Tamasha Politics
Won’t Fill Bellies
The way out of the economic quick-sand we find ourselves in
is through promoting growth unabashedly. This might seem obvious, but the UPA
Government has not been able to find a way over the last five years. Economic growth,
above all else, is what Narendra Modi stands for, and is offering the nation if
the NDA is elected into power. And he has a track record to back up his ideas
over 15 years of good governance, and without
the corruption that has been endemic in UPA rule.
All of big business in India, much of small and medium enterprise
too, backs his vision. So does foreign business interested in India. Ditto for
the FII community, as well as the prospective flood of new FDI money. International rating agencies have
stated their confidence about the Indian economy going forward under NDA rule,
but not so under other dispensations. The domestic stock market has been reflecting this
preference as well. And the construction industry is holding its breath and
marking time like all of business and industry.
Narendra Modi’s Gujarat has seen over 10% growth per annum
in Gujarat year- on- year. There is a visible prosperity in Gujarat, and signs
of substantial progress no matter where one looks. NaMo and the NDA now seeks
to spread this prosperity all over the country and sustain it over the coming
years. It is a thoroughly believable pitch in consonance with the aspirations
of India’s young population.
Everything else, all the other ingredients that are
competing for prominence: transparency, governance, reduction in corruption,
less VIP culture, more connection with ordinary people, etc. are ancillaries to
the main objective of growth. To put it another way, desirable as they are,
will all the other things put together make up for the lack of progress that is
emblematic of the present picture? Without growth how will the country be able
to make progress in future? And yet,
neither the Congress, nor any other political party seems particularly bothered
about growth in this election season, with the exception of a NaMo led NDA.
The Socialist Nehru/ Indira Gandhi/ latter part of the Sonia
Gandhi era, have all been big on ‘social justice’ without being able to deliver
any, except in the form of fiscally damaging subsidies and freebies. They have
delivered dismal growth rates of around 2% or less, the present dispensation
reducing an 8% GDP to 4%, and this has driven India deeper and deeper into
chronic poverty and backwardness. This sad economic performance has nevertheless
been accompanied by a laughable hauteur and liberal pontification on how the
rest of the world should conduct itself!
India, for all its size and potential, has been ignored and
derided for all the 66 years since Independence as a consequence. It is, even today,
neither a practical force of any kind in world affairs, nor a particularly
reliable ally, except in a wordy, theoretical and preachy manner.
The last time it showed the world anything of acknowledged
value was when Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence helped secure India’s independence,
bracketed though it was with Netaji Subhas Bose’s more robust opposition, and
the ravages of the Second World War. The post-colonial Indian experience is
characterised with performance that is uniformly below par despite pockets of
excellence and achievement. While we are a nuclear power and missile builders,
capable of a demonstrated degree of scientific achievement etc., our social and
developmental performance has been constantly blighted by the chimera and
confidence- trick of Socialism.
And the world’s
Communist regimes have fared even worse, every one of them. China, the one that
got away, succeeded only when it dumped its unworkable Communist ideology in
economic matters.
The present political discourse is, once again, in danger of
losing the woods for the trees. India, ill served by Socialism, nevertheless
lets the virus run on strong in its veins. It is suspicious of business and
industry led growth because of long and unfair indoctrination and brainwashing.
Every national election, in five years or sometimes less,
tends to become yet another referendum on competitive Socialism, rather than a
robust comparison of which party has the best blueprint to lead this country
into prosperity. The Indian psyche is somehow ashamed of thinking rich. Instead
there is always a melodramatic orgy of emotion expressed on misery,
deprivation, injustice, corruption, poverty, class and caste and communal
violence, fear-mongering, and so on, without any thirst for the cure for these age-old
problems. We like to deliberately muddy the water rather than commit ourselves
to growth like the Japanese and Koreans did, or like the Chinese today who are
well on their way to becoming the world’s number one economy in times to come.
So once again, as the media, ever keen on a juicy story to
follow, chronicles the daily tamasha on
populism being perpetrated, we need to remember that constant Socialist
experimentation can become ruinously expensive and destabilising . Publicity-seeking
on the basis of a facile righteousness will not bring home the prosperity we
need. There is, now, once more, a great outcry against corruption, and a
Socialist emotiveness about ‘democracy’.
But in all of this, there is little or nothing being said by
any of the political parties other than the NDA, about our poor economy getting
worse on all parameters by the day. And if this is not addressed by the new Government
in 2014, most of our dreams of equity and social justice just cannot be
realised.
(911 words)
January 12th,
2014
Gautam Mukherjee
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