Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s decision to opt out of electoral politics and hand over his Sivaganga constituency to son Karti to nurture and defend may be counted as a pre-election victory for the BJP Prime Ministerial contender. Whether or not Narendra Modi had staged a ‘fake encounter’ with facts when he took on the Union Minister in Chennai last month for saying that Modi’s knowledge of economics can be written on the back of a stamp, the fact is that P Chidambaram never came out with the promised facts and figures that, he said, would effectively debunk the contentions of the Gujarat Chief Minister. And now that he is quietly slinking into the sunset without an explanation or apology to the people of India for the manner in which he has degraded the economy and their lives, it is definitely Round One to Narendra Modi.
Chidambaram’s decision had been speculated for at least two weeks before it became official, and follows the decision of Union Shipping Minister GK Vasan to opt out of the electoral fray on the pretext of devoting more time to campaigning for party candidates across the State. The Congress is believed to be heading for a rout in Tamil Nadu in the Parliamentary election; former TNCC president KV Thangabalu has also declined to contest and sitting MP M Krishnaswamy made way for his son Vishnu Prasad in the Arani constituency.
However, a friendly journalist claims that the “real story” why the Finance Minister is not contesting is because he is “likely to be key Congress campaigner” who will rebut Narendra Modi on all issues all over the country. Those who have seen the memorable (sic) crowds Chidambaram attracted at Sivaganga recently, which doubtless prompted his retreat, are amused by this claim and the assertion that Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi have asked him to debunk Narendra Modi’s views on the economy, national security and foreign affairs and break the spell he has cast over urban India. According to the committed journalist, Congress has actually sent a signal to the electorate that in the event of a fractured mandate, Chidambaram could emerge as a potential Prime Ministerial nominee.
The Finance Minister, who has uneasy relations with the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, tried to persuade DMK leader M Karunanidhi not to join hands with the BJP before he took his decision to quit. Though the DMK has not made any alliance or seat adjustment with the BJP, Karunanidhi’s reference to Narendra Modi as a ‘friend’ and his estranged son Azhagiri’s meeting with party president Rajnath Singh has further queered the pitch for the Congress as the BJP has mopped up the unaligned parties. It is too late for Chidambaram to seek an understanding with the Chief Minister as he has publicly denounced the AIADMK as the ‘B Team’ of the BJP and predicted that it will back a Narendra Modi-led dispensation at the Centre after the elections, and that J Jayalalithaa had ditched the Left parties for this reason.
Whatever the calculations of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, the Union Finance Minister has his task cut out defending his record and that of the UPA in the countdown to the election, which will begin as early as April 7 in some States. Given the high decibel campaign of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the high profile candidates it has fielded in many places, the Congress and particularly its emerging leader, Rahul Gandhi, are already facing a problem of visibility. The party leaders appear not to have too many talking points as Narendra Modi has been grabbing all the talking points as he straddles the nation, giving macro and micro suggestions to re-galvanise the economy through governmental support for private enterprise on multiple fronts. At his recent “Chai pe Charcha” devoted exclusively to the agrarian crisis, the Gujarat leader listened to the problems faced by farmers across the nation and personally emphathised with the families of debt-ridden farmers who had committed suicide in Maharashtra, a move that put the Congress-NCP leadership in the State at a political disadvantage.
In this scenario, if P Chidambaram is truly going to be one of the lead campaigners for the Congress, he will have the unenviable task of explaining the years of policy paralysis of UPA-II, the jobless growth of the past decade, the steeply rising prices of essential commodities like milk, the massive inflation, the rising national debt and falling value of the Rupee. While it is undeniable that Sonia Gandhi’s pet projects generated through her cronies in the unaccountable National Advisory Council (NAC) have a huge responsibility for the ruination of the economy through unsustainable doles, it will fall to Chidambaram who officially presided over the mess to explain how an economy booming at 8 per cent growth and only 4.3 per cent fiscal deficit, a treasury and foreign exchange reserve that was loaded when Atal Bihari Vajpayee demitted office, has been reduced to such a shambles.
Whether it will take a stamp, a postcard or a notebook to detail Narendra Modi’s knowledge of economics, will be seen in the days to come. But as he prepares to walk into the sunset, the Harvard-educated Union Finance Minister should at least inform the nation if the national GDP growth now pegged at 4.9 per cent is in fact lower due to jugglery with figures and the mean trick of saddling the incoming regime with huge expenditures for which there is no money in the till. The commitments to the successor States of Andhra Pradesh and the unnecessary controversy over gas prices are just two instances of the mess that the next Government will have to clean up.
With the Cambridge-educated economist, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, blissfully out of the electoral fray, and Congress’ other leading economist ensconced in Rashtrapati Bhavan, it is easy to understand why P Chidambaram too wants to give up the fight. In one sense, he has rightly left it to Sonia Gandhi, whose backseat driving of the Government took the economy to the edge of the precipice, to defend her actions in the court of the people.
Niticentral.com, 22 March 2014
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/03/22/pc-logs-out-leaves-behind-crumbling-economy-202547.html