Faced with protests from farmers, the government on Tuesday decided to lift the ban on onion exports.
The decision to permit shipment of onions was taken by the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) on food headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee here.
“Ban on onion export has been lifted,” union minister for science and technology Vilasrao Deshmukh told reporters while emerging from the meeting.
Those who attended the crucial meeting included agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and food and consumer affairs minister K V Thomas.
The government had imposed a ban on onion exports on 9 September to check its spiralling prices which touched Rs. 25 a kg in retail in the national capital.
The minimum export price (MEP) on onions has been fixed at $475 per tonne, the same level when the government decided to prohibit the shipment of onion, Deshmukh said.
“The situation will be reviewed after a fortnight,” he said.
While the ban on exports had an instant impact in bringing down the wholesale prices of the onions by Rs. 2-5 per kg in Delhi, the decision had triggered protests from farmers in the key producing regions of Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Farmers in Nashik district and Bangalore had refused to bring their produce to markets protesting the drop in their profit level due to ban on onion export.
The farmers’ agitation forced the government to take a fresh look on the onion export ban.
Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi on Monday ended a three-day fast seen as an attempt to bury his controversial past and promote him as a serious prime ministerial contender.
The Gujarat chief minister, accused of complicity in anti-Muslim riots that swept the state in 2002, broke his self-styled “harmony” fast by sipping juice given to him by Hindu, Muslim and Christian supporters.
“My fast may have ended but my mission has not. My ‘harmony´ mission has united all of India,” Modi declared to a crowd in an air-conditioned auditorium in Gujarat’s main commercial city of Ahmedabad.
India’s next general election is almost three years away, but the race for prime ministership may have already begun.
Many top leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is India’s main opposition party, attended the launch of the fast in Ahmedabad.Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, started a three-day fast on Saturday—his 61st birthday—purportedly to bring peace, prosperity and harmony to a state he has ruled for nearly a decade. But the manner in which the fast has been played up as a national event reflects its larger political significance.
Some other parties in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) also sent representatives.
The fast, analysts say, is Modi’s springboard from which he is launching himself as the BJP’s, and possibly the NDA’s, prime ministerial candidate at a time when the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is battling a spate of corruption scandals and a leadership crisis.
Using the fast as a launch vehicle has symbolic value: the UPA recently buckled under the pressure of an indefinite fast by activist Anna Hazare to bring crucial changes to a proposed corruption law.
The stated purpose of the fast, bringing harmony to Gujarat, also deals with what many perceive to be Modi’s Achilles’ heel—his poor record in maintaining inter-community relations in the state.
The 2002 blot
Within six months of Modi taking over as chief minister in October 2001, Gujarat faced its worst hour. More than 1,000 people were killed in months-long communal riots that started after the burning of a train carrying Hindu devotees at the Godhra station in February 2002.
Many victims of the riots were Muslims, and critics accused the Modi government of not just failing to keep them safe but also of tacitly supporting Hindu rioters in an attempt to polarize the electorate and win state assembly elections due later that year.
Whether the polarization was intentional or incidental, Modi then reaped its rewards. The BJP won by a handsome margin, and he became the poster boy of its hardliners, or the supporters of its right-wing Hindutva ideology.
