The announcement of the schedule for the elections to the 15th Lok Sabha has set in motion the process for the Indian people to elect a new government that can serve them and the country better.
Following the last general elections of 2004, the CPI(M) and Left parties had decided to extend support to a Congress-led secular coalition — the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) — in order to safeguard the unity and integrity of our country and the security of our religious minorities from the onslaught of the communal forces.
The support of 61 Left MPs was crucial for the Congress-led UPA (formed post-elections) with a strength of 216 MPs to acquire a majority and form the government. The Left had offered support from the outside on the basis of a Common Minimum Programme, which contained many a programme designed to benefit the people of this country. It was at the Left’s insistence that a reluctant Congress was forced to implement some of these promises. Recollect that it took more than two years for the Rural Employment Guarantee scheme to come into force that too in a limited, halting sense. It took over four years for the tribal rights over forest produce to be put into effect. It was only in the final year of the UPA government that the loan waiver for farmers facing acute agrarian distress was finally announced. The right to information likewise still continues to be riddled with many complicated procedures.
The Congress, of course, in order to seek credit for itself, falls back upon the fact that it was only the Congress manifesto that spoke of rural employment guarantee. While this may be true, there was no guarantee that this guarantee would be implemented, if left to the Congress alone. Remember, it was the Congress which first raised the issue of land reforms in an election manifesto in the early years of our parliamentary democracy. Yet, none of its state governments has implemented it. It was only the Left-led state governments of Kerala and West Bengal that have implemented land reforms. Clearly, but for the CPI(M) and the Left’s pressure, many of the promises made in the CMP would have remained on paper.
On the one hand, the Left had forced the UPA government to implement some of its promises (while many others like spending 6 per cent of the GDP on education, 3 per cent on health etc etc have remained unfulfilled). On the other hand, many of the neo-liberal economic reforms that the Congress sought to pursue by bringing legislations in Parliament were stopped by the Left. In light of the current global economic recession, this has helped, to some extent, to protect India from greater devastation. In particular, the following four — full convertibility of the Indian rupee; the right for foreign banks to acquire Indian private banks; privatisation of pension funds; and increasing the cap for foreign investment in the insurance sector — if implemented, would have ruined millions of Indian people and devastated our economy along with the global financial meltdown.
The UPA government’s insistence on pursuing its neo-liberal economic agenda was matched by its reluctance to take on the communal forces frontally. Despite the Supreme Court’s direction for a CBI enquiry into some of the more heinous attacks in the Gujarat carnage, nothing substantial was done. This resulted in the state government that had sponsored the communal genocide in Gujarat being re-elected. The steadfast commitment required to cleanse our society and administration of the communal forces was lacking. This has largely provided the BJP the opportunity to stage a comeback by winning the elections to the state assembly. This, in turn, has now emboldened the BJP and the communal combine to, once again, mount a vicious communal offensive and resurrect the hardcore communal agenda as their mascot for the coming general elections.
Excerpts from an Editorial published in People’s Democracy, organ of the CPI(M), 8 March, 2009