An Acid Test

At the Swatantra Party Convention held at Bangalore last week an acid test has been proposed for trying out Congress bona fides. If the Statist policies of the Congress are rightly or wrongly intended for the good of the people (apart from their being inherently worthless and ineffective), the Congress Party should be willing to entrust the administrative and supervisory jurisdiction over the distribution of Iicences, permits and quotas, and the other incidents of controls, to an independent Board composed of competent people not aligned to or interested in any political party, but whose members are conversant with the business involved. Such a Board would justly and impartially administer and exercise supreme authority over these economic controls. The distribution of the private monopolies created by the Statist policies of the Congress, going by the misleading name of socialism, and the controls exercised by the State over individual enterprise would then, like the judicial decisions of courts, be above political motives and influences, resting purely on a concern for the prosperity of the nation.

If this acid test is not submitted to by the Congress Party, it must only mean that it is bent on exploitation of economic power for party purposes and utilizing it for perpetuation of its rule. It is a simple and conclusive test of honesty.

Whether the Statist policies and bureaucratic controls of national industries are conducive to good production is a different question. The Swatantra Party does not think that they are. It is convinced that the royal road to increase production and prosperity is free enterprise with minimum regulations to check abuses. Most people engaged in the work of production, be it industrial or agricultural or be it the work of transport or distribution by trade and commerce, are men trained to the work and fully interested in the business seeking to earn their living by it and not unwilling to give a due share of their earnings to the State for its special purposes. They are not only intent on making a living by it but eager to save and build up capital for expansion of the work. Their whole outlook and their equipment are totally directed to increasing national prosperity and expanding employment. On the other hand, the bureaucracy engaged by the State, in pursuance of its Statist policy going by the name of ‘socialization’, are neither equipped for the task nor individually motivated by any spirit but that of rising in the ladder of bureaucratic status. This is plain a priori conclusion, as well as one demonstrated by experience and the dismal failure of the Plans so elaborately conceived by the Planning Commission, and so expensively attempted to be enforced during these fifteen years of Congress rule.

Throughout the length and breadth of the land disappointment and distress stare us in the face. Taxation, interest charges for foreign loans and prices have shot up and all the calculations have been upset by the inevitable confusion resulting therefrom. The Government has surrendered not only important areas to the Chinese but has succeeded by poor diplomacy in permanently burdening the nation with a rising scale of Defence expenditure which must swallow up more and more of our resources, leaving but little to serve the purpose of raising the standard of life of the civilian population. There is no other way to turn the tide of affairs except by dismissing the Congress Party. The dissensions and dissenting voices within that party are of no avail to the nation. They are just murmurs of careerist frustrations and nothing calculated to help any new formulations of commonsense based politics.

The sycophancy of licence-holders and the politeness of foreign observers serve only to raise a fog over the truth. The nation should open its eyes and turn to a better government. We cannot for all time live on the memories of heroic sacrifices and exaggerated pity for past prison life. The situation calls for plain commonsense and humility and an appreciation of simple arithmetic. Is this permit-licence-quota raj a bona fide affair kept up in order to regulate and guide the limited resources of the nation into useful channels as claimed, or is it serving the party in power to wield economic power and hold the citizens in its grip, and kept up for that purpose? An acid test has been proposed to put this question to a trial. Will the rank and file of the Congress Party submit to this test and demonstrate the honesty of purpose of the party? I fear they will resist and the leaders will conspire with them and offer learned and specious excuses to escape the trial. The Congress Party, which depends so greatly now on lavish election expenditure, cannot survive the deprivation of their power to make rich men richer and threaten recalcitrants with total ruin. Apart from the test of Congress bona fides, the reform proposed is inherently good and completely feasible and will, whoever be Caesar’s wife, place her above suspicion.