This was a dismal week as far as the Union Government was concerned. Suddenly, the ‘achievements’ of the last four years have become meaningless. All those guarantees for rural employment, and loan waivers, and still people go ticking you off for being compelled to pay a ‘wee’ bit more for the groceries……one wonders what would one have to do to impress these blokes! If the fuel price crisis wasn’t enough, what with the state petroleum companies literally on the deathbed, global crude prices at an all time high, and food prices zooming up faster than a ISRO satellite in space, the loss of Karnataka was the proverbial last straw. I bet that the boffins in the AICC must be scratching their heads or pulling their hair out (depending on whether they have a shiny pate or not), wondering aloud, “Can we possibly do any worse?”
Prices, and more particularly fuel prices, have always been a sensitive issue with governments; they could and have been seen to cause the downfall of many a government over the world. And in India, with our populist political class, which simply frowns on pragmatism and long-term vision (and that isn’t because nearly half of them are geriatrics who are more suited for a nursing home than for Parliament…), price hike considerations simply mean that you are left with two options: one, raise prices and commit political suicide, or let prices stay the way they are and compel the nation to undertake financial and economic suicide.
Surely suicide is a strong term here, you say? Hardly so. Let us evaluate each option more closely.
Fuel prices don’t just affect your ability to go for long drives along the Bandra Reclamation or Palm Beach Road (depending on which part of Mumbai you stay); they influence the logistics costs of transporting right about everything from tomatoes to horses to automobiles, and of course the tykes commonly known as ‘humans’. So, even an infinitesimally minute raise of just 0.000001% in the prices of automobile fuels would mean that the ‘crooked capitalists’, those ‘slaves of Mammon’, (to quote the Communists), would get yet another opportunity to raise prices for just about everything.
And we aren’t even looking at cooking fuels yet. Raise the prices for those, and you will have the populace marching to the Legislature, demanding that someone be scalped, guillotined, hung, drawn, quartered, and just for a thrill, cooked on a low flame using some expensive cooking fuel paid for from the bloke’s own pockets. And considering the propensity of our legislators to be ever so enterprising, those pockets are bound to be pretty deep, and the cooking ever so slow and tortuous (if not the cooking, the expense certainly would be…).
So let fuel prices be as they are. I mean, who on this earth wants things to be more expensive (other than those pesky capitalists, bourgeois rascals, out to make a buck at the proletariat’s expense)? So what if the state petroleum companies are going bankrupt? How dare they go broke? They have mismanaged themselves, that’s for sure……and now they want us to raise fuel prices to cover up their ineptitude? NO SIR! We may be stupid and impractical, buffoons and idiots of the highest order, conniving and snivelling rats, but we would be damned if we were to allow you to do what is right for you.
On a more serious note (and I want to end this blog with this), the energy crisis is finally looking the world in the face. Oil producers may be profiting from this sudden increase in global prices, but in the end, resentment against them is also increasing manifold. And where there is resentment, there is a sense of being betrayed, a modern day Dolchstoßlegende, and the last time such sentiments arose, calamity (read war) struck the land. Oil importers need to comprehend the fragile nature of their existence, being wholly dependent on the fuel being brought in. The time to face the energy crisis is now.
We need to understand that a government of the people does not seek to mollycoddle its people; it seeks to protect them, yes, but even a mother sometimes feels the need to punish her children. She doesn’t love them any less, but the beating is for their own good. So it is with fuel prices.
If we do not raise these prices now (or do something to ensure that we aren’t too way off the global price mark), we may end up endangering the health of the very enterprises that are meant to safeguard our future. Oil prices may drop in the near future, and consequently domestic prices also will drop. It is time we evaluated whether we will bear the prick of the injection now, or suffer the agony of an amputation later on. The choice is ours and ours alone to make. So choose wisely.
