Date:15/04/2003 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2003/04/15/stories/2003041505071100.htm

National

SJM on warpath again

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI APRIL 14. The RSS-affiliated Swadeshi Jagran Manch is again on a warpath. Today, it signalled an all-out attack on the Government's economic policies, especially disinvestment and the lowering of tariffs on imports, over the next two months through countrywide "sangharsh yatras".

The SJM which had at one time been vocal in opposing the Government, has more recently been less critical.

After the Government decided several years ago to open up the insurance sector to foreign direct investment a kind of uneasy truce had been negotiated between the Manch and the BJP via the good offices of some RSS leaders. But it seems that the RSS has once again given the SJM the "go-ahead" for an attack on the Government's economic agenda.

The founder of the SJM and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a labour union of the BJP, Dattopant Thengdi, charged the Vajpayee Government with following policies under pressure from the World Trade Organisation and the "white man's" developed countries.

"Workers are on the streets without jobs, farmers are committing suicide," he said, announcing that from today, for two months, the SJM would organise "sangharsh yatras" throughout the country to create the right public opinion against the stifling WTO policies ahead of its September meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

Mr. Thengdi did not spare the Congress either. He pointed out that it was under a Congress Government that the country had got on to the WTO, and this had proved ruinous for India's small scale industry since tariffs on imported goods had come down and multinational corporations had been allowed entry into numerous sectors of the economy, including some that had been earlier reserved for the small scale sector.

In a reference to what the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had said earlier that there was no one born in India who could or would sell this country, Mr. Thengdi warned that Governments which forgot history, forgot the traitors "Jaichands and Mir Jafars", would come to grief.

Mr. Thengdi's colleague and SJM convener, P. Muralidhar Rao, said the manch had a political agenda which was part of a national mission.

He warned that if the Government did not mend its economic policy "we will try to put together an alternative.'' In a statement, Mr. Thengdi and Mr. Rao said that Government expenditure on transport, energy, education and health was declining.

Half of the Centre's revenues and one fourth of that of the State Governments was spent on payment of interest on debts. The governments were caught in a debt trap.

The number of sick small scale industrial sector units had increased from two lakhs to three lakhs by 1999, they said.

However, the BJP leader and former convener of the party's economic cell, Jagdish Shettigar, countered this by saying that the manch was possibly looking at old statistics.

Asked for his reaction to the critical stance of the manch, Mr. Shettigar pointed out that the recent report of the National Sample Survey showed that the number of workers employed in the small scale sector had increased by 20 lakhs.

"Swadeshi" policies should mean economic policies that were in the national interest, and the Vajpayee Government had done nothing that was against the national interest, he maintained.