The question is not if we can do this. We have to do this.” These words of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the spirit behind the Food Security Bill, encapsulated both the enormity, and expense, of the task of providing subsidised food grains to 75 per cent of the population, and the compulsion to do it.
Since Independence In-dia has struggled to make things better for its toiling masses.
The Right to Life is enshrined in the Consti-tution as a Fundamental Right. But what is life without sufficient food, education, health and employment?
The task was so humongous, that even the founding fathers of the Constitution restricted themselves to listing these under the Directive Principles of State Policy, desirable goals to be achieved by the Indian State.
Successive leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru through Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao to Atal Behari Vajpayee, have doubtlessly left their stamp on history, but it was left to the incumbent government to give legal backing to the dreams of the framers of the Constitution.
In 2004, when the Congress came to power, the government was presented both with a platform for take-off, after 15 years of liberalisation, and a nagging set of problems that held it back.
Mrs Gandhi, the guiding spirit behind the Man-mohan Singh government, appears to have game-planned solutions with years of research through the Rajiv Gandhi Foun-dation. As head of the National Advisory Coun-cil, Mrs Gandhi had the opportunity, having spur-ned the chance to be Prime Minister, to guide the agenda for the government.
There is a quartet of legislation inspired by Mrs Gandhi that has changed the way administration and governance is done. First off was the Right to Information (RTI) Act, something that civil society had been struggling for years. It was only Mrs Gandhi’s persuasion that the Manmohan Singh government enacted the law, even if has come back to sting the very same administration.
The legislation guaranteeing rural employment has changed the face of the countryside, jacking up rural wages but also, it is said, causing inflation due to rising demand. The matter was stuck with the labour ministry, but Mrs Gandhi impressed upon the Prime Minister to shift it to the rural development ministry. She even helped the then minister Raghu-vansh Prasad Singh in drafting the law through her NAC.
Dr Prasad admits that had “she been not there, MGNREGA would never have seen the light of the day.”
Then came Right to Education, giving the constitutional right to education. The internal dynamics of the government with late Arjun Singh as the human resource development minister were such that the legislation too faced hiccups. There again was Mrs Gandhi to push it through, some say with an NGO zeal.
On the Food Security Bill, there were indications that even the Prime Minister had reservations besides agriculture minister Sharad Pawar. It took all of Mrs Gandhi’s strength of conviction to negotiate the legislation over all hurdles, and the dismay of Corporate India, and earning, in the process, a place in history.