The Hindu : We can't be derailed: PM

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 28, 2002

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We can't be derailed: PM

By Our Special Correspondent

The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, with the CII president, Sanjiv Goenka, at the CII national conference and annual session, in New Delhi on Saturday. — Photo: S. Arneja

NEW DELHI April 27. In a sharp reaction to the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi's address to the Confederation of Indian Industry here on Friday, the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, today declared that his Government was here to stay for the full five-year term. "This Government cannot be derailed. It is stable; it is here to stay," he asserted.

On the communal violence in Gujarat about which Ms. Gandhi spoke at length, he said it had shocked and traumatised the country. It was "a blot on India" but he decried the "attempt to ignore the complexity of the situation". It did not help the interests of the country, the cause of secularism or the interests of business to forget that the Gujarat violence was a ''temporary aberration'' and not a fundamental fissure of society.

Addressing the concluding session of the CII annual conference, Mr. Vajpayee devoted a large portion of his address to respond to the issues raised by Ms. Gandhi at the inaugural session. Insisting that he did not intend to impart a political tone to his speech, Mr. Vajpayee said that the climate of debate in recent months had become "highly vitiated" by half-truths and exaggerations and even the CII platform was not spared.

He joined issue with Ms. Gandhi for placing significance on being invited to the CII's inaugural function and noted that such people seemed to think that chambers of commerce had more powers to make and unmake governments than the people. Mr. Vajpayee minced no words when he advised Ms. Gandhi at the very outset to learn from industry that "it does not make business sense to count one's chickens before they are hatched". Ms. Gandhi had said in her inaugural address, "When the Leader of the Opposition is invited by the country's leading industrialists to start off their annual get-together, it is natural to speculate. What could be the motive? What sort of political winds are blowing and in what direction."

With the invitation to Ms. Gandhi becoming a controversial issue, the outgoing CII president, Sanjiv Goenka, tried to make up for not calling the Prime Minister for the inaugural session by stressing in his welcome remarks that the special plenary was the "centrepiece" of the annual event and that "there was no inaugural of this annual conference".

The Prime Minister's speech was heard in rapt attention by the audience, comprising corporate leaders, diplomats and bureaucrats, who burst into a loud applause at these opening comments. He said that when people elected Parliament, they expected it to run for five years. And those mandated to sit in the Opposition were expected to play their due role. When the time came to elect a new Parliament, everyone had a chance to go back to the people, he said. Attempts in recent years to destabilise governments had neither helped the cause of business, nor done any good to democracy.

Mr. Vajpayee also criticised Ms. Gandhi's comments on Gujarat and secularism. "Yes, a tragedy is a tragedy," he said, adding that the crime perpetrated in Gujarat either in Godhra or elsewhere should not be belittled. The probe would be fair and the guilty would not go unpunished, irrespective of their community or organisation. At the same time, he felt that the tragedy should not be used to make "sweeping generalisations" that demoralised Indians and present a wrong picture of India abroad.

He said that the determination expressed by the Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha, to attain a seven to eight per cent GDP growth was not misplaced as the economy had achieved more than a mild recovery. In this context, he called for industry to "believe" in Mr. Sinha as he had earlier urged them to "believe in India".

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