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GUEST ARTICLE

        There are rumours currently afloat that UPA govern ment is wishing to have mid-term elections. If these rumours are true, then the Congress Party is more likely to get the worst drubbing at the political booth than it ever suffered in the last sixty years.

        The truth - or tragedy, whichever way one looks at it — is that in its desperate desire to garner votes it has been alienating a substantial segment of the population. If Afzal Guru is not hanged in time, the Congress will get a severe beating. If he is hanged, the Congress may lose the Muslim vote; if he is not hanged, the party may lose the Hindu vote. Either way the party faces a tough time. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's advice to the National Development Council that minorities, particularly the Muslims, should have the 'first claim' over national resources has clearly offended large sections of the Hindu poor. The advice may have been well-meant, but it has hurt millions.

        The poor in India run into several millions. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report on 'Level and Pattern of Consumer Expenditure 2004-2005' released on 27 December 2006, one third of India's rural populations, or over 200 million, still live on less than Rs 12 a day!

        The report revealed that Orissa, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh remain the poorest States in the country in terms of the monthly per capita consumer expenditure (MPCE) of rural population and that 10 per cent of the All-India Rural Population is living at just Rs 9 a day, and this, after nearly half a century of Congress rule. In Madhya Pradesh, 47 per cent of the rural population is reported living on Rs 12 a day followed by Bihar and Jharkhand (46 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (33 per cent), Karnataka (32 per cent), and Maharashtra (30 per cent).

        Under the circumstances, to insist that one particular community should be given first claim on national resources is adding insult to injury. Fancy a States like Madhya Pradesh where half the population lives on less than Rs 12 a day! For that sum, one can't get even a cup of coffee in a C Class restaurant. According to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Prime Minister's concerns would be taken on a priority basis, hinting that the issue of greater help to the Muslim minority would be taken up in right earnest, despite the fact that the Planning Commission is a non-political body and will ultimately come under the Parliament scan.

        Trying to win votes through aggressive minorityism may sound clever but if the Congress does not realise that dividing the people along religious lines was part of M A Jinnah's technique to divide the country, it has failed to learn from history.

        Muslims in India have to a large extent remained poor not because they are Muslims, but because they have no leadership. The Kutchis of Gujarat - many of them Muslims - control the retail trade in Mumbai and it is claimed that some f them own huge retail chains in England. Surely, what the Kutchis can do in the retail field, others can do in other fields.

        According to Arif Mohammad Khan, a former Union Minister (Who had resigned from Rajiv Gandhi's Cabinet in 1986 to protest against the decision of the government to over-turn the Supreme Court's judgement in the Shah Banoo maintenance case), it is the so-called 'Hindu secular leadership' that has been responsible for promoting 'the most ugly face of Muslim separatism after partition'. He has a point.

        It is a well-known fact that as early as in 1952, when there were general elections, Congress candidates went out of their way to secure support of old members of the Muslim League who had stayed back in India, and in most cases, dropped their own Muslim colleagues who had spent years with them in jail, just to satisfy the Leaguers who, may it be remembered, used to laugh at Muslim Congressman like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as 'showboys'. Congress, it would seem, is incapable of learning.

        Those who refuse to learn from the past by repeating it are condemned to pay for their mistakes in future. Besides, what is it that the Congress-led UPA government has to show? Shibu Soren who has been sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, the first sitting Union Minister to be successfully charged with murder? Natwar Singh who had to resign from his post as Foreign Minister charged with corruption? A nuclear pact with the United States under which India will have to put as many as 14 nuclear reactors under safeguard compared to only four today and in the context of the situation existing in the five nuclear weapons states putting only eleven out of their 237 reactors under safeguards? Don't we have any sense of self-respect? The so-called 123 Pact is silent on universal nuclear disarmament.

        The white Euro- American nations can get away with murder, but apparently the UPA government is willing to sell India's freedom for a mess of pottage. Why are we selling our future to the United States? Because we do not ourselves have uranium to feed our nuclear reactors?

        According to Arun Shourie, who can be relied upon for the homework he does, India has 78,000 tonnes of uranium reserves, enough for all the existing reactors in India and even for the manufacture of nuclear weapons from 2023 to 2028. The so-called shortage is because there is a reluctance to acquire tribal lands which have the uranium ores. Besides, it is a fact so far hidden from public eyes that to generate 35,000 MW of electricity, India has to pay anything between Rs 75,000 to Rs 1 lakh crore for importing reactors from the US. The months American manufacturers must be watering at the thought of making that much money.

        No wonder US Congressmen voted overwhelmingly in favour of the 123 pact. Why are facts kept away from the gaze of the Indian voter? So much is made of foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in India.

        What is not revealed is that India, the fourth largest economy in the world, gets only 0.8 per cent of the total global FDI flows and less than 3 of total FDI flows to developing countries, whereas China gets more than 25 per cent. China asserts itself. India does not. According to Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, China continues to occupy approximately 38,000 sq kms of Jammu and Kashmir territory. Under Congress regime, that too. Is all this much to be proud of? Yes, the UPA should hold mid-term elections. It will be good for India. And it would certainly put all political parties in their place.