What, however, is one to make of its charge that the policies of these two parties have made India totally vulnerable to external threats, and are slowly but surely bringing the economy to a grinding halt; that the governments fertiliser subsidy policy has led to a steep fall in food production, and that rural poverty has increased since 1991 and the quality of life worsened? What, moreover, is to make of its open invitation to the communists to join it in an attack on mindless globalisation of the economy?
The most charitable interpretation of these remarks is that the BJP has been deeply unsettled by its electoral reverses in Uttar Pradesh and its failure to increase its vote share in the general elections. It is now thrashing around desperately in search of a policy platform that will help it recover some of its losses. For the India it is describing exists only in its imagination.
Is the economy grinding to a halt? There has admittedly been a small slowdown in industrial growth this year, after very high growth in the previous two years. Most of it has occurred because of a decline in the growth of non-manufacturing components of the index, the production of oil, coal, electricity. These are reasons for concern and remedial action. There has also been a slight decline in manufacturing growth, from the very high levels of the last two years, but when the most conservative estimate of the likely growth of GDP this year puts it well above 6 per cent, to say that the economy is grinding to a halt is beyond hyperbole.
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Has there been a steep fall in food production? The BJPs economic gurus must be looking at last year, when an indifferent monsoon caused a near halt, not a steep decline. Why did they not look at this year, when the kharif output is estimated to be six million tonnes more than last year and foodgrain production is set to exceed 200 million tonnes?
What is one to make of BJPs claim that rural poverty has increased? Given agricultures need for labour, given the 4 per cent growth rate in agriculture since 1992, and the steady increase in acreage under the even more labour-intensive cash crops at the rate of more than 2.2 per cent per year over the past 16 years, is this a tenable proposition? Between 1991-92 and 1994-95 the real wage rate for agricultural workers increased by 4.1 per cent. What is more important, National Sample Survey data show that rural underemployment had declined at least between 1987 and 1992. Could this trend have been reversed after 1992, when agricultural growth has spurted?
All the indicators of health and life expectancy tell the opposite story. Between 1991 and 1995, the death rate declined from 9.7 per thousand to 9.2 per thousand, and the rural poverty index from 28.37 per cent (population below the poverty line) in 1987-8 to 21.68 per cent in 1993-94. This trend too cannot have failed to continue through the high growth years that have followed.
Finally, what is one to make of the BJPs attack on the governments mindless globalisation policies? For anyone who has even an inkling of the rapid way in which the world economy is evolving, the idea that India is a globalising economy is ludicrous. Today 37,000 transnational corporations have invested more than $2 trillion in 175,000 affiliates. In 1993, these generated more than $5.5 trillion worth of sales, which was one-third of the worlds GNP and 120 per cent of world trade.
India has not even started down the road to globalisation. Global integration does not mean colonial subservience, but a new form of equality. For if plants in India depend on imports from other countries, then plants in those countries depend on the products of plants in India. In the world that is coming into being today, a countrys national sovereignty is in deadly danger, precisely so long as it is unable to exert this countervailing economic power. China has actually brought the US to its knees without firing a shot, simply by exerting this countervailing power.
Global integration does not mean that Indian entrepreneurs are forever doomed to subordinate status. Over a vast range of products, ranging from chemicals,petrochemicals, and metals,textiles, and food beverages and tobacco, they can easily go it alone, because the Indian domestic market is large enough to sustain them. But in the most high tech, high value added industries, Indias late start in global integration leaves it no niche but a subordinate one to fill. Far from bemoaning this, the BJP should remind Indian companies that nothing lasts forever, and nothing can, ultimately, hold an efficient firm down.