Bjp Objects To Pm Statement On Reforms

The BJP yesterday objected to Prime Minister HD Deve Gowdas statement in Davos that Indias economic reforms are irreversible. The party said that Gowda should have consulted the BJP and the Congress before making such a statement.

Prime Minister Gowda goes to Davos and repeats this nauseating statement that the economic reforms programmes is irreversible, BJP spokesperson Yashwant Sinha said. His party wanted internal liberalisation before exposing Indian companies to multinational competition, the former Union finance minister added.

He claimed that the Congress too was realising that its reforms programme had not worked. However, almost as if to contradict that, the AICC spokesperson stated separately that the party remained committed to reforms. There is no question of revising the liberalisation policy, he asserted.

He said only two members of the executive of the Congress Party in Parliament had criticised liberalisation at its recent meeting.

The Congress had not taken a stand against foreign equity in sectors such as insurance, he added, though members had spoken against it during the meeting.

The only sector in which the party opposed foreign equity was the media, he said, and that was a long-standing policy since Nehrus time. Individual members and not the party had taken stands against specific projects, including the Tata-SIA proposal, he said.

Clearly, it wasnt only the press that got the impression that the Congress had changed its line on economic policy. The BJP spokesperson based his briefing largely on the assumption that the Congress was gradually taking a U-turn.

He pointed out that Congress president Sitaram Kesari accepted during his election tours in Punjab that the economic reforms programme has not percolated down to the poorer sections of the society.

There seems to be a growing realisation in the Congress that the reform programme had been wrong, he said. The Prime Minister should have taken this change of mood into account before committing the nation at Davos, he added.

The BJP has serious differences with the sequencing and pace of the reform programmes followed by the UF government, he stated, adding that foreign investment and technology were peripheral and not the central issues facing the countrys economy. However, Gowda has made it look at Davos as if these two were the basic issues. The country has to strengthen its domestic industry by first liberalisation internally.

Experience of liberalisation in some other developing countries also showed that this approach was better, the BJP spokesman said.

The UF Gowda government should have gone for gradual liberalisation rather than trying to compete with the pace of reform programme witnessed during 1991-92, he said.