A hard sell
The Indian ExpressTags : ie, editorialPosted: Mon Nov 28 2011, 03:17 hrs======================================================================The decision to allow greater foreign direct investment in retail has reverberated across the political spectrum — but instead of analysing its effects on farmers, consumers, workers and the economy in general, most major parties have simply played to their own limited agenda.
The Left laid out a rote statement on the monopolisation of the retail sector by MNCs; Mayawati accused Rahul Gandhi’s “foreign friends” of benefiting from the decision; Uma Bharti threatened to torch any Walmart store that dares to show up; and the BJP, as a whole, condemned it as an anti-people action. The government has, for once, made at least the effort to persuade — laying out explanations of how the introduction of global resources and innovation to Indian retail should be a win-win, and allaying fears about unemployment and exploitation. It has pointed to the experience of many other countries that do allow FDI in this sector, suggesting that it is not a zero-sum game, and that large retail chains do not end up supplanting neighbourhood stores.
However, the principal opposition party, one ostensibly committed to reform (unlike the other FDI opponents), has mutinously refused to engage, and chosen petty interest-group politics over an open-minded debate on the consequences of this decision. The BJP has subordinated considerations of national gain to the question of its own political gain — specifically, how it stands to benefit by misrepresenting the issue as one between global behemoths and small, embattled businesses.
The BJP might imagine that it stands to lose among small traders if it does not make loud protective noises about their interests. Or it might want to seize every chance to attack the government, no matter how flimsy. But this stand reveals its confusion and broken principles, its tendency to opt for narrow tactics rather than operate from larger conceptions of the common good. Its inability to outline a consistent economic agenda that rivals the government’s, and back up its claims, is what makes the party’s stand appear so curmudgeonly now. While its own chief ministers, far more attuned to ground realities, have been taking bold, reformist steps in their own regions, the party’s central leaders are undercutting those principles, busying themselves with power games and, in the process, diluting the BJP’s once-cogent political and economic philosophy.
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