Impasse over price rise ends

After an hour-long debate, the government and the Opposition parties granted concessions to each other today to end the logjam over price rise. On Tuesday, the Lok Sabha will take up a discussion to pass a “Sense of the House” proposal over the “inflationary pressure and its adverse impact on the common man”.

There will be no voting at the end of the discussion but the opposition parties would like to project the Sense of the House proposal as their victory. After the Iraq war resolution (2002) and the one on Gujarat riots (2003), the Lok Sabha is set to adopt yet another Sense of the House resolution.

At a breakfast meeting convened by Finance Minister and Leader of the Lok Sabha Pranab Mukherjee in the Parliament premises, the Opposition managed to include phrases like “common man” while the government stove off the opposition’s demand for including the terms “specific action” and “price rise” and stuck to “inflationary pressure”.

Finally, after a week-long disruption, Parliament functioned smoothly and the government took the opportunity to pass the Securities and Insurance (Amendment and Validation) Bill.

There was intense debate over the choice of words between opposition leaders like Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj (BJP), Basudeb Acharia (CPI-M) and Union ministers like Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram.

When the opposition insisted on including the phrase price rise replacing “inflationary pressure” on the ground that the former phrase is more direct and easily understood in the public domain, the finance minister objected to it. Mukherjee told the meeting that price rise means a lot of things. He also pointed out that price of food articles along with some other items have actually come down.

The government also argued that price rise cannot be stopped or checked in any economy. What can be contained is the rate at which prices rise and the government’s job is to ensure that there is no steep rise in the prices over a short period of time. As the government is essentially dealing with the rate of price rise, it will be more appropriate to use the word “inflationary pressure”.

On the phrase “common man” (aam aadmi), the Opposition was adamant and finally the government had to include the two words.