From bang to whimper

From bang to whimper through dither and fisticuffs within the ruling coalition — that has been the story of disinvestment this year.
Disinvestment minister Arun Shourie sold off a clutch of companies including VSNL and IPCL over the first six months of the year, and got Suzuki to cough up Rs 1,000 crore as control proemium for Maruti.
Thereafter, the disinvestment process skidded off-course.
They blamed it on an oil slick. Members of the ruling party and the ruling coalition could not agree on the whys and whereofs of disinvesting petro PSUs HPCL and BPCL.
The specific disageement over the oil PSUs turned out to be the symptom of a larger malaise which broke out as a rash of objections to divestment in other companies but went beyond privatisation.
The disease has been traced to a germ called Swadeshi which sometimes mutates into a Socialist variant.
Extreme manifestations of its damage include delirium and hallucination about big, bad MNCs gobbling up innocent Indian businessmen and the Indian peasantry or whatever is left of them after an alien monster called the WTO and sundry geneticaly modified organisms have finished with them.
The net result is that the political leadership’s ability to get on with disinvestment has become a test of its ability to vanquish this germ within the body politic that seeks to kill the entire economic reform programme.
The test, or rather the contest within the ruling dispensation, will continue in the year to come as well.
In February, the government cleared the sale of IBP to Indian Oil Corporation and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd to Tatas. The next week, Paradeep Phosphate was sold below the reserve price in a politically very bold move.
And a fortnight later, Jessop & Co Ltd was sold to to Ruia Cotex.
The sale of Hindustan Zinc to Sterlite Industries a month later was followed by a small pause. But the action picked up again in mid-May, when Suzuki Motors agreed to a control premium of Rs 1,000 crore for Maruti Udyog Ltd. Suzuki also agreed to underwrite the public issues of government.
Later in the same week, Indian Petrochemical Corporation Ltd was sold to Reliance Industries, overriding objections of monopoly and misgivings of fertiliser minister SS Dhindsa. Along the way more than a dozen hotels of ITDC and Airport Centaur, Mumbai were also sold.
Oil PSUs HPCL and BPCL were to be sold off and so were Nalco, Shipping Corporation of India, Engineers India Ltd, National Fertiliser Ltd and Hindustan Organic Chemicals Ltd and a clutch of smaller PSUs besides.
In June, political opposition to the sell-off moves started gathering steam. Petroleum minister Ram Naik found allies in defence minister George Fernandes and human resources development minister Murali Manohar Joshi.