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G. Srinivasan

Mr. S. Jaipal Reddy

NEW DELHI, Sept. 20

THOUGH committed to privatisation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone back on disinvestment as it succumbed to the pressure of the RSS and its allies, according to the chief spokesperson of the Congress party, Mr S. Jaipal Reddy.

He told Business Line that the BJP had found Mr George Fernandes the "useful instrument for these forces within Sangh Parivar. So the leading BJP partners can be no more than tools of various forces and they are not independent.

Had Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani and RSS held the same view, do you think that Mr George Fernandes would have prepared to throw? So whenever they tried to point the fingers to the coalition partners, they are misleading the people.

He said that before 1999, the internal contradictions of the coalitions got noticed but post-1999, the internal contradictions of the Sangh Parivar were coming to the fore.

Mr Jaipal Reddy said, "I don't share the perception that the NDA is suffering from coalition problems. Today practically, it is BJP-led Government. But the problems arise from the contradictions within the party because BJP is not a party itself — it is one of the many organisations of Sang Parivar with the BJP facing problems from RSS, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Bharatiya Kisan Sangh and Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SMJ). So the current problems of NDA are not arising from its partners but from the sister organisations of BJP which are not part of the NDA''.

"I once compared RSS to an octopus and BJP as one of its tentacles. So NDA partners are in wedlock with one of the tentacles when the octopus and its other tentacles are outside the NDA. So to view the current crisis in the Government as the coalition problem would be incorrect. It is a problem that is germane to the nature of the Sang Parivar. The leadership of BJP or its hierarchy draws the sustenance from the RSS. Here the leadership in BJP is accountable to RSS which is not accountable to anybody'', he added.

Such a problem has not arisen in the history of coalition anywhere in the world. While every major political party was a coalition of various interests and was accountable to the broad framework with which it was functioning, BJP was a party, which was not accountable to it, but to RSS, Mr Jaipal Reddy said.

"With unrepresentative character and extra-constitutional power RSS is enjoying and wielding in the country today on account of the fact that BJP is dependent on it'', he said adding that "if there is a problem between Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani it is not settled within BJP but has to be settled with RSS as an arbiter''.

He said making an objective assessment of the performance of the NDA Government in the economic sphere is "highly disappointing''. The BJP itself admits that it derives the base from middle class and in its current governance no class has suffered so much from the BJP regime as the middle class. In other words, they have "alienated'' their own class.

First of all, the UTI scam has resulted in disappointment to 20 million investors and has turned out to be the biggest nightmare. Now the Government has come out with a bailout package costing as much as Rs 14,000 crore from public exchequer to the losses incurred by the UTI.

The losses were incurred by the UTI that were on account of the "illegitimate policy directions issued by the NDA Government. UTI, a safe mutual fund, was used as an instrument to patronise the proteges of BJP — the industrial proteges of BJP.''

Besides UTI, other public financial institutions like IDBI have also proved to be "unsafe'' organisations, as also the commercial banks with their rising non-performing assets (NPAs). The public financial institutions in India are facing "unprecedented crisis'' and a large number of people are not reposing trust in provident funds with millions of people being concerned over the fate of their life-long savings.

Thus, the BJP Government had lost the trust of people — small-time savers and individual investors. The attempts to decrease the interest rate on savings are the proverbial straw so far as the middle class was concerned, he added.

He said the industry had not shown signs of growth and there was stagnation in agriculture with one of the "unnoticed'' aspects being that farmers were not getting the minimum support price for any commodity during the last two years. Hence the calculation of the so-called contribution of agriculture to GDP needs to be "genuinely questioned''. Again, the Government has not been able to tackle what has often been described as "investment famine''. While domestic investment is a must, the Government's investments in public undertakings have been completely stopped. Investment in irrigation, which is supposed to yield the highest rate of return, has ground to a halt.

"The irony is that while growth has stagnated, the godowns are overflowing with foodgrains which is not because of surplus in production but because of the decline in the purchasing power of the consumers'', Mr Jaipal Reddy quipped.

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