Let us turn to evaluating the performance of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) over the last nine years.
Political stability: Since entering an era of coalition politics in 1991, India saw a fair amount of fluidity from 1996 to 2004 - an era that saw non-Congress governments and coalition's at the Centre. However, if one was to juxtapose those eight years with the nine plus years of UPA rule from May 2004 till now, you would discern that political instability as a thought, construct or a concept has almost but disappeared from terra firma of the Indian public discourse.
Social cohesion: The idea of India has been underpinned by the core values that constitute the philosophical construct of natural rights and humanism. They are the fundamental freedoms of thought, expression, religious beliefs, democratic choice and a variety of others that fall within the remit of this overarching construct. The India that the UPA inherited in 2004 was scarred by a state-sponsored pogrom perpetrated against the largest minority in the west Indian state of Gujarat. Coming on the heels of the religious polarisation perpetuated in the late 1980s and early 1990s using Indian mythology as an anchor, it put a severe strain on the pluralistic ethos of India. One of the foremost tasks of the UPA government was to reassure its citizens and especially the minorities, that there life, limb and liberty would receive the fullest protection of the state, while persevering to bring the criminals to justice.
Internal security and its external linkages: The UPA government, through a combination of hard power and soft power initiatives as well as capacity augmentation measures, has been able to keep the security situation stable despite grave provocations. The worst, of course, being the Mumbai outrage of 2008. With triple transitions coming up in Afghanistan next year, the security situation in South and West Asia requires responsible engagement by all stakeholders. Similarly in the eastern theatre and the broader Indian Ocean region the string of pearls and other such exotically disruptive paradigms would only serve to make the global commons more volatile.
Economic development: In the last nine years, the UPA government has built up perhaps the most ambitious and holistic rights-based social security infrastructure. The Right to Information, guaranteed 100 days of employment to the rural poor, free and compulsory education to every child below 14 years of age, the most comprehensive school lunch programme that feeds 120 million children daily, food security for over 800 million people, and the overhaul of antiquated land acquisition laws - the list of initiatives is breath taking in the trinity of its scale, conception and implementation. After four stellar years from 2004 to 2008, growth did slow down in 2008-09, but India quickly rebounded from the slower growth of 6.7 per cent in that year to record rates of growth of 8.6 per cent in 2009-10 and 9.3 per cent in 2010-11, respectively.
The Indian economy has also showed early indications of recovery with an increase in exports in the second economic quarter. Our foremost policy priority, therefore, would be to expedite pending financial legislation as well as other policy initiatives.
Foreign policy: In the last nine plus years, one of the significant successes of the UPA has been strategic positioning of India's interests in the evolving churn of global developments. India has successfully engaged with the US, Russia, China, the EU, Japan, other global powers, multilateral institutions, managing contradictions without being overawed by the responsibility that the movement to multi-polarity portends. Notwithstanding the Asian rebalance, the continued emergence of China as the lonely power or the tumultuous events in West Asia, the moral imperatives that form the bedrock of our foreign policy have not been diluted, but tempered with the pragmatism of the times we live in.
Let me enumerate the steps taken to improve the Indian financial architecture in this year itself. A commission of theoreticians and practitioners has drafted a new Indian Financial Code, a legislation drafted to replace 50 existing laws governing finance with a single concurrent financial statute. A new Companies Act is in place. Commodity futures are now dealt by the ministry of finance. A new law has been promulgated establishing the defined contributory pension mechanism under a statutory regulator. The obvious question that then begs an answer is what must be the policy priorities of a Congress/UPA government in 2014, if people do give us that opportunity.
The first and foremost task is to ensure that India transcends from a low middle-income to a middle-income country. This would require liberalising our economy further. This in turn means ensuring that an environment is recreated where it is easy to do business and ensuring that profit is not made to sound like a dirty word. This is the only way to ensure that the 10-million plus young people are gainfully employed. Coupled with this is, of course, a special emphasis to quickly put in place the remaining building blocks of the financial edifice namely the Direct Taxes Code, Goods & Services Tax legislation etc.
The second is to build the capacity of the state to be able to effectively address, surmount and, yet nurture the opportunities that emerging frontiers have on offer. The third is a concerted attempt to completely overhaul India's colonial administrative system, so that vertical and horizontal avenues of talent intake are created at every level of government.The fourth is the rewriting of a panoply of century old laws with an expiry date to synchronise them with contemporary realities that adequately empower the instrumentalities of the state to implement these covenants by putting in place mechanisms that put a premium on both performance and accountability. The fifth is to create capacity in the judicial system at all levels to ensure that delivery of justice is efficacious and swift. The sixth is to make it unambiguously clear to our public institutions that policy choices and their execution are the eminent domain of democratically-elected governments. The seventh is to work for the reform of global institutions to reflect current global realities and not the post World War II power balance. The eighth is to augment institutional wherewithal to protect our national interests. The last but not the least is to fix our politics and regenerate a spirit of multi-partisanship on critical policy issues so that our legislative institutions remain relevant to underwrite this transformation.
Excerpts from the Fullerton Lecture by Minister for I&B, Manish Tewari at International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore on November 27
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
