The Rediff Special

'The Congress pushed a wedge between Hindus and Sikhs for 20 years. No more'

These are not Congressmen's concerns just now, however. There are greater fears of losing the elections to the Akali Dal (Badal)-Bharatiya Janata Party combine. Exactly a month after she was made chief minister last year, Rajinder Kaur Bhattal announced a Rs 6 billion poll package of free water and electricity to farmers and of octroi-abolishment. "She stole our poll promises," says Barnala. Parkash Singh Badal and other Akali heavyweights were shaken.

It is then that the new chief election commissioner, M S Gill, without consulting Bhattal or the other political parties, advanced elections by a month. That prevented Bhattal from implementing the package, and the Akalis were relieved. "Before that the Akalis were very worried," admits Dang, who has been pushing for a Communist alliance with the Congress.

Bhattal's other constraint is the corruption of her ministers. Parkash Singh Badal and L K Advani focused upon it in their speeches in Muktsar. Reference was also made to it in the Congress pandal. Brar, the former CM, and Santokh Singh Randhawa, the party's state president, said to reporters, within hearing perhaps of Bhattal sitting on the dais, that corrupt ministers be denied tickets. In the end, most of the tickets were decided in Delhi, and the choices are hardly exemplary.

In the 1992 elections, the Congress won 87 seats, a gain of 55 places from its tally in the 1985 polls, because Badal boycotted them. Congressmen won in places with less than a thousand votes. In the 1996 Lok Sabha election, however, assembly segment-wise, the Congress party was down to its old 1985 level, and the Akali Dal had lost a little of its old strength, some of it to the Bahujan Samaj Party.

A BSP-Congress alliance, with the two Communist parties coming in, would have provided a spirited challenge to the Akali-BJP combination. But this was not to be. The BSP's Kanshi Ram demanded nearly 50 seats, 25 of them in the Doaba region alone, where the Congress usually performs well, and this wasn't acceptable. Eventually, the Akali Dal (Mann) conceded his demands, and Kanshi Ram could now add Mann's admittedly dwindling Sikh votes to his own 26 per cent dalit votes. It will not help the Congress party very much, though.

A Communist-Congress alliance would have made a little difference but not much. The CPI's Punjab unit, especially Satpal Dang, was very keen on an alliance, and persevered till the last, but the CPI-M seemed less keen, with its general-secretary, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, exploring a -- clearly unviable -- third front and its state chief, Mangat Ram Palsa, harping on the Congress's corruption.

If Bhattal had pushed through her now-defunct Rs 6 billion, 50 point action plan, then the Akalis stood threatened in their main, 45 per cent rural constituency. Beant Singh had already robustly wooed rural voters, and a Akali joint Opposition candidate's slender, 2,000 vote victory in the Gidderbaha constituency against the Congress contender had shaken the Akalis.

Till before that, aside from the quirky 1992 elections, the Congress's strength lay in cities and towns. But after Beant Singh, and especially after Bhattal was denied her poll package, that new advantage was gone.

Now, the Congress's strength even in urban areas will get eroded with the BJP going with the Akali Dal. ''The Congress party had pushes a wedge between the Hindus and the Sikhs," said Captain Kawaljeet Singh, the Akali Dal strategist. "This had vitiated the atmosphere for the last 20 years. They played with the lives of the people. No more."

Five or ten years ago, few Akali politicians would have said as much. And, it is following the hesitation of the Congress party to use the peace card that the Akali Dasl-BJP campaign -- that terrorism began in Congress administrations stoked by Congress politicians -- is finding many new converts among the Congress's 35 per cent Hindu urban voters.

And, cutting across the urban rural divide, all over the state, the sharp wheat price-hike has produced great anger. Satpal Dang does try to diminish its significance, saying that this is because after eight years of good monsoons and yields, wheat production in the ninth year was less. But it won't wash.

It is not just that the farmer who sells wheat to the government at Rs 380 per quintal has to buy it back at Rs 900 per quintal. It is bad enough, of course, and has become the singlemost powerful Akali weapon to destroy the Congress party in this election. But Captain Kawaljeet Singh is determined to convince his more articulate voters that Punjab is deep in the throes of an agricultural decline through negligence of the central government, and he is not off the mark.

Narinder Singh Randhawa, the well-known agro-economist, who spent years at the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation, returning to Punjab less than a year ago, says ''Agricultural growth rate has declined (from 6.9 per cent between 1960-61 to 1980-81 to 4.5 per cent between 1980-81 to 1993-94), and there is a dangerous over use of fertilisers and insecticides. New strains of wheat and rice and new farming technologies are necessaary. A second Green Revolution is needed and it is not coming."

Should Bhattal, or any Congress state government, be answerable for this? Clearly not. But when the Akali Dal means to use this highly damaging assessment, it will clearly imply that it is the Congress party that has ruled the Centre for years that has created this situation. Being with a national party like the BJP, the Akali Dal will have necessarily to temper its criticism of the Centre. But it could get away with a lot by implication. And things are bad.

Professor Randhwa feels the diminished investments in agriculture in the 1980s, in dams, in canals, irrigation networks and so on, are now impacting in Punjab. The effect here is more pronounced that in other states because half its GDP derives from agriculture. His calculations also show that there is an 'indirect tax' of 30 per cent of Punjab's farmers (national average: 22 per cent) because he does not realise the full value from his wheat and paddy sales to government, the only big buyer. "And the terms of trade (loosely the purchasing power) have not improved at all," he says.

"None of this is justified under economic liberalisation," Professor Randhawa goes on. "Part of the problem arises from agriculture not having been liberalised as speedily not having been liberalised as speedily as the industry sector. There are still a lot of restrictions. You can't export anything you want. The internal price system is still biased against the farmer. So what you are getting is not optimum."