FDI, Opposition & Déjà Vu

If you have a nose for political seasons, it is unlikely you’d miss the shrill similarity between the present debate on foreign investment in retail and the build-up to the 2008-09 vote of confidence over the Indo-US nuclear deal. 

Of course, the striking disconnect between the thenprophesied doom for the first Manmohan Singh regime and eventual UPA victory in May 2009 defined any subsequent review of the intense build-up as either comic or tragic, depending which way you looked at it. 

So, what makes one recall the 2008-09 build-up in the ongoing war cries against the UPA-II, which many do not grant even a chance to live out its lifespan till 2014? How can one miss the similarities in the showcased script, plots and hopes beneath the present build-up! 

As Parliament begins the debate on FDI, TV screens are already on a high with those graphics and screaming pundits, projecting a nail-biting finale and posing that seductive question, “Will the UPAII fall in the FDI battle?” We saw much the same, back in 2008 too, when the UPA-I bit the Left bullet and sought a trust-vote on Indo-US civil nuclear deal against a united, combative Opposition. 

That time, when the Left and the Right fought a ‘nationalist’ war on the N-deal, there was also another issue that had been secretly bothering the UPA’s rivals: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, implemented through an Act, NREGA, that the UPA-I had launched as its flagship social sector scheme, hoping to ride its electoral winds. 

This time around, too, as the Redsaluting Communists and khaki-knickered Nationalists wage a “Banish FDI, Save India” war, there is no prize for guessing that their inner thoughts worry over the potential impact of yet another UPA launch: the direct cash transfer scheme. 

In short, even as it was being pilloried as pro-imperialist, for inking the N-deal, the first Manmohan Singh government was also busy implementing India’s largest, and by now most appreciated (by the poor), welfare scheme since the launch of economic reforms in 1991. 

Four years on, as “the combined Opposition” is again out to finish it off for “selling out India’s interests” by clearing FDI, the second Manmohan regime is, again, in the middle of giving an ambitious technological push to India’s pro-poor schemes to make their delivery fast and accurate! When any ruling dispensation artistically plays with such contrasting colours — imperialist blue and welfarist red — on the national canvas, the test is on the Opposition to show skills to intelligently tap the popular response so that it does not appear either colour-blind or just plain blind. 

Yet, the BJPLeft’s anti-FDI and anti-cash transfer tango has chosen to do exactly the same, ironically — as a repeat performance. Even a child knows the BJP’s political DNA is more Right and Capitalist (Hindutva-capitalists, if you like) than of any other Indian party and, therefore, it, by its true instincts, would have taken to FDI like a fish to water, just as it would have loved to implement the Indo-US Ndeal on a grander scale. 

No wonder the BJP’s anti-FDI stand smacks of downright dishonesty as its opposition to the N-deal had. Any reader of the BJP’s 2009 poll manifesto recipe for making welfare schemes effective would also laugh at its opposition to cash transfer scheme as a display of envy over “the missed chance”. 

Going by its ideological and social grain, the Communists should have cheered the NREGA, just as it should rally for effective implementation of the cash transfer scheme. 

Similarly, the Communists went out to fight the N-deal, only to realise the disconnect between armchair theoreticians and its foot-soldiers’ priorities. At a time when ‘the Left vanguard’ should have been busy fighting its real wars — preventing Mamata Banerjee from hijacking even its slogans and social base, ending the bullfight in its Kerala unit, digesting the newly-delivered world view from Beijing and, of course, reclaiming the JNU revolutionaries — alas, it is back to brewing a self-numbing ideological cocktail with BJP! 

When parties go against their political or ideological moorings, people dump them as opportunists and obstructionists. The NREGA-bashing ultra-reform pundits too met the same fate. 

While not hazarding a guess on the FDI voting outcome, one may merely recall how no Congress government, be its composition single-party, coalition or minority, has ever, so far, been ambushed on the floor of Parliament. 

And if that history repeats itself, emboldened Congress managers are bound to go all out on their future tasks: an election Budget, controlling inflation, reworking ‘LPG formula’, firming up the Right to Food plank and pre-poll repairing of Congress state units and reworking alliances from Bihar to Tamil Nadu. The BJP too, meanwhile, will prepare for a critical task: its dream project(Opposition unity)’s tryst with ‘Modi fire’ from December 20.