The Congress is making heavy weather of deciding on a fuel price hike. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and other party brass had another meeting.
Cong has another meeting on fuel price hike
NEW DELHI: The Congress is making heavy weather of deciding on a fuel price hike. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and other party brass had another meeting on Sunday, as a follow up to Saturday’s CWC meet. At the end of it, all AICC general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi would say was “A decision [on the petrol price hike] will be taken only after consulting UPA allies”. The Congress Working Committee has apparently given a conditional go-ahead for a small price hike.
The core group on Sunday is learnt to have discussed ways to evolve a “comprehensive package” on subsidies in consultation with the allies. On Saturday, external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, the interlocutor with the Left, gave a presentation on the subsidies the government is providing in different fields.
Mukherjee said oil companies had to spend more than Rs200,000 crore on subsidies while the government’s bill for various subsidies was around Rs1,43,000 crore.
Finance minister P. Chidambaram is not a member of the CWC and hence was not present at the meeting.
The PM gave a detailed account of the international situation and said there was no need to panic and “our situation is not as bad as in many other countries.” He said the state governments also had a responsibility in curbing prices by taking steps to guard against hoarding.
Even as Singh said care would be taken to ensure the burden on the people was kept to the minimum, HRD minister Arjun Singh, in a veiled attack, said inflation cannot be wished away. He said price rise was one major reasons for the party’s dismal performance in Karnataka.
But several other members said price rice was not the main cause and there were a number of other factors. Senior member from Karnataka C.K. Jaffar Sharief, who had, irked with high command’s denial of a party ticket to his grandson, threatened to quit the party on the eve of elections, circulated a note calling for a “thorough introspection” to find out reasons for the electoral rout.
G. Venkataswamy, senior party leader from Andhra Pradesh and a strong advocate of a separate Telangana state, raised the statehood issue and warned of a “Karnataka type” situation in Andhra Pradesh. With no support coming from the CWC, sources said he created a flutter threatening to walk out of the meet. Undeterred by the dismal performance of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti in the byelections, Venkataswamy repeated his warning on Sunday.
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