Karat to carrot

If carrot has replaced Karat as the principal determinant of national politics, it is only because India’s policy-making system needs a politics that’s pragmatic, even if it’s not pretty. Four years of Marxist finger-wagging have made many of us forget how national politics has operated after the Congress ceased to be a natural winner — it has operated by handshakes between many apparently disparate parties. Marxist proscriptions on policy have also made us forget that these handshakes, frequently followed by unrepentant palm-greasing, have delivered the following immensely important political/policy paradigm shifts: the Congress was made to pay for political arrogance and then rewarded for humility, the BJP was shown as fit for governance and then made to pay for political overconfidence, the third front was made to pay for political fantasising, economic reforms happened, and foreign policy became rational.

Through all this making and unmaking of friendships, haggling and sometimes ghastly personal profit maximising, India started and never reversed its dissociation from socialism. Narasimha Rao, who politically broke the back of the economic ancien regime, did not even have a full-term parliamentary majority. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral weren’t passionate reformers. As prime ministers with little hold on real levers of power, they were content when the then ex-Congressman P. Chidambaram, who had a communist as a cabinet colleague, took up the job of reforming the economy.

Vajpayee was apparently forced by the RSS to pick Yashwant Sinha as finance minister because Sinha better understood swadeshi. But Sinha, as many astute observers of the Indian economy point out, proved to be a doughty and clever reformer. Foreign policy changed, too, in part because of another nuclear test, for which Rao, who allegedly had to buy votes to secure a House majority, had prepared brilliantly and which Vajpayee, leading the BJP’s first coalition that lasted barely a year, executed equally astutely.

... contd.