Elections 2009 – Khullamkhulla Report 1

Uncreative and disastrous Economic Policies of Congress and UPA

Sundry media analysts would like us to believe that Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram are extraordinary economic thinkers and UPA’s report card on the Indian economy has not been all that bad. However, as usual, it is more a media hype than reality. So, what is the reality?

Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister when the biggest ever stock market scam happened and our economy took a turn for the worse thanks to a crisis of confidence; it took almost twelve years and an NDA rule before it could be brought back on the rails.


He is a typical Reserve Bank man, who cannot think beyond CRR, interest rates, and money supply, the basic tools of monetary policy, to macro-manage the economy, leaving the rest to God above. As the Finance Minister, he blindly copied the policies, ideas, and practices of the World Bank. He is not a genuine economic thinker. He is a tinkerer, and has survived because he is the ‘Ji huzoor’ kind of bureaucrat, a chaprasi. Such people suit the mediocre Congress leadership. All through his tenure as the governor of the RBI, as a Finance Minister, and as the Prime Minister, he has not been able to come up with a single original idea to transform the Indian economy or evolve a healthy capital market suited to India’s conditions.

Chidambaram is just a suave communicator. He too cannot think out of the box and follows the Manmohan formula of sticking to the age-old and the most simplistic routine of tinkering with and tweaking the monetary mechanism here and there to manage the economy by manipulating the ‘indices’ and ‘indicators’ of growth, which, in my view, can be done by any idiot. However, all this hardly contributes to real economic growth. Look at what happened in the US. None of such indicators foretold the impending steep decline of the US economy. They could not have. They were just figures, based on politically convenient assumptions, supported by voluble media-savvy analysts.

Chidambaram also followed the same path. He promoted investment in the stock markets to keep the Sensex rising, and colluded with a handful of bankers to introduce corrupt instruments and practices that legitimized speculation (gambling). He also involved public sector banks and financial institutions like the LIC and the UTI in these, the old practice followed by all Congress finance ministers, including Manmohan, which resulted in the UTI fiasco of 2002 for which the NDA regime had to pay a heavy price. I am certain that LIC and many of our public sector financial institutions like the UTI have much to hide.

With the departure of the NDA regime, the Indian economy was thrown back to the retrograde practices of the old Congress regimes. You had to be in the good books of the ruling dispensation and sing paeans to the UPA leaders to do your business. Cronyism was back with a bang to the great delight of a small coterie of businessmen who had access to the new regime. Rules were made, amended, and changed to suit the needs of this coterie. The convenient practice of ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’ once again became the norm in this unholy nexus between the government, the industry, and the media.

The idea is to make money just by being close to the policy makers. That is the easiest way to make your millions and billions. You don’t really have to work hard here. What works in this exclusive world are important contacts and insider status, Bollywood damsels, pimps, fixers, and a secret bank account in some Swiss bank.

So, what we have now is neither a free market nor a command economy. It is a corrupt and hybridized kind of economic scenario manipulated by a few, characterized by high incidence of taxation, gross misuse and waste of public money, blatant profiteering, cartelization, and oligopolistic market conditions. In other words, we are at the mercy of a gang of robbers who pose as our saviors and harbingers of an unreal economic growth with the UPA government as the gang leader.


You don’t have to be a genius to do this. You just have to be a corrupt and thick-skinned insensitive bastard and a SOB who has near absolute political power, and has no scruples and absolutely no real concern for the people.

What about the loan waiver scheme and the rural employment guarantee schemes? Ha, ha. Whose loan has been waived dear friend? Most of that money has simply gone into balancing the books of accounts of cooperative banks, managed and owned by big-time politicians. The poor farmer has already committed suicide and evaporated in thin air. The rural employment guarantee scheme and a whole all such welfare programmes are actually designed to placate the local babudom, the civil contractors, and the local politicians. Moreover, these were ideas mooted by the NDA regime that have been badly executed by a dishonest and mediocre UPA government that hides its incompetence behind the hype created by a captive media and talkative gas bags.

It is important to remember here that in this whole process, the common man, the ‘aam aadami’, is nobody’s concern. While the ‘aam aadami’ toils hard to earn his livelihood, the ‘khaas janata’ manipulates the system and eats up the ‘malaai.’

RKS

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