Vajpayee signals no compromise on reforms

Vajpayee signals no compromise on reforms
HARISH GUPTA & DEVESH KUMAR

NEW DELHI, JULY 18: Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has initiated a multi-pronged strategy to ``sustain'' a national consensus on economic reforms. His call on Monday to the members of the Economic Advisory Council that ``the economic agenda must be de-politicised'' was obviously aimed at telling the RSS and the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch leaders that they should help in the process.

Since the Congress is supporting the reforms process despite constituting an economic review panel and the Left parties are virtually silent, the PM's call on Monday and a number of events that are taking place on the economic front indicate that he is aiming to placate these voices of dissent. But without compromising.

If he fielded Union Home Minister L K Advani among other ministers to mollify the RSS and SJM who bitterly attacked his government's economic policies persued, he okayed an open debate on disinvestment to his Man Friday on Disinvestment Arun Jaitley.

Jaitley will respond to the fears of the RSS and SJM at the FICCI auditorium on disinvestment. And his fellow-speaker will be Madan Dass Devi, joint general secretary of the RSS handling political affairs in the organisation. Devi succeeded K S Sudarshan. This is the first time that the government and the RSS will be face to face on disinvestment.

Meanwhile, the crucial meeting between representatives of the government and the SJM, convened to thrash out differences on economic policy, ended in a deadlock with both sides reiterating their positions. It was agreed that another round of dialogue -- its date has not been fixed as yet -- will be held.

That the effort ended in an impasse was apparent when a senior SJM leader said after the four-hour-long meeting: ``Neither have we changed our programme nor have we changed our stand on these policies. We are firm on the direction of swadeshi,'' he said. He also reiterated that the SJM would go ahead with its mass-mobilisation programmes, including the proposed Dandi-to-New Delhi march from October 2 to force the ruling coalition to lift the ban on common salt, announced during the Agra national council meeting last month.

Interestingly, Union Health Minister C P Thakur met senior leaders of the RSS on Monday morning to discuss the salt issue. He is learnt to have told the latter that the Prime Minister's commitment, made in the form of an assurance to the sarvodaya leaders on this count, would be fulfilled.

The Government-RSS meeting was held on Monday evening at Minister of State for Human Resource Development Sumitra Mahajan's official residence. Its importance could be gauged from the fact that Prime Minister fielded Home Minister L K Advani to convince the leaders of the RSS-SJM combine about the inevitability of, and the need for, reforms. The entire top brass of the BJP was also there.

Advani was assisted by his ministerial colleagues Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and Arun Jaitley, the RSS was represented by its joint general-secretary Madan Das Devi, who was accompanied by SJM leaders S Gurumurthy, P Muralidhar Rao, Ravindra Mahajan and Bhagwati Prakash Sharma.

The meeting, it is learnt, covered four broad areas of economic reforms. These included foreign direct investment, WTO-related issues, disinvestment and the policy towards small-scale industries. While Finance Minister Sinha outlined the compulsions before the government in relaxing rules regarding FDI (necessary to fill the trade and investment gaps), Jaitley is learnt to have said that the disinvestment programme was essential to bridge the burgeoning budget deficit.

The SJM leaders are learnt to have said that ideologically, they were not opposed to disinvestment. ``But we have reservations regarding the identification of companies, the methodolgy and the tranfer of ownership,'' they said.