Congress
party secretary and strategist Jairam Ramesh tells
SHEKHAR GUPTA, editor-in-chief of The Indian Express,
that there is no question of going back on liberalisation; there is
only a need to create a political constituency for economic reforms
and demonstrate that there is no conflict between peoples’ needs
and the new economy. Excerpts from an interview telecast on
NDTV 24X7’s Walk The Talk:
SG:
My guest today is one of the most familiar faces
on your television screens. The self-styled poster boy of reform, isn’t
it or more than that?
JR: Not self-styled. People are
saying that this vote is a vote against reforms. It’s certainly
not a vote against reforms but certainly a strong protest in states
like Andhra, in Tamil Nadu, in Haryana by farmers, predominantly, against
the policies of the state government. Certainly.
SG:
Maybe instead of self-styled, I should nuance
it, you know at a time when most people are hiding away from being reformists,
at least you are willing to say that.
JR: No, I think this notion that
reformers or poster boys of reforms don’t have a social conscience
and there is only one section of the political spectrum that has a social
conscience, a monopoly on social conscience, you know this is not right.
People who are for reforms, people who are for globalisation, also are
deeply concerned about poverty, deeply concerned about illiteracy, ignorance,
malnutrition. It’s just that I think, as we are speaking here
in…
SG: Teen Murti
Bhawan
JR:
The Teen Murti which is the great man’s residence for 17 years.
And you know Nehru was wedded to a mixed economy but the ingredients
of that mix have to change and I am sure Jawaharlal Nehru himself would
have changed with the times.
SG: But there
will be people in your party who would now be accusing you and others
of dismantling Nehruvian economics.
JR: I think the great tragedy of
India is that Gandhians ossified Gandhi and Nehruvites ossified Jawaharlal
Nehru. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were extraordinarily
agile minds who would’ve changed with the times, seeing the new
challenges that India faced. And, in many ways, you know Jawaharlal
Nehru laid the foundations of the modern Indian nation-state (of) which
we are all beneficiaries..
SG: Many of
us are beneficiaries but so many of us Indians are also victims of that.
Because we grew so slowly, and also you know these were such giants
that the rest of us, people who followed, took that much longer to evolve,
to change, to move on from there.
JS: No question about it. I think,
with the benefit of hindsight, some choices were made in the 50s and
60s that may look wrong but I do believe that in the 50s and 60s, the
infrastructure for modern industry today, the infrastructure for the
Infosys and the Wipros, the infrastructure for the Bajajs and the BHELs,
the Marutis were laid in the 50s and 60s but we had to change, we had
to change with the times, we had to cope with new challenges.
SG: You
sound like the common minimum programme.
JS: No
I don’t. You really do require a public sector in some areas but
you don’t need a public sector to run airlines, to run hotels,
make bread, make soft drinks but you do require a smaller….
SG: Well,
the bread and hotels are more or less finished but the airlines are
still there…
JS: The
airlines are still there.
SG:
Will this government have the courage to move
in? Because the last one stopped just short. I think if they’d
had another month, they would’ve taken fairly significant steps.
JS: For
many years, I have been advocating a venture capitalist role for the
public sector. The public sector comes in, starts a project, gets it
off the ground and you know, sells it off. The competitive advantage
of the public sector is to start new projects. The competitive advantage
of the private sector is to run them commercially. Take Delhi, for example.
Private distribution of power, in my view, will, in the next two to
three years, transform the power situation in Delhi.
JR:
I think the great tragedy of India is that Gandhians ossified Gandhi
and Nehruvites ossified Jawaharlal Nehru. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal
Nehru were extraordinarily agile minds who would’ve changed with
the times, seeing the new challenges that India faced. And, in many
ways, you know Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundations of the modern Indian
nation-state (of) which we are all beneficiaries..
SG: It has
already made a…
JS: It has already made a small
improvement. I feel, for example, power distribution is clearly an area
where the private sector must take on a larger role. But power generation
is an area in which the public sector will continue to play an important
role.
