by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
It is taken for granted that the monsoon session of Parliament, commencing today, will be consistent with the season; in other words, it is waiting to be washed out. The bone of contention is as predictable as the players. It is BJP V. Congress, or, more precisely, Prime Minister Narendra Modi V. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. The theme of the battle is also old. It is Modi's struggle to remove from the UPA's law in 2013 an obstructionist clause that requires consent of 70 per cent of landowners, including tenant farmers, before the government can use the land to make roads, flyovers, new railways tracks, etc. The NDA says it is largely due to this law that infrastructure growth in India came to a standstill since last year, and private industrial investment suffered even more as that requires an even larger extent of consent, 80 per cent. The bill is stuck in the Rajya Sabha for obvious reasons. Modi tried to get the better of his rivals last December by pushing a series of executive orders, or ordinances, removing the consent clause. But ordinance is no alternative to law.
While no civilized country of today will allow forcible acquisition of land, the problem is handled in most countries through direct negotiation between buyer and seller. Such negotiation often runs into what is known as the hold-out problem, with the owner of a handful of plots in a large basket of them actually holding out in expectation of the price climbing to stratospheric heights.
The US and some other countries have laws to get out of such sticky wickets, but after the Rahul Gandhi brigade made the UPA law so rigid that it left no room for controlling greedy spoilers, project costs began rising to unsustainable levels. Maybe Modi could improve upon his bill by bringing in a provision, as suggested by some economists, to let the unwilling land-seller take a similar plot somewhere in the neighbourhood of the project area but not within it. The owner of the alternative plot may agree to vacate it if he gets the generally attractive price in the project area.
But Gandhi and his supporters will not settle for anything but a return to their law. With only 44 seats in the Lok Sabha, Congress is looking at the land issue as the only prop that my save it from further slide into irrelevancy. The party will not heed to the argument of some of its own senior leaders that the rural masses, being no longer attached to agriculture and ill-paying professions in the villages, are migrating to cities; therefore, to the new generation of rural people, land may not be as emotive an issue as it used to be. Instead, Rahul Gandhi is frequently making a spectacle of himself by showing through his words and action that he has a bone to pick with Modi at a personal level. A few days back, he ridiculed the Prime Minister in a public rally in an intemperate language.
Modi has realized that, the arithmetic of Parliament's Upper House being what it is, the time has not yet come to pass the land acquisition bill, or even to hammer out a consensus with the non-Congress opposition parties. Politicians are after all not logical people.
They are fixated on votes and they think it will be electorally suicidal to support Modi's land bill until there is enough evidence that rural voters have indeed begun to think about the issue differently, and they are looking at land-ownership as an opportunity lost to make money and try something else.
Rahul Gandhi Narendra Modi Only a miracle can save the monsoon session
as doubts gained credence over BJP's ability to win long race
Modi has realized that, the arithmetic of Parliament's Upper House being what it is,
the time has not yet come to pass the land acquisition bill, or even to hammer
out a consensus with the non-Congress opposition parties. Politicians are after all not logical people. They are fixated on votes and they think it will be electorally suicidal to support Modi's land bill until there is enough evidence that rural voters have indeed
begun to think about the issue differently, and they are looking at land-ownership as an opportunity lost to make money and try something else.
This feeling is particularly strong among the parties that either are ruling over, or are strong, in states where assembly elections are due. Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal Chief Minister, has been unambiguous in announcing that her TMC party will not support the bill. And so have leaders of SP, despite its supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav's warm ties with the Prime Minister. Elections to the West Bengal assembly are due next year. In Uttar Pradesh, it is in 2017. Even AIADMK is opposed to the bill despite its leader J. Jayaalalitha having reasons to be thankful to Modi on several counts, including her present legal status in the disproportionate asset case. In Odisha, where Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik swept the assembly poll for the fourth time last year, land still remains a sticky issue. Posco, the South Korean steel giant that had been battling with Odisha government on land acquisition for the past ten years, is now saying that it may move its project to Maharashtra, a BJP-ruled state.
Modi has already started cutting losses by telling it wouldn't make a big difference with the new land acquisition bill now, and the government's focus has already shifted to the Goods and Services Tax (GST), a reform involving constitutional amendment.
It will be a miracle if the BJP is able to get any of the major legislations through during the Monsoon session. The dust will settle down or not will only be known only after the Bihar Assembly polls outcome in November. The BJP has put its entire might in Bihar and Modi is keeping his fingers crossed.
But it is clear that the Congress, with its considerable strength in the Upper House, Will not let even GST pass this monsoon. If Rahul Gandhi thinks Modi is an interloper in his family fief, it can remain his personal problem. But the low support that Modi is getting from other parties, including allies like SAD and Shiv Sena, shows that the "magic" of 2014 is receding. So intense is the doubt of BJP's ability to win long race that they are even willing to give some credence to the strident voice of a political novice who has nothing but a surname as his credential.
(The author is National Editor, Lokmat Group)
