‘Public-Private Partnership has built-in incentives for corruption’

AAP leader Prashant Bhushan says the party is not anti-business, but against unbridled privatisation and runaway populism

Q You have stirred a hornet’s nest. Deployment of the Army in Kashmir is not a bijli-pani issue.

A There is a difference between Army deployed for external defence, and for internal security. If it is supposed to be used for the internal security of people, then should you not have the consent of the people [who live] where it is deployed? Any reference to a referendum shouldn’t be misconstrued to mean a plebiscite on Kashmir’s relationship with India. Kashmir is an integral part of India.

Q Is AAP devoid of ideological moorings?

A We have a basic political outlook that you may call our ideology. Those who get elected are servants of the people. They are not masters entitled to lord over them; this leads to [the] hijacking of decision-making, and creates grounds for crony capitalism. We are for participatory democracy, where the Government makes decisions based on the will of the people. In other words: decentralised direct democracy.

Q The discoms, Reliance and Tata, are worried about their business interests in Delhi thanks to the new AAP government…

A Selling power is a big money spinner. This so-called PPP (Public Private Partnership) model is a State-created private monopoly, which is supposedly regulated by a regulator. Inflating [the] power tariff by 50 paise leads to thousands of crore of profit every year. There is a big incentive to compromise for the regulator (Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission), to overlook [the] fudging of records to show artificial losses and inflate electricity bills at the expense of consumers. This model has created in-built incentives for corruption. Consumers are being made to pay more and more because they have no choice. This has to change.

Q Is AAP anti-corporate?

A No, we are not against business. We are for clean business. We are against unbridled privatisation.

Q Does the AAP support a greater role for the State, or some form of socialism?

A Liberalisation was justified by saying that it [would] end the Licence-permit Raj and curb corruption. But that has not happened. Earlier, you could take bribes to the extent of the profits the newly licensed businessmen could make from their business, which was, say, 10 per cent of revenues.

Liberalisation opened up any kind of business to [the] transfer of capital assets and natural resources from the State to private hands—land, mines, coal, water, even public sector units worth thousands of crore—for a song. Here, the profits are virtually unlimited. There was suddenly a quantum jump of a hundred times over the profits being earned earlier. Bofors was a Rs 64 crore scam—nothing in comparison with scams like 2G and Coalgate [worth] thousands of crore.

…A new class of businesses have grown making absolutely horrendous profits out of the transfer of capital assets from the public sector, or from the State, or from the people, to themselves. All monopolies were in the State sector, but in this liberalisation phase, we created private monopolies.

Q Is AAP employing populist means to garner votes? Is fiscal prudence not a consideration?

A Is providing for people’s needs populist? This is absurd. The state of primary education and health infrastructure is in shambles. Public utilities are about to collapse. We want to follow a model of cross-subsidisation [the practice of charging higher prices of a richer group of consumers in order to artificially lower prices for poorer consumers]. It is not unbridled populism. Fiscal prudence is an important consideration.

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Mihir Srivastava