Clearing the Cobwebs - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 62

investment, put it neatly when he told me in 2001 that his government's implementation
problems stemmed from 'a fractured electorate that leads to a fractured legislature' and an
opposition that had a 'perverse concept of what it means to be out of office'. 22 This was a
reference to the Congress-led opposition that was disrupting parliament over rows ranging
from corruption on defence contracts and the collapse of the country's largest unit trust to
controversial anti-terrorism legislation. As a result, there was a backlog of more than 40
bills.
'Everyone has enough power to block everything and no one has enough power to see
anything through,' said Shourie, highlighting a failing of India's parliamentary democracy
which became even more true with the 2009-2014 UPA coalition. During those years, the
BJP and other opposition parties behaved even more irresponsibly in parliament than Con-
gress had done earlier. It wasted weeks of parliamentary time and impeded urgently needed
legislation such as land ownership compensation, banking and insurance regulations and
labour laws, while the government dithered on opening up the defence industry and other
areas.
The opposition also played havoc with overhyped plans to allow foreign investment into
supermarkets and other parts of the retail business, which Manmohan Singh and his com-
merce minister, Anand Sharma, unwisely allowed to become a litmus test of reform suc-
cess. 23 This was a typical example of the government avoiding diffi cult basic issues and
policy debate with headline-grabbing reforms. Singh and Sharma hoped that foreign com-
panies would invest in supermarket supply chains and would then force through state-level
reforms in public sector-dominated and inefficient marketing arrangements for farm pro-
duce. Instead, the policy foundered and foreign supermarket companies were put off partly
by muddled and complex regulations and ministerial hubris, and partly by entrenched op-
position from vested interests in the distribution system, supported by populist and anti-
Congress regional political parties.
Gandhi Sops, Not Growth
The main blockage to reforms between 2009 and 2014 came from divided government
leadership. It was caused by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi favouring the provision of expensive
and wasteful sops and aid schemes for the poor rather than pushing growth-oriented re-
forms favoured by Manmohan Singh. I heard in London in June 2012 that Rahul had told
a friend on a recent visit that the way for Congress to stay in power and win elections was
through the aid scheme route, not reforms. 24 'Has the domination of economic policy by
Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, together with regional members of the governing coalition... be-
come so established that there is now no room for reformers to be heard? Is the government
so much under the spell of these forces that India's leadership has gone back to the 1970s