The prime ministerial endorsement of the unsustainability of the current fuel price regime probably indicates political acceptance of the need for correction. The cabinet reportedly is to meet today to formally admit that the exchequer can?t carry the jerry can anymore. But how much of this final acceptance of reality, if indeed that turns out to be the case, is thanks to prime ministerial push? In the UPA, you never know whether the Congress is or isn?t backing what Dr Manmohan Singh is saying. That?s, bluntly, the message from the accumulated evidence of the last four years. Remember that oil prices have become publicly a Congress party-political affair, even the pretence of making it appear that it?s solely an executive decision was abandoned long back. Politically grounded prime ministers would not have countenanced this. Instructively, Dr Singh?s great USP, a true economic liberal, is almost forgotten these days. How the Congress leadership and Dr Singh worked out that he should remain ?apolitical??when his Rajya Sabha term ended he could have got elected to the Lok Sabha; surely the Congress could have found a safe seat for the PM?has never been clear but the result of that strategy is: by the ruthless calculus of politics, an economist-PM is less of an influence than an economist-politician-PM.
Appropriately, another leader, who has also been Union finance minister, and who has also frequently sought parliamentary legitimacy via the Rajya Sabha, also deserves our attention in the context of oil economics. Jaswant Singh has expressed dissatisfaction at Dr Singh?s support for an oil price hike. Need we remind Jaswant Singh that the BJP, while in power, had dismantled the dismantling of the administered price regime and having killed the reform, started the process of heavily politicising oil prices in the post-reform era. It was the BJP?s idea the Congress simply developed. Ram Naik, Jaswant Singh?s colleague in the NDA cabinet, holds the patent on ministerial micromanagement of oil prices. If politicians like Jaswant Singh, who have been finance ministers, will take cheap potshots over absolutely necessary, and long-delayed, economic corrections, the BJP cannot but be assessed as a party that?s often ready to pander to every ridiculous populist provocation.