The proposed White Paper shall surely hold Nehru responsible for the squalor in Bharat which has thrown up multitudes of the poor both in Bharat and India. But weren’t 10 years in absolute power enough time to provide homes with toilets to all poor families in the country? Or are we going to have Achche Din-1, Achche Din-2 ad infinitum/nauseam?
It is 1st March today-exactly a month since Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (NS) presented the Vote on Accounts (VoA) in parliament. Expectedly this was her shortest speech as FM. It was generally assumed that since this is an election year the 1st Feb address by the FM would be a formality and NS kept to the barest minimum. Further, the PM had earlier iterated that the VoA would only be a pointer to the proper budget his government would present (with NS in the same seat?) on July 24 when his boast/pledge of 400 par will have been embraced/shunned by the electorate. As things stand today the ruling NDA is oozing confidence that they will return. There is another carrot for those who understand economics and shadow the political economy-that the government will come out with a ’White Paper’ on the economy after its return: this seems to be a permanent rumour-it was assured in 2014 also. If it materialises this year, we don’t need an expert economist to forecast what it will be- essentially a ‘Black Paper” on the Nehruvian model of planned economy-such as it was!
Maybe by default NS needs to be complimented for not presenting a populist VoA with elections in sight. There was almost nothing to woo the voters. Being NaMo- driven like all her colleagues in the BJP and the cabinet she banked on the old hat over how NaMo’s successful Gujrat strategy is now being expanded successfully to India: deals to bring in foreign investors and in the same breath holding intimate talks with farmers and stunning them into silence by avowals of doubling/trebling their income or tell them that their income has multiplied according to official statistics of his 10 years.
NS might have made her shortest speech in parliament but she has been talking a lot outside it: at various forums and to the media. She seems to be resting on her laurels (actually NaMo’s?) after her successful completion of 5-year term as FM. Herself an economist, married to one, a JNU alumni despite being south Indian she has every reason to exalt and deserves our compliments for surviving an impetuous boss like NaMo for full five years. Naturally her utterances come with NaMo spice and flair. For incomplete/lagging projects she has the all too mundane ‘it is being expedited’ or ‘center cannot compel the states’ or ‘it is being looked into’. Like him she is sure that the pan-demic is history and India is one of the fastest growing economies and the entrepreneurs (such as there are) are upbeat. She also points out that the MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) sector is fast gaining momentum and shall be a hope for the future. In the same breath, rural artisans are also being looked after under the Vishwakarma Mission, NS adds. Inflation, the sensitive nerve of all FMs of all countries is within limits.
NS is an economist metamorphosed into a politician and as such has scant scare of the ‘experts’ and the shape they see the Indian economy is taking: L/U/Z or whatever! Ram is in Ayodhya, NaMo is in Delhi; both are going to continue unchallenged after the polls. The abysmal delays and conceits of the INDIA front are only improving the prospects of the incumbent government. It would be in order to look at the ‘pointers to economic policy’ that emerge from the iterations of NaMo and NS.
I know it is not child’s play to form a comprehensive economic policy for India, a people haunted with all kinds of inequalities which, till yesterday, were considered God-made and therefore to be lived with. Be it caste, religion, gender, employment (4 classes in State cadres), geography (Himalayan foothills as Dev Bhumi: Land of Gods) Indians take it as divinely ordained that equality is a mirage and human endeavour for it is wasteful. Further, and may be worse, is the presumption that unequal people also can live in harmony!
Does this ring a bell? It is the ideology underlying the RSS sponsored Samajik Samarasata Manch and all the myriad platforms to convert an unequal society into a harmonious one. It is also the raison d’etre of the sweet motto ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas.’ In short, pucca homes with tap – water, electricity, and toilet for the bottom and red carpet for the top. Jan Dhan sops and subsidized food grains for the farmer (who has been more sinned against than sinning) and state of art infrastructure for the investor. Let both stay apart and prosper according to their initial predicament. So let India and Bharat never change the MoU between them. Let the conflict of interest be blunted and diffused by a cunning political establishment posing as do-gooder to both. Further, monitor the society to forget blatantly unjust economic disparity by grand celebrations of cultural events, temples to icons (Krishna in Mathura to follow Ram in Ayodhya?), eulogies and co-opt all sorts of obscurantist godmen and so on.
If religion was the opium of the masses, equality is the opium of the secular democratic idealist?
Ponder GYAN for example: Garib-Yuva-Annadata-Nari: the poor, the youth, the food growers, and the women. NaMo is waxing eloquent over their uplift perhaps even while asleep. The question needs to be asked if they are really different? Don’t all belong to the farm sector that was subject to benign neglect (official phrase) under the Nehruvian model and continued to receive just sops and relief packages during the 10 years of NaMo. The farm sector’s share in GDP has appallingly fallen while it still has over half the population. Where did the urban slums come from? Did they fall from the sky? And why does the 10 old NaMo government still refuse to unshackle the farmers and treat them with respect as major contributors to the economy instead of hollow Annadata eulogies?
The proposed White Paper shall surely hold Nehru responsible for the squalor in Bharat which has thrown up multitudes of the poor both in Bharat and India. But weren’t 10 years in absolute power enough time to provide homes with toilets to all poor families in the country? Or are we going to have Achche Din-1, Achche Din-2 ad infinitum/nauseam?
If disparity and poverty are to stay put, what sort of social harmony are we looking forward to? By a realistic estimate India will have between 75 to 100 crores living just above or below the poverty line at mid-century. And they are going to oblige the power obsessed political establishment as the new vote banks. Economy will best serve the interests of business, industry, and service sectors (state supported crony capitalism?); it will satisfy the aspirations of the consumer sector and will provide ‘subsidised Life’ for the around 70 per cent of the population through a generous state! The State will no longer serve their lot by empowerment through skill developing education and creation of employment but help them to stay happy and optimistic where they are languishing. Survival will be their philosophy of life; they will be drugged into forgetting to aspire. They will not know even the spelling of Ambition!
If that is going to be the case, why did we take the trouble of creating a republic with a constitution that assured all sorts of liberties and equalities to all? Our constitution promised a life of Dignity to all. The present duality of economic policy will take us back to the middle age where the royalty together with the aristocracy lived in a world of filthy wealth and masses managed only to survive from day to day.
Leave aside equality as desirable and idealistic but it seems that very soon it might be thought preposterous to talk even of Egality!
A philosopher-politician (Gandhi?) is supposed to have quipped that his model for society would rather be the ocean than a mountain range: because the ocean covers the inequalities of depth while a mountain range makes difference in height vivid.
Fine words are these not? You do not mind the inequalities but want them to be covered under a misleading flat surface!! Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, in short!
(P S: Even as I finish this there is talk of a huge semiconductor plant coming to Poona: some 11 billion dollars worth. Thanks, on behalf of all Puneits but let the planners come and see how Poona is at the breaking point due to the greed of Vikas.)
- Vinay Hardikar
vinay.freedom@gmail.com
(The writer has been working in the public sphere of Maharashtra for the last five decades. His versatile personality has several dimensions, but the primary ones remain to be that of an established writer, journalist, editor, critic, activist, and teacher.)
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