Beating the summer 250 years ago

Yet, there has been much euphoria over the BJP and its coalition partners having completed five years in office in two parts and it would be natural for it to entertain great hopes next year. Yet in spite of all the happiness, there are great fears, if not jitters, over the prospects in April or September next year of going to the polls. For Vajpayee personally, it might be worthwhile to think of retirement, not because he is nearing 80, but because all the slings and arrows of managing an unwieldy coalition of 25 parties is a bit too much of a headache, even though he has passed on a number of responsibilities to his deputy, Lal Krishna Advani, who is now Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister rolled in one. But as Vajpayee has been dieting and shedding weight and looks fit, perhaps even in the pink of health, the coalition partners and BJP rank-and-file and leadership would like to consider him as their best bet for continued leadership, a face nationally acceptable, secretly even to his detractors in the Opposition.

Yet the incumbency factor is there. No government, no matter how good, can solve the enormous and myriad problems that the nation and the people face. The country’s finances are in a great mess, threats from across the border continue unabated, even if the foreign exchange reserves are a healthy $ 75 billion and the armed forces are being modernised and well-equipped, albeit slowly. But one of the worst droughts last year reduced grain production by almost 10 per cent to 193 million tons from 210 million tons. With a fierce summer having started and the skies looking clear and blue and prospects of a good monsoon still unknown and irrigation water scarce in rivers and canals as well as underground, agriculture faces grave problems, if not a nightmare. Farming is the key to India’s economy as 70 per cent of the billion plus people depend on it directly or indirectly even though agriculture now contributes only 27 per cent to the gross domestic product. But another bad year and dry year would make life miserable for the farmers and other people of India, leaving them hungry and parched in more ways than one. That would nullify the best hopes of 5.5 to 8 per cent economic growth. Who takes the blame for it? The government of the day. The Prime Minister, his Finance Minister, his Agriculture Minister, his Food Minister and all of the other Ministers. What do they tell the voters when they ask for votes in the upcoming Assembly elections and next year for the General Election when the Lok Sabha completes its five year term? No matter what they say, they are in the dock. What have they done to solve the people’s problems? What about the tall promises they have been making to usher in an India full of prosperity, with flowing rivers of milk and honey?

In the face of this, the Congress is also promising the moon: garibi hatao; a great slogan indeed, one of the greatest the advertising world lives by in India, but is it moonshine? So would the Congress detractors like to say. But the Congress would insist that it is not a pipedream. It would claim that it can deliver where others have failed. It would like to invoke its record of 46 or more years in power and having modernised India. It would invoke the grave contradictions that the ruling coalition of today reveals and faces and would offer itself as an alternative. But the Congress detractors say that the Congress by itself is not an alternative. It would have to depend on the support of other parties from outside or be forced into a coalition for which it seems now to be prepared. Coalition politics is here to stay with all its attendant problems.