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Back to garibi hatao

Indira Gandhi wielded `garibi hatao' (`remove poverty') like a magic wand. It was powerful enough to decimate her opponents — a motley group of out-of-date Congressmen known by the unfortunate label of `Syndicate.' The slogan captured the imagination of millions of ordinary folk, winning Prime Minister Gandhi an overpowering two-thirds majority in the 1971 general election. Thirty-five years on, garibi hatao has re-entered the lexicon of the Congress, this time led by a second Ms. Gandhi. So what are the chances that Sonia Gandhi's party will repeat history? The 1960s and 1970s were a period of intense social churning. On the one side was a hard-boiled elite featuring the princely class, landlords, and status quoist sections of the judiciary. Ranged against these forces were the vast majority of ordinary Indians and an intellectual class raised on Nehruvian ideals of socialism and equity. Brilliantly divining the mass as well as the intellectual mood, Prime Minister Gandhi cast her lot with the era's `pro-changers' in more than words. Among other things, she abolished privy purses, nationalised major banks, and declared war on poverty with an inspired battle cry: "They say Indira hatao. I say garibi hatao." It is another matter that she had little use for the slogan after winning her famous victory.

Three-and-a-half decades ought to have been long enough for India to make a massive dent on poverty. During the same period, by all accounts, China, embarking on a new economic path, has succeeded in raising hundreds of millions of its citizens out of mass poverty comparable with India's. However, in the new millennium, more than 350 million Indians remain desperately poor by any international norm. The paradox of India is that farmer suicides and an unacceptable level of rural distress co-exist with high economic growth. `Feel good' — the current mantra of the two leading parties in the political system, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party — is the ideological opposite of garibi hatao. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent response to the socio-political challenge of the `two Indias' has been to alternate the celebration of `India shining' with a bow towards manifestly unshining mass realities. While there will be few takers for the proposition that garibi hatao has suddenly become the earnest agenda of the United Progressive Alliance Government, the Congress president seems to be suggesting that her politics is on a different wavelength.

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