Translate policy into practice
As a party, the Congress is a bundle of contradictions. In many ways, it is a conglomeration of corrupt and careerist crooks whose one-point programme is power. But, after the country – fed up with the Congress – gave the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a stint in power between 1998 and 2004, it found the latter was a ‘Party with no Difference’. Having unseated the BJP in 2004, the Congress was returned to power once more in 2009, despite anti-incumbency.
Why? For two reasons. Despite the party’s obvious venality, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is clean and incorruptible. Second, and more important, the Congress has a conscience, in the shape of its President Mrs Sonia Gandhi. She can’t keep the crooks of the Congress completely honest, but a healthy fear of falling foul of her approval has meant that the party has avoided any mega-scams sullying its image at the Centre, despite being in its second term in power.
Until the Commonwealth Games…
And that is a topic Mrs Gandhi addressed in the first meeting of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) during the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament, held on Thursday. She said categorically that as soon as the Games were over, she expected the government to investigate all malpractice allegations and to “spare no one found to be involved in them”.
But it is what Mrs Gandhi had to say about mining that was more relevant for Goa. Making a sharp attack on the “serious menace” of illegal mining, she said it had “profound political, economic and social implications” in states affected by tribal deprivation and left-wing extremism.
Only “fundamental innovations in the manner in which our mineral resources are exploited and our forests are managed” could help in dealing with the Maoist challenge, she said. Protecting the rights of tribals and ensuring their livelihood, she said, was central to ending “their exploitation and sense of alienation”.
But illegal mining is not restricted to the Maoist-affected states, and Mrs Gandhi knows this. Nor can it be ended only in those states. A recent study has shown that illegal mining is rampant in several states, and Goa’s name is prominent among them.
Illegal mining ought to be as much of a problem for legal miners as for the people it affects. It tends to give the entire industry a bad name, apart from creating unfair competition and lowering standards of compliance with regulations across the trade. That is why apart from people’s organisations active in the field, legal miners too should lend their voices to expose and shun those who shame their line of work.
It is true that all mining, whether it is legal or illegal, adversely affects the environment. But the fact is that to sustain civilisation and modern life, we need it. Without mining, there can be no steel. It is essential that miners mitigate, to the maximum extent possible, the environmental damage that their trade causes. But it is equally true that starry-eyed ultra-environmentalists, who naively believe that mankind can do away with mining altogether, will not have an eco-friendly bicycle to ride on if their dreams come true.
But we digress. The point is that though Mrs Gandhi acts as the conscience of the Congress, it is for the governments led by the party – both in the states and at the Centre – to listen to that ‘inner voice’ and act on it. The problem is that so many Congressmen in power are involved in illegal mining, for example, that the party’s governments tend to go in for window dressing rather than to strictly follow the policy laid down by their undisputed leader. Therefore, it is for other, more dedicated, Congressmen to intervene and pressurise their governments to translate the party’s policy into practice.
