Maharashtra Elections
We all are privy to the transition that the BJP is going through. This must have surely raised Congress’s hopes of electoral success in the upcoming assembly elections. The assembly elections in Maharashtra are crucial in this regard where the Democratic Front government has a dismal performance to defend. It may be right opportunity for an organized opposition to rest power from the ruling coalition, which is facing anti incumbency of two terms and is struggling with grassroots dissonance. It is also likely that the anti incumbency voters have realized who the actual beneficiaries are in case they vote for MNS and other smaller outfits. This should likely benefit the Saffron alliance.
Let us know what you think should be the issues this election and your expectations from a BJP-Shiv Sena government, if voted to power.
Haryana Elections
It is no surprise that the Hooda Government, following Congress’s super showing in the Lok Sabha elections, dissolved the legislature and called for an early election. The Congress is obviously confident of its good showing yet again in the assembly elections. While it is a fact that the Congress has traditionally felt the heat against strong alliance in Haryana, it faces no such formidable opposition this time. The BJP has walked out of alliance with INLD over seat sharing disagreement. Haryana elections are dominated by caste politics and the BJP’s appeal in the past has been restricted to urban and upper caste. This is perhaps an opportunity for the BJP to increase its support base amongst other sections of the society and evolve as a dominant player in times to come. This is something that the Friends of BJP would be delighted with. There is always a prospect of post poll alliance with the INLD. Importantly the political equation in the state will also depend on how Bhajan Lal’s Haryana Janhit Congress and the BSP perform.
Let us know the key issues BJP should raise in Haryana and what is the role that you would like it to play in State politics.
Sudheendra Kulkarni
by Vijay Vikram
I can’t say that I ever fully understood Mr Kulkarni. I have always found his columns and other public utterances abstruse and rather dense, thereby finding it difficult to get a handle on his political philosophy. A rare exception to this general rule was Kulkarni’s open letter to L.K. Advani that argued for a recasting of RSS-BJP relations in the aftermath of the original Jinnah controversy. Essentially, Mr Kulkarni wanted to free up the party from micromanagement by Sangh interlopers - an admirable sentiment. His abstruseness apart, Mr Kulkarni emerges as a thinking man who represented a sober nationalism that attracted many to the party in the first place.
Kulkarni is not by any stretch a political figure of comparable national prominence to Jaswant Singh. His departure though is at least as disturbing because it represents the growing flight of intellectual capital away from the party. The cerebral right-wing talent the BJP managed to attract in the NDA years that made it the natural party of governance is being gradually weeded out. Arun Shourie, a modern day polymath is a virtual pariah, Yashwant Sinha has quit all party posts and the Jaswant Singh brouhaha is still playing out. It does seem that the party is turning to a certain atavism after the defeat. Swapan Dasgupta has argued that the once broad church of the Bharatiya Janata Party - accommodating strident Hindu assertion with centre-right nationalism - is turning into a sect with the former emerging as the overriding paradigm. Perhaps then, it is time for the urban Indian with his newfound cosmopolitanism to resurrect that ill-fated nexus of Parsi free thinkers, conventional nationalism and free enterprise.
Effective Government Spending
by Sudipto Das
I might be sounding like a broken record when I always criticize the ‘popular’ schemes like “National Rural Employment Guarantee” or on-the-house loan waiving. Even a layman in economics understands that to keep the wheel of economy of a country rolling it’s very essential to keep the consumers alive. It’s often argued that, thanks to these popular schemes, India hasn’t seen the worst of the recession in the past one year. Well, I don’t accept that. That’s too short term a perspective. In reality the government has already made a deep hole in its pocket. We’ll see serious long term impacts if the government spending is not controlled.
The ongoing drama with the swine flu has shown how much vulnerable our government is when it comes to disaster management. Thank God, that the flu is still restricted to the affluent class mainly in tier one cities. Just imagine what would have happened if the flu had attacked the hinter lands of our country? Even in the few cities, the government is not capable of providing with the basic infrastructure like the testing equipment. Even the masks required as a precautionary measure are not available in the market. Government is in dire need of cash for buying the testing equipments. I know that the panic with swine flu is a little exaggerated, but still the point remains that the government is not able to spend money in the way it should have in order to tackle the situation.
India’s total sending on health is just around 5% of the GDP, out of which only one fifth is government spending. This is a ridiculous amount of money. It’s seems like a joke that Mahatma Gandhi had said, “Health is Wealth”. The demographic dividend, that every one is talking about now-a-days, would be a myth if we don’t have healthy children growing up to strong adults. Government has a great role to play.
Let’s see some statistics (Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/in-india/hea-health)
Access to sanitation 72% 77th
Drug access 0% 152nd
Hospital beds 0.9 59th
per 1,000 people
Physicians 0.6 19th
per 1,000 people
These are just a few statistics. There are many such terrible things that we need to improve and that require serious government expenditure. I’m very sure that anyone, irrespective of his or her level of intelligence and financial background, would value the settting up of an efficient health center in his or her village than anything else. I just wonder what the government has been doing in all these aspects.
We are all Hindus now: Newsweek column
From Newsweek:
America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.
…here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we’re burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. “I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection,” agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard.
Of Jinnah, Jaswant and Hanuman…
by Vijay Vikram
It is no secret that the BJP high-command has avoided any attempt at genuine reflection on the reasons for defeat in the 2009 General Elections. In fact, the emerging consensus within India’s miniscule right-wing intelligentsia is that the BJP never quite recovered from the defeat in 2004 and continued on with the 2009 campaign on autopilot. Admittedly, the media strategy in 2009 was excellent: The clever subversion of the Congress’ triumphalist ‘Jai Ho’ with the sober ‘Bhay Ho’ jingle and the inclusion of young, IT-savvy talent for LK Advani’s personal image boosting initiative are cases in point. All this however, could not hide the rot at the base of the party. This defeat was a political defeat. It was not about image management. It was not about re-packaging Hindutva in more modern prose. The electorate rejected India’s version of a conservative party wholeheartedly.
Rajnath Singh and his ilk realise this. They realise that if the party sat down and did some actual chintan at the Chintan Baithak, their variety of conservatism would be declared an electoral liability in newly aspirational India. The resulting restructuring of the BJP would inevitably cut short the political careers of certain sections of the party. Like any political animal, this group’s primary impulse is to survive in the face of looming obscurity. It is in this context that the shock expulsion of Jaswant Singh must be viewed.
While Jaswant Singh’s sacking may not be a case of calculated news management as Vinod Mehta of Outlook suggested on a current affairs programme, it definitely hints at a totalitarian impulse aimed at homogenising the party and smothering legitimate intellectual expression.
As it happens, the period of history that this political controversy has thrown up is equally fascinating. Jaswant Singh has propounded a contrarian reading of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s political philosophy. He is by no means the first to interpret Jinnah as a calm, secular politician. But, Mr Singh’s public role ensures that the book and the arguments contained therein receive an inordinate amount of