P Chidambaram’s budget for 1997-98 is unique for two reasons. One, it was a showpiece of holy consensus, an unquestionable and unalterable divine instrument elevated to the hallowed status of an object of supreme national interests raised above party politics. From Congress to CPI(M) and BJP to federalists, all rallied together in an hitherto unseen show of commitment consenting to pass it even during that anomalous interregnum after one government was voted out and the next was yet to assume office. While debating the first confidence vote, the Marxist floor leader even bemoaned the fact that Sitaram Kesri had hastened to bring down Deve Gowda’s government without waiting for this remarkable budget to be passed.
It was remarkable indeed for yet another reason. No other finance minister and no other budget had showered such unprecedented concessions on the moneybags at one stroke. The bourgeoisie themselves couldn’t believe their eyes. They had not hoped for such largess even in their dreams. Political stability or not, the ability of the bourgeois politicians to push forward the agenda of liberalisation ever more aggressively remains strong and stable. An aggressiveness that was absolutely lacking in the two left parties in the governmental coalition, in their 52 MPs who had turned wooden, at one with their benches in the parliament.
If the CPI-CPI(M) are really opposed to the budget why their big chunk of MPs should vote to pass the Finance Bill and let the budget session end smoothly without a single cut motion being passed? How long can CPI(M) hide behind the specious argument “We don’t want to bring down the government”? Why is it so that you care much more to save a bourgeois government than the bourgeoisie themselves? Your bourgeois partners — whose government it is in the main into which you have been coopted — put their foot down on their fiscal priorities and care two hoots about your objections or any possible collapse of their own government due to your opposition. Inspite of all your grumblingthey don’t budge an inch on the budget. Why is it that it is only you parties, the CPI and CPI(M), which will have to eat your own verbal protests and go in for a total surrender every time? Sadly enough, it is a fraud on the proletariat and the toiling masses who never expected this of a left party.
Despite unseemly and unprincipled power-brokering day in and day out which has earned your leader the laurel of being a modern-day Chanakya, and despite your own claim of being the chief architect of UF itself and your self-styled role of a kingmaker notwithstanding, how come you are so impotent and powerless even to bring about a small change in such a budget?
Just for the sake of a few crumbs of power thrown at you in the Holy Communion with a host of bourgeois parties — who in any case are ditching you one by one to go over to the Congress camp, especially your closest ally Mulayam, that favoured choice of yours for premiership — you are compromising even on your anti-Congressism and are sacrificing the cherished principles of the Left one after the other. It is high time the genuine leftists in these parties wake up to the danger of not only participation in a bourgeois government but even to that of coalescing with bourgeois partners and mortgaging Left’s political and programmatic independence at their altar which would be equally suicidal.