Opinion Right? Left? Centre?

Not only did the BJP not speak for these rich men,its senior leaders went out of their way to protest against FDI in the retail sector. Not rightist at all. And,almost always when they speak in Parliament they sound just as ‘socialist’ as the most passionate socialists in the Congress. And,if they turn to their alma mater,the RSS,for advice all they get is a lecture on ‘swadeshi’ or some gobbledygook about Gandhian socialism.

It is a shame that the shutdown of the American government got so little attention in India. There was much we could have learned from it. I do not support the efforts of the Republican extreme right to shut down the US government,but in an Indian context,I support all efforts to keep government spending under control. As its bounden duty to the people of India,the main opposition in Parliament should behave like a watchdog when it comes to government spending. Especially when people’s money is wasted on the wrong things.

In the past five years,reckless spending has been the leitmotif of Sonia Gandhi’s government. This is why we are nearly broke. Sonia has,in the name of the poor,spent thousands of crore rupees on giving India’s poorest citizens handouts. In my rightist view,the money spent on these schemes could have been much more beneficially spent on improving the hideous conditions in which people live in rural India,by investing in sanitation,schools,roads,public transport and clean water.

Every Budget session I have waited for the BJP’s luminaries to protest not just about useless welfare schemes but about the amount of money that government continues to spend on itself. We do not need armies of clerks swarming about in the offices of the Government of India. We do not need high officials to have so many peons in attendance that they do not bother to carry their own briefcases from their cars to their offices. We do not need high officials to go abroad for medical treatment and yet this government just passed a law giving them this privilege. And,through it all,the BJP remained deafeningly silent. Why?

Why did they not speak against a food security law that will not reduce malnutrition in underprivileged children but will surely bankrupt India? A rightist party would have pointed out that even on food security,the money could have been better spent on improvements in midday meal schemes,building modern warehouses for food grain and on improving roads so that nearly half of what India’s farmers produce would no longer be lost in transportation.

Had the BJP been rightist in its ideas it would have not allowed the passage of the Right to Education law. It has done nothing to improve abysmal standards of public education and has interfered with private schools,forcing them to shoulder the burden of educating underprivileged children. In doing this it absolves the State from cleaning up its own act. Government schools across India are shrines to illiteracy and ignorance.

The question the BJP can ask on our behalf is why,with all the ‘rights’ given to us by the Sonia-Manmohan government,public services have not improved. The question it can ask itself is why it kept quiet when economic policies were made to satisfy the vanities of the Dynasty.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @tavleen_singh