Battle for survival bogs down Amarinder

Punjab: Bitter battles
It was billed as the "Year of Development." But the year was occupied by development of different kinds. Politics dominated over all other things and as the year drew to a close, the bitter political rivalry left no absolute winners or losers. A festering unease, however, continued to prevail, notes P. P. S. Gill.

CAPT. Amarinder Singh had declared 2003 as the "Year of Development" for Punjab. Indeed, it has been the year of development but of a different kind. You only had political developments; there was no socio-economic or agro-industrial progress to speak of. The year mainly revolved around select men and matters, events and non-events.

Every learning process begins with a set of letters yet lessons are seldom drawn from them. Can it be hoped that Punjab will draw lessons from 2003? In Punjab, the process began thus: A for Amarinder and Akalis, B for Bhattal, Badal and bureaucracy, C for Congress, court cases and corruption charges. At D, development was outpaced by dissidence within the Congress and up popped Daler and governance met a dead-end. At E and F, economic and fiscal reforms were sidelined and, down the line, at P politics and police dominated governance. At R, rollback became a household word and there was no sign of any resurgence. And V symbolised vigilance not victory; while at U, the government took a u-turn on many of its own decisions on user charges and additional resource mobilisation. At W, the World Bank fiddled waiting for the implementation of reforms; while at X, Punjab was seen at the crossroads of political and administrative uncertainty and instability.

When it comes to writing 2003 year-ender, there is nothing that is outstanding or stands out in Punjab, except that politics remained Chief Minister and former chief ministers-centric — Capt. Amarinder Singh remained embroiled in conflicts and controversies with Rajinder Kaur Bhattal and Parkash Singh Badal. Corruption got politicised and campaign against it personalised. The operation clean-up was mishandled.

If the Badals were shown the jail door, a Chandigarh court has been ready to frame corruption charges against Rajinder Kaur Bhattal and another court has already framed defamation charges against Capt. Amarinder Singh. Thus, 2003 rightly belonged to the three political bigwigs.

Throughout 2003, the Akalis maintained that Amarinder Singh’s anti-corruption campaign was neither holistic nor noble, as it was only Badal-centric. And eventually, the Badals succeeded in converting a ‘’personal’’ issue into a ‘’panthic’’ issue. The rest is history; too recent to replay.

Why Amarinder Singh did not touch BJP ministers in the Badal-government is a different story. But he made the Lok Pal-indicted Congress legislators ministers in his own government. They are his close confidants and also powerful. If corruption was the key agenda, how come the Lok Pal slot is still vacant?

In the BJP there was a change of guard, with young MLA Avinash Khanna appointed as the state president. In 2003, the Akali-BJP combine continued to nurse grievances against the Congress after being mauled in the municipal and panchayat elections and also submitted memoranda to the Governor on various issues on several occasions. Their theme song was against the Congress, charging it with ‘’injustice, tyranny and repression’’.

In 2003, dealing with corruption by using the police, integrity of which has always been questioned, remained a passion with the government, though corruption was rampant at every level of administration, as it was during the Akali-BJP regime. Political analysts say that manipulative politics with total disregard for rules had reached a level in the first 20 months that the Akalis, perhaps, scaled in their last year of government.

Businessmen and industrialists, who deal with revenue and taxation departments, say the ‘’risk factor’’ increased in 2003 due to the involvement of the police, read vigilance. Since the police cannot be the conscience-keeper of any civil society, it would be desirable to restore administrative civility rather than allow the civil administration to remain in hibernation.

Any compromise by Capt. Amarinder Singh with any of his own team members on corrupt practices will spell more doom than what he had scripted for the Badals in 2002-03. Several instances are quoted to show to what level political corruption had peaked in the past months:

Say converting, read colonising, land use of 120 acres in Mohali, recruitment into the police under sports quota, multi-crore irrigation scam of the UBDC (Upper Bari Doab Canal), political pressures to fix low rate for export of wheat by a favoured private company, allocation of paddy for milling to tainted rice-millers, transfers in the co-operative department, sanctioning of over 900 additional seats to privately managed polytechnic at a time when admissions were over, etc

This resulted in transfer of good officers to unimportant posts. And no one has heard of what happened to the report of a committee under the Chief Secretary on recruitment of sportspersons. Yet, ‘’transparent, effective and clean’’ governance was the slogan in 2003! Besides Congress vs Congress and Congress vs Akalis, 2003 also saw political equations change within the Akali camps with Parkash Singh Badal and Gurcharan Singh Tohra embracing yet again, after a standoff since 1999. Tohra was back as president of the SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee).

Among other developments on the religio-political stage was holding of the World Sikh Convention in Mohali by several organisations, much to the chagrin of the SGPC. Its focus was Akal Takht, its jurisdiction, jurisprudence, relevance of hukamnama (religious edicts), excommunication of individuals, role and place of Sikh priests (jathedars) in the context of the Guru Granth Sahib, Guru Panth, etc.

As the events unfolded in 2003, it became apparent that the government agenda centered only around the Badals. All talk of reforms, fiscal and economic, was pushed into the slow-speed lane. One saw education and health delivery systems fail, and agriculture diversification and contract farming systems and implementation of the industrial policy go haywire.

The restructuring and re-engineering of the administrative departments for improved functioning met a dead-end, just as did the scheme of adjustment of identified surplus staff after compiling of manpower register and framing of the voluntary retirement scheme.

The process of disinvestment in public sector undertakings (PSU), barring one or two, also ran into rough patch, as did the concept of right-sizing of the burgeoning babudom and bureaucracy, while the wage bill inflated to over Rs 4,000 crore per annum. The issue of full 95 per cent grant-in-aid to private colleges or payment of pension and gratuity to their staff remained on the backburner.

While the social sector, which includes various kinds of pensions and shagun schemes etc. remained in a shambles, implementation of the power sector reforms was slow. Procedure to decentralise administrative and financial powers to Panchayati Raj institutions has also been rather sluggish and despite repeated announcements the same have not been transferred.

The year also saw several agitations by farmers’ organisations over high pricing of inputs and low minimum support price for food grains. Punjab agriculture survived despite political manipulations and neglect of this key segment of state’s economy. The farmers reaped high yields of wheat, rice and cotton on their own. It was a much brighter Divali for the peasantry in 2003.

The government’s wavering stand on imposing, withdrawing, reducing, re-imposing user charges, sales tax, etc. on a variety of items, including farm inputs, has also annoyed the World Bank, which had opened a window to Punjab in November 2002, after free power and water to agriculture sector was withdrawn. Despite the World Bank’s persistence, the bureaucracy has been rather slow and sluggish in its responses and implementation of reforms agenda.

The state continued to suffer on account of increasing incidence of crime, deteriorating law and order, reports of police excesses and overriding of the police by the bureaucracy, egged on by political considerations. The year 2003 also saw the police getting highly politicised and divided. The damage done to its morale and image will have long-term effects.