The Bangalore plenary session of the Congress(I) shows a party that is slowly coming to grips with the changing political and economic situation in the country.
FOR the Congress(I), the country's major Opposition party, the release of the Tehelka.com tapes on March 13 was perfectly timed. Not only was Parliament in session, but the 81st plenary session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) was to be held in Bangalore on March 17 and 18. (The event had been scheduled for February 14 to 16 earlier.) The explosive contents of the tapes changed the focus, course and outcome of the session held in Bangalore's Palace grounds. It transformed the Plenary from one which would at most have issued a rather uncertain campaign message for the coming Assembly elections in four States and a Union Territory, to one which issued a virtual call-to-arms for a war against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in New Delh i.
Fortified by the ammunition provided by the Tehelka tapes, resolutions were hastily redrafted with the focus on misgovernment, corruption in the BJP and the government, and the demand that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his government accept mor al responsibility for these and resign. "Let the message go forth from Bangalore," Congress(I) president Sonia Gandhi said in her presidential address, "that we will fight every battle, wage every war and make every sacrifice to ensure that the country i s liberated from the shackles of this corrupt, shameful and communal government."
The high spirits among delegates at the plenary, fed no doubt by the steady inflow of news on the political fallout of Tehelka's expose, was evidently shared by the pleased-looking phalanx of Congress Working Committee (CWC) members seated on the stage u nder a huge backdrop of garishly painted images of Congress leaders from the past. Even the usually grim Sonia Gandhi, at all times the focus of the plenary, did not conceal her upbeat mood. It was evident in Bangalore that her metamorphosis into a leade r who was very much a part of the political landscape was complete. While her authority in and leadership of the party was never under serious question, she had an awkward and inhibited public presence and her body language suggested a sense of unease at being under the arc lights of public life. But this time around, directing operations from the stage of the plenary, Sonia Gandhi appeared to be at ease with herself and the political role that she was called upon to play. Her speeches were well-crafted and focussed, and in contrast to the woodenness of her expressions in the past, here she spoke with flair and conviction in both Hindi and English.
"The original thrust of the Bangalore session, before the Tehelka.com revelations and with party organisational elections over was to get the party back on the road," Arjun Singh, a CWC member, told Frontline. According to him, the Plenary "clarif ied the confusion about our position on forming coalitions" and corrected "misinterpretations" of the position formulated at the Pachmarhi session of the party in September 1998. It was made clear that the Congress(I) would be prepared to enter into alli ances with secular parties, that is, with any party that does not have an alliance with the BJP. Hence, the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal would be a 'secular' alliance partner for the coming Assembly elections provided it called off its alliance with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Arjun Singh said that the plenary decided that the party must focus on the immediate need to ask for the resignation, on moral grounds, of Prime Minister Vajpayee. "We realise that we may not be able to defeat this government in Parliament on this issue. It is for this reason that we have asked him to step down on moral grounds," Arjun Singh said. The Congress(I), he said, would support, but "alone cannot take the lead" in building a secular front.
However, despite the repeated calls for the resignation of the government, there was no clear formulation of any plan of action that the Congress planned in order to achieve this objective. According to observers, a campaign for the ouster of the governm ent with no fall-back demand, such as the constitution of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for an enquiry into defence deals, may fizzle out soon. The Congress has of course been given a Bofors-like election plank for the coming Assembly elections a nd the party is trying to use it to find new alliance partners.
THE Bangalore plenary, for all its buoyancy of spirit, did not depart from traditional Congress practice in respect of the absence of any real debate. It did not throw up any fresh ideas on issues that are likely to be of critical importance to the party in the coming months. Predictably, every Congressman and Congresswoman who spoke had the mandatory fulsome praise for Sonia Gandhi and her leadership (Salman Khurshid, CWC member from Uttar Pradesh, went to the extent of calling her a world leader). The weaknesses of the party in some key States such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu was not seriously addressed. The representation of the Congress in Parliament from these five States, which together account for 225 Lok Sabha seats, is small.
One of the most significant outcomes of the Bangalore plenary was the ideological justification for and adoption of a left-of-centre, pro-poor platform, on economic policy in particular. However, the Left perspective was not confined to economic policy and it was evident in other areas of commentary, such as foreign policy. With the policy of economic liberalisation having come a cropper in respect of its promises of radically improving living standards, and with Assembly elections just weeks away, the Congress has changed tack on the issue of economic reform and returned to a position on key economic policy issues, which in theory at least, was last held by the party prior to the early 1980s. Although almost all Congress leaders argued that it was a platform that the party had never really abandoned, they made it clear that there has been a rethinking on and reformulation of several key economic policy issues. This was elaborated in the Report of the AICC Economic Introspection Group.
In both the political and economic resolutions, and in Sonia Gandhi's presidential address, there was criticism of the "anti-poor and anti-farmer bias" of the BJP-led coalition. Sonia Gandhi spoke of the "tragic paradox of full godowns and empty stomachs " owing to the doubling of foodgrain prices and the absence of a massive food-for-work programme.
The disinvestment of profit-making public sector undertakings, the privatisation of banks and infrastructure, the increase in the administered price of food items, the indiscriminate import of food products, the slowdown in employment and the deceleratio n in growth rates in the economy were some aspects of the NDA government's economic policy that came in for trenchant criticism. Less convincing, indeed disingenuous, were the arguments of Congress ideologues, such as Mani Shankar Iyer and former Finance Minister and the architect of the economic reforms, Manmohan Singh, seeking to distance themselves from these policy planks which were laid down by the Congress governments that were in power during 1991-96. "The BJP-led coalition's economic policies ar e a parody of Congress policies, and it is the duty of the Congress, as the leading party of the Opposition, to highlight the anomalies, contradictions and lacunae in these policies," the economic resolution noted.
Former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao circulated a 10-page note at the plenary on liberalisation and the public sector. He drew a distinction between partial disinvestment, which he claimed was what the Congress did with certain PSUs, and outright sal e, which was what the current government was doing. The note argued that a government that did not even have a majority in Parliament had no right to make an irrevocable sale of public property worth Rs.200,000 crores. "It is most unfortunate that the go vernment should be thinking of selling Air-India and Indian Airlines. I simply cannot think of India selling off her national carrier which carries the national flag," Narasimha Rao's note said. In the discussion on the economic resolution Congress leade rs Priya Ranjan Das Munshi from West Bengal and Vayalar Ravi from Kerala argued that the Congress must categorically state that it will block all anti-labour legislation in Parliament.
The negative consequences of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) directives on the Indian economy, notably with regard to the agricultural sector, were discussed extensively at the Plenary. Significantly, the attack was not on the WTO, but on the failure of the BJP government to use the many safeguards in the agreement which would have protected the interests of the people. "The WTO agreement is not to blame," the resolution on agriculture states. "The blame lies entirely with the incompetent BJP-led coa lition government which has failed to effectively use the many safeguards which Congress negotiators worked into the umbrella WTO agreements."
The all-important political resolution was moved by Arjun Singh. Apart from dwelling at some length on the issue of corruption in the context of the Tehelka.com expose, he spoke in detail on the dangers of the "saffronisation" of education and culture. O n Ayodhya, there appears to be a slightly modified line, one that is aimed at mollifying Hindu religious sentiment. The political resolution made it clear that the Congress was not averse to the construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, but that it was al ways against this being done by demolishing the Babri Masjid.
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