Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

In the electoral marketplace, the greatest achievement of the Rao government proved to be an uncashable cheque

The Socialism of the Congress was never doctrinaire. It was never an imported Marxist myth. The 'mixed economy' was the mantra; there was never anything sacrosanct about the mix itself. That is why it was wholly inappropriate to describe the Rao-Manmohan initiative as a 'new' economic policy. It was a new phase of an old economic policy, the logic of which had been written into the Avadi strategy.

Yet, the semantic consequence was to drive the word 'socialism' out of the Congress vocabulary -- and leave us open to the charge that we were more concerned with the 200 million Indians in the market than the 700 million outside the market's pale. Notwithstanding the fact that the Rao-Manmohan policy set aside more finances for the poor than ever before -- a veritable exponential quantum leap in resources for employment assurance and poverty elimination -- the deletion of 'socialism' from our vocabulary and the projection of the 'new' economic policy as a break from the past made sense only in the marketplace where the privileged Indian foregathers.

In the electoral marketplace, the single-greatest achievement of the Rao government proved to be a virtually uncashable cheque.

Also, the abandonment of political priority to Panchayati Raj meant that there was no mechanism to deliver anti-poverty programmes to the poor. It was state governments and the entrenched bureaucracy that fattened on the good intentions of Rao and Manmohan Singh. The bottom line of Congress socialism has always been priority to the poor; the substantive consequence of the Congress abandoning the vocabulary of socialism is that the poor-- who are the true bahujan samaj -- are left wondering what's in it for them. I would have redesignated Manmohan as minister of poverty eradication.

Finally, Non-alignment. For us, the world has not changed. The Berlin Wall never stood between us and our aspirations. Its fall has not altered our primary foreign policy objective of resisting the quest of others for domination over us. Terminologically, non-alignment is necessarily part of the vocabulary of the alignments of the Cold War. The semantic task is to align the vocabulary of independence in external affairs to the idiom of the present. Substantively, standing up to the quest for dominance, as we have been doing over the CTBT in Geneva, remains at the heart of foreign policy.

If the Congress is able to rejuvenate itself ideologically, the country will itself discover how much India needs the Congress; if we remain stuck in old grooves or abandon ideology for expediency then, perhaps, the fate of the Liberals will -- should? -- overtake us.