,it shows panache. The PM has been to see US President Barack Obama and then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The nuclear reactor programme is on course and even Air India could not stop the PM from getting to Copenhagen on time. India is playing its vital role in WTO trade talks and Kapil Sibal is getting on with education reforms. The counter-terrorism agencies continue to show their usual total incompetence in the case of David Headley but then did we expect anything else?
Maybe it is just fatigue after five-plus years in office. Perhaps the Congress does not have enough competent people to deploy. It could be that the opposition,both the BJP and CPM,having fallen apart and in no hurry to rebuild their parties (despite the resignation of LK Advani and Rajnath Singh),the government is having a quiet sabbatical
Someone needs to wake up and smell the (very expensive) coffee.
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