SG: But,
there will be a lot of generation in private sector as well
JS: Undoubtedly,
undoubtedly, but the NTPC would still continue to be important, some
of the state electricity boards will continue to be important.
SG: But for
a company like NTPC to be important, to be competitive, it will need
to go to the market, raise resources.
JS: TheI
came to privatisation not out of any ideological conviction, let me
say, I came to reform the public sector purely out of pragmatic reasons.
Having worked in the government for 15-20 years, I became convinced
in the early 90s that the political economy of the Indian state—the
Indian neta and the Indian babu—will never allow the public sector
the true managerial and commercial autonomy…
I
came to the conclusion that public sector reform is very difficult in
our context. And therefore, the only answer to reform is privatisation
while keeping a small, selective, strategic public sector perhaps, in
the oil industry, perhaps in areas like power generation.
SG:
It is one thing for us to talk the reformist
language like this. But look at the discourse of the first, say, 10
days of the election results. When we look back even five years hence,
wouldn’t you wonder what went wrong? Populism happens before elections.
In this case, populism started after elections, after a party had won.
And you let the Left hijack the agenda. And then paint this election
as a vote against reform.
JS: Talking of the Left,
there’s really no difference, in substance, between what Buddhadeb
Bhattacharya is saying and doing and what Dr Manmohan Singh is saying
and doing. There may be some differences of nuance, there maybe some
difference of language, but really, Somnath Chatterjee, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya,
I don’t see any difference between what they are saying.
Jyoti
babu, for example, and what Dr Manmohan Singh and the others have been
saying.
SG:
I think one thing you have to say for the Left is: they have a policy,
they have a world view. You can question it, you can disagree with it.
But I am not saying they are being dishonest. My complaint is with the
Congress party. That in the first 10 days after victory, they allowed
the Left to create an impression that this was a vote against economic
reform which, as you know, it wasn’t.
JS: Yes
and no in some ways. If you look at Andhra for example, I think it was
a massive, massive upsurge of farmer anger against Chandrababu Naidu.
If you look at Haryana, again, it’s a massive farmer upsurge against
Chautala. Tamil Nadu, it’s a massive upsurge against Jayalalithaa.
SG:
Andhra was a place (where) Chandrababu Naidu had been for nine years.
He had begun to look urban, (the state had) three years of drought.
You have to keep these things in perspective. Once you let someone run
away with the ball, it becomes very difficult to retrieve it.
JS: Yes
wouldn’t paint this verdict as an anti-reforms verdict. But I
would certainly say that this is a wake-up call for governments that
are carried away by the reforms propaganda, by the hype of reforms.
That there is need for balancing the economics of reforms and the politics
of reforms. To go out and communicate to people what these reforms are
all about. And ultimately start beginning to make a difference to people’s
lives which was not happening in Andhra and Karnataka, for example.
SG:
But if you balance the economics of reform and politics of reform, do
you get the Hindu rate of growth?
JS: No,
I don’t think so. We have got out of the Hindu rate of growth.
I think we are now in a five-and-a-half to six per cent minimum growth
trajectory. Clearly, that is not sufficient. We have to grow at about
seven to eight per cent year after year for the next 10-15 years. And
I think it is possible with, on the one hand, liberalisation and globalisation
and privatisation, not of the Arun Shourie variety, again, although
he’s a good friend of mine and he’s a good friend of yours.
I think he became overly aggressive, he became a jehad. He carried out
a jehad against the public sector. I think you need to be a little more
careful of what you want to privatise, how you want to privatise. And
there’s no conflict between that and what the people are demanding,
which is bijli, sadak, pani.
SG:
But there’s been a degree of defensiveness in the Congress party
on reform after the elections, which is the interesting part to me.
Before elections, Congress was saying we were the originators of reform.
