As a diligent political columnist, I considered it my duty last week to watch the release of the Congress Party’s election manifesto from start to finish. It made for dismal watching. The leaders of our oldest political party looked defeated and frail. And some promises that they made in their speeches sounded as if they had been taken directly from Narendra Modi’s recent election rallies. It startled me to find that even the words seemed borrowed. Modi is given to using the word ‘guarantee’ a lot these days, so it would have been wise to at least not use this word. Instead, it was used so many times by the Congress Party’s senior leaders that a reporter asked afterwards what the difference was between Congress guarantees and Modi’s guarantees.
More worrying for me was that some ideas in the Nyaya Patra (Justice Letter) seemed copied from Modi. The Prime Minister has been saying since the beginning of this election season that in his eyes the four castes in India are: youth, women, farmers, and the poor. The Congress President spoke of the four pillars of the party manifesto being: youth, women, farmers, and workers. His speech was received with such apathy by his colleagues that he asked in a sad voice if people had ‘forgotten how to clap’.
When it came to Rahul Gandhi’s turn to speak, he repeated what he has said many times since the last general election. He said that Indian democracy and the Indian Constitution have never been more endangered than they are today. This is something that international democracy watchdogs have often pointed out. Some have gone to the extent of declaring that India is already an ‘elected autocracy’. It is an important issue for our main opposition party to raise. But Rahul has raised it so often, that his message has become devitalised from overuse.
What worries me most about the Nyaya Patra is that the Congress Party’s economic worldview has moved so radically to the Left that it is beginning to sound like the Communist Party. The Marxists also released their manifesto last week and they talked of reversing privatisation and introducing strict new taxes on the rich. The Congress Party, mercifully, has not gone that far, but has ‘guaranteed’ that unemployed educated young people will be given jobs or apprenticeships worth a lakh of rupees a year. Every Indian woman will also be guaranteed an annual gift of a lakh of rupees. If taxpayers’ money is spent recklessly on largesse of this kind, where will the money come for building airports, roads, hospitals and universities? A question that the Congress Party must ask itself.
India’s tragedy is that there has rarely been a more urgent need for a strong opposition party than there is now. Modi is very good at hyping his ‘guarantees’ and the purported achievements of his government, but the truth is that there are millions of Indians who continue to live in abject poverty. I met some of them last week in a village in Maharashtra. And I would like to describe for you the conditions in which this Adivasi community lives in one of our most developed states.
The first thing I noticed was that there was not a single house that could be described as a house. There were shacks made of waste material, so walls were of plastic and discarded political posters, and roofs made of strips of waste metal that seemed as if retrieved from abandoned construction sites. I asked people why they had not qualified for the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. They said that some had received money under Modi’s vaunted scheme, but the amount allowed per household is Rs 1,20,000 and to build a simple one-room house would cost at least Rs 3,00,000.
When I asked about Modi’s other celebrated schemes, I learned that the Ujjwala Yojana had provided most households with a gas cooker, but a gas cylinder costs more than Rs 900, so people have been forced to go back to old-fashioned cooking. Outside every house lay piles of wood gathered from a nearby forest. The only welfare scheme that has helped them is the free rations of food grain that they get every month and without which they would not be able to survive.
At the end of this depressing tour, I asked what their biggest problem was. In one voice, the men and women who had gathered around said ‘water’. They are forced to buy water from tankers that charge exorbitant rates because there is yet not the smallest sign that piped water will become available as ‘guaranteed’. I meant to ask if they had benefited from the scheme that provides cash subsidies to build toilets, but when I saw the fragile, makeshift homes I did not dare ask such a stupid question.
The Congress Party should have been able to benefit from this failure to lift millions of our citizens out of poverty. But polls indicate that it is unlikely to. Could it be because the solutions that Congress offers are those same old ones? Scraps off the political high table as charity in the form of freebies. What people living in extreme poverty need are the tools to escape poverty: good schools, decent hospitals and jobs. What they do not need is ‘alleviation’ of their poverty. The Congress manifesto indicates that its leaders have not learned this.
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India’s tragedy is that there has rarely been a more urgent need for a strong opposition party than there is now
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07.04.2024
As a diligent political columnist, I considered it my duty last week to watch the release of the Congress Party’s election manifesto from start to finish. It made for dismal watching. The leaders of our oldest political party looked defeated and frail. And some promises that they made in their speeches sounded as if they had been taken directly from Narendra Modi’s recent election rallies. It startled me to find that even the words seemed borrowed. Modi is given to using the word ‘guarantee’ a lot these days, so it would have been wise to at least not use this word. Instead, it was used so many times by the Congress Party’s senior leaders that a reporter asked afterwards what the difference was between Congress guarantees and Modi’s guarantees.
More worrying for me was that some ideas in the Nyaya Patra (Justice Letter) seemed copied from Modi. The Prime Minister has been saying since the beginning of this election season that in his eyes the four castes in India are: youth, women, farmers, and the poor. The Congress President spoke of the four pillars of the party manifesto being: youth, women, farmers, and workers. His speech was received with such apathy by his colleagues that he asked in a sad voice if people had ‘forgotten how to clap’.
When it came to Rahul Gandhi’s turn to speak, he repeated what he has said many times since the last general election. He said that Indian democracy and the Indian........
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