Forgetting One's Onions

To know one's onions: be fully knowledgeable or experienced —The Concise Oxford Dictionary

FOR months now, we have been innocent bystanders to a national fiasco. For months now, onion prices have been beating one previous record after another, and our governments—Central and state—have been unable to do anything about it. The administrative failure has been total. For months, our governments have been gibbering helplessly, with their rhetoric swinging sharply from cocky optimism—"Prices will fall in the next seven days"—to frustrated outbursts—last week, Delhi's food and civil supplies minister Poornima Sethi called R.K. Sharma, general secretary of Delhi's Potato and Onion Merchants Association, a "scoundrel". The net result: zero; the price continues to rise.

Indeed, the results of the upcoming state elections could hinge far more on the dirty-pink onion than the saffron mushroom cloud. Through its tardy response to the onion issue, the BJP has handed its enemies a potent weapon on a platter. For, traditionally, the innocuous onion has had great symbolic value in the hands of politicians. To the poorest of the poor in India, a meal means a roti or rice with an onion. For the large majority of India's middle class families, especially in the north, an onion is the basic tang-lender to food. People take it for granted: when onions become too expensive, the housewife considers it a violation of her fundamental rights. All this makes the current mess all the more confounding. After all, surely Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani haven't forgotten that in 1980, Mrs Gandhi swept back to power using rising onion prices as a major poll plank? Thus had collapsed the first non-Congress attempt to rule India, a government in which Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani were ministers.

So why did this happen? Well, like the onion itself, the ongoing crisis seems to have several layers to it. The top one's the original—and now well-known—reason for the rising prices: widespread crop failure, especially in Maharashtra, which accounts for 30 per cent of India's production. Peel that layer off, and we find a shocking administrative apathy/incompetence. Doesn't our agriculture ministry have any early warning systems, any contingency plans? There's some time lag between a crop failure and the results showing up in the retail vegetable market, enough time for a government to take decisive action to minimise the impact. Aren't the agriculture and the food and civil supplies ministries in communication with each other? And while onions have been in serious short supply within the country, India has been happily exporting the stuff to East Asia!

Don't our bureaucrats know that the people who respond the fastest to a supply shortfall of almost anything in India are the hoarders and blackmarketeers? What has the government done to stop these people, who've been laughing all the way to the bank for four months now? And why couldn't the decision to import onions be taken earlier? Is anyone in charge here?

The nadir of onion crisis management has of course been plumbed by the government of Delhi, where the price has risen five times in one year, from Rs 8 in October last year to Rs 40 now. As the crisis has built up, government officials have never seemed to have any  clear idea of how much of the stuff was coming into Delhi, how much the demand was, and what should be done.

On October 5, an official announced that the price per kg would drop to Rs 8 within a week (I'm writing this on October 8, and the price is still Rs 40, and there are reports that it has risen even higher in some areas). On October 6, in an ironical twist (Delhi is after all a BJP-ruled state), two truckloads of Pakistani onions reached the capital's wholesale market at Azadpur to add to the city's supply from Maharashtra. The government also said that more would be arriving soon from Dubai and Iran. The next day, the civil supplies minister was saying the crisis was all a Congress conspiracy. In the meantime, the government started distributing onions through mobile vans all around the city at Rs 10 per kg. Not surprisingly, since this supply was far less than demand, canny arbitrage experts bought from the vans and sold in the open market at Rs 40, and made enormous profits. Genuine consumers who couldn't lay their hands on anything after standing in line for hours attacked some mobile vans and roughed up van personnel. Any fool could have predicted this turn of events.

UNDER this layer of administrative idiocy lies the dark core of growing public suspicion. Everyone knows onions are being hoarded; this is pushing prices up. The government itself has acknowledged this. So what's it doing about it? Increasingly, the average Indian is being forced to believe that a BJP government is unable to take any effective action against hoarders because traders form a very vital core of its vote bank. These are the people who've financed the party's rise to power and now want returns on their investment, catching the BJP government in the proverbial cleft stick.

If this isn't true, then the BJP government has handled the issue with remarkable incompetence, and is every day managing to alienate larger and larger numbers of people who voted them to power. Yes, this government has been beset from its first day in office with economic problems not of its own making: problems that can be directly traced back to the decisions Manmohan Singh took in his last two years as finance minister, and Chidambaram's flashy but hollow reforms. But this is one crisis it can blame no one for. And the administrative failure to deal firmly with the onion problem could turn out to be very costly for the BJP indeed.