You had advertising that said we were the ones who are responsible for
India’s IT success, etc. Since election results, one stopped hearing
those voices.
JS: We
are not going back to the licensing raj. We are not going back to the
control raj which benefited only a privileged few
SG:
Actually, more than 60 per cent of sitting MPs got defeated. It just
so happened that the NDA had more sitting MPs than you. But tell me,
what is it you did, or your people did, say in January, February? What
change did you spot in the air? Or did it happen by itself?
JS: Right
in first week of January, when we started planning for the strategy
for this election, we recognised that this election is going to be an
accretion of state-level verdicts. And that’s why the most important
decision that Mrs Gandhi herself took was to effect a paradigm shift
and go in for alliances. Alliance in Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Jharkhand,
Bihar, Maharashtra. The one alliance that we tried for and did not succeed,
of course, was the BSP in UP. In retrospect, that was good for us because
now we are now able to stand on our own feet.
SG:
But one set of people you did not align with and who actually you fought
against are now your valued allies.
JS: Who?
SG:
Left. See how politics changes.
JS: That’s
true. So alliance-building was first. Most important decision that was
taken in January, let’s go for alliances. It’s a paradigm
shift. The Congress doesn’t like alliances but now we recognise
that we are in a coalition. So, that was the first decision. The second
decision that, again, was taken by Mrs Gandhi, was to completely change
her campaign style, the traditional fly-in-fly-out, public rally, rent-a-crowd,
so to speak, and she started this Jan Sampark programme, which all of
you guys never called Jan Sampark and insisted on calling roadshows.
It was not a roadshow, it was really a Jan Samparkho?
SG:
Even I travelled on those roads a bit also and that takes me back to
the question of what was this vote about. In fact, if you see people
in UP, Bihar who are voting for Laloo and Mulayam, they are not revolting
against any reform. Because they have not seen any reform. There have
no roads, no hospitals. Doctors don’t come to work, teachers don’t
come to work. Those are frozen states with frozen votes.
JS: Indian
elections are also not just about roads, they are also about getting
your caste arithmetic, getting the, favourite word of politicians—
samikaran— (right). Yeh samikaran sahi hai to hum election jeet
jayenge.
SG:
And sometimes, two plus two is five,
sometimes three-and-a-half.
JS: Tamil Nadu was a classic
example of where the caste arithmetic, the allies arithmetic was right.
SG:
So you got the better of Pramod Mahajan and his boys, is it?
JS: (Laughs)
I have a lot of respect for Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley. And by
the way, we were out-spent 1:10. They had war rooms, we had mini-rooms
with no bathrooms, we were running a ramshackle operation out of 99
South Avenue, we had not many resources, we were a few people.
SG:
Maybe, sometimes that becomes a problem. Too much resources. It makes
you arrogant, complacent.
JS: I
think, ultimately, we had fire in our belly. They were complacent. We
were the underdog. We didn’t expect to win. We wanted, our goal
was, to get 135 or 140 seats and fight 2006.
SG:
Well, you got about that, 145 but then the rest fell into place.
JS:
No, whatever we say, we may sound very wise now but none of us expected
to form the government, none of us expected to be the single largest
party, none of us expected to be the largest coalition.
SG:
If we’ve got any lesson now, that you’ve learnt, we’ve
learnt, and the BJP’s learnt, everybody’s learnt is that
almost nobody gets re-elected now. And the real challenge would be if
somebody gets re-elected after running a government.
JS: Naveen
Patnaik got re-elected.
SG:
Well, those are exceptional cases. Laloo and Mulayam get re-elected
JS:
No, no, but
so does Naveen Patnaik. So personal image counts. He can’t speak
Oriya, he’s a new politician
SG:
He does little for his state.
JS:
He does little
for his state. But he gets re-elected because people see in him some
embodiment of a hope. Maybe he will lose after 10 years. Maybe.
(Originally
appeared in SIFY.com)
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