Congress Is All Gas And Gaiters

Congress Is All Gas And Gaiters

It would be a welcome surprise to find the Gandhi trio,  now in full chorus, speak occasionally out of their own heads, instead of mouthing carefully crafted PR lines. These currently are fixated on a compulsive obsessive rendering of references to ‘ideology’ and ‘secularism’, with no mention whatsoever of development, governance or progress. Not even of the Jean Dreze/Amartya Sen variety, full of sanctimonious sentiment, that animated the thinking in the Sonia Gandhi led NAC. These worthies too are presently missing-in-action and not providing any covering fire from afar either.

The sad and defensive PR lines however are classic deflection under pressure, because the BJP and Narendra Modi have stolen a substantial march over the Congress on all economic issues that matter to the population. Narendra Modi has long taken a page out of Jagdish B hagwati and Arvind Panagariya’s line of reformist market- economics, in Gujarat. And this, epitomized by his ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ line, and other aspects of his development vision, explained simply by him during the campaign, is now resonating with a national electorate, yearning for a change in both government and governance.

The Gandhi trio needs to understand people cannot eat either their warped notion of ideology or their self-serving version of secularism. Helicoptering and air dropping versions of caring for the poor do not wash. Not even the Muslims they are desperately targeting can make a meal out of empty rhetoric and melodrama about povertarianism.  They are not willing to vote for Congress, having been badly let down in every way, even if they refuse to come over substantially into the Lotus fold just yet.

The Left has been pushed to the wall in Bengal and Kerala precisely for indulging in this very kind of sloganeering, election after election, without delivering food, employment or social justice as promised. And Congress ought to know better, after fooling the people for 56 years, that this time the old line will simply not work. They have already lost the Dalits, and now they will decisively lose the Muslims too.

The country has changed so much under its very nose, that discredited and clueless leaders like the Gandhis, and the slavish Congress Party that follows them, are both headed for an electoral drubbing and decisive dismissal.

Meanwhile, with a month to go, unconvinced still, and complacent that this particular confidence trick pulled on a trusting people is a winning formula, Congress is trying it yet again. Besides, the Gandhis, unwilling to risk displaying their towering ignorance of ground realities, like sticking to the script, and dutifully trot out what’s in it.  

To illustrate how mere Congress style hot air does not fill bellies, let us note that we have an estimated 30 per cent unemployment rate, huge and damning by any standards, and higher than the presently economically ravaged West by  more than 10 per cent. Comparisons can possibly be made with Sub-Saharan Africa and other very badly run parts of the world!

Let us also note that India has some 25 million people working and living abroad, many of them Muslims working in the Gulf, some still citizens of this country, and others who are part of the diaspora; and together, last year, they sent in $70 billion for their families and dependents here in India. This is according to the World Bank. This sum is $ 5 billion more than India earned from its total software exports in the same period, and the largest inward remittance from any ethnic diaspora in the world. Chinese abroad, with similar family values, sent in $60 billion last year to our $70 billion. In this, if nothing else, we are indeed ahead of China.

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves why so many Indians live and work abroad in the first place if not for better opportunities there. If the Congress has done a good job of administering this country over so many decades, given our natural resources and strengths, people would be flocking to India from all over the world instead.  But, in reality we have a huge unemployed and dependent population that is literally fed and clothed by these inward remittances. Inward remittances build houses, pay medical bills of elders, send small children to school, for many, particularly in Communist Kerala with almost zero job creation for decades! Even Chidambaram’s economy counts on it for foreign exchange and hard currency reserves, dependable for its consistency over the years.

It underlines however that despite a huge demographic dividend we are unable to generate a sufficient number of jobs in country, let alone well paid ones, in business, industry, government, or in any other field. This is not only a time bomb but yet another signal failure of the UPA over the last ten years. And no amount of welfarism can provide more than a subsistence, given our huge numbers, provided the programmes and systems are well run, as in three-term winning Raman Singh’s Chhattisgarh. 

But if one looks at the 11 states currently run by Congress, the massive welfare schemes thought up by the Gandhis as their trump card, are not being properly implemented.  All the B JP run states and those in the care of their NDA allies, it is clear, have implemented Congress central welfare schemes better than  the Congress or the UPA.

So it is a case of their not even being able to deliver on their flagship initiatives. So, emotional rhetoric on ‘ideology’ and fear-mongering ‘secularism’ is all that is left to talk about.

The sad truth on the ground however is that the UPA under Sonia Gandhi and her children, via a ‘defanged’ prime minister Manmohan Singh, has concentrated on accumulating an unprecedented amount of loot through the most extensive corruption this nation has ever seen.

This money, running into billions of dollars, will, no doubt, come in handy, when, much diminished, it will be sitting in the Opposition benches of the 16^th Lok Sabha.  

(991 words)

April 17^th, 2014

Gautam Mukherjee