The idea of holding an anniversary bash, an occasion on which a report card of the government is presented, is not native to the Congress Party. Such celebrations are not known to have been held in the time of Nehru, Indira Gandhi or P.V. Narasimha Rao. Admittedly, a Congress-led coalition such as the UPA is not the same as a Congress government proper.
And yet, the culture of the UPA, and the manner of its essential functioning, do not differ in significant ways from an all-Congress dispensation. So, possibly a dinner party to which coalition allies, and parties that otherwise support the Congress in government, are invited is meant to communicate to the country that the Congress is perfectly capable of running a coalition government, an idea that many at one time felt was not possible. Even so, there appears to be no fixed periodicity about the anniversary festivities of the UPA.
In UPA-1, the first anniversary do was held at the end of its fourth year in office, not every year. The government was in some difficulty with its Left supporters over the civil nuclear agreement with the United States. Even so the Communist leaders did attend on that occasion and were accorded top protocol in terms of seating arrangements at the table of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The irony is that they would force the government to take a confidence vote barely two months later and quit the government’s side. Therefore, it is hard to imagine that the fourth anniversary dinner of UPA-1 was tied to a celebration in particular. UPA-2, to be fair, appears to have opted for a celebration and a report card every year. But the event had to be called off in 2010 as an air crash took place in Mangalore. So, last Sunday the UPA-2 government held the first celebration dinner at the end of its second year in office, and a report card was duly issued. Possibly the most striking feature of the evening party at the Prime Minister’s residence was the attendance of representatives of the RJD from Bihar and the Samajwadi Party from UP — Lalu Yadav, although somewhat subdued after his rout in the state Assembly election late last year, was present. (For all the speculative gossip in sections of the media, there was never any doubt that the DMK — no matter how aggrieved — and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress would send representatives.)
With corruption being on everyone’s mind since the exposure of the scam involving Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing Society and the Commonwealth Games late last year, to be followed by the 2G spectrum allocation fiasco, it was to be expected that the Prime Minister and the Congress chief would allude at some length to a subject that continues to be the talk at every dining table in the country. Surprisingly, there was too little said on rising prices. This is not a dining table staple because those who suffer its impact the most possess no such object. But the Prime Minister was brave enough not to flinch from speaking of “inclusive” growth, the mantra that suffuses nearly all his speeches. Inclusive growth — meaning cushioning the poor against the ravages of the market — with prices showing no sign of stabilising at an affordable level for nearly four years now? The Prime Minister, quite rightly, chose to take credit for 8.5 per cent annual growth of the economy over the seven years he has been in office although the world was hit by a deep-going recession in this period. But this surely ought to be adjusted for the secular trend in inflation. Even if our inflation is an imported one (commodity prices), you can’t comfort the needy with this. You have to do something about it, at least by adding to employment going beyond NREGA-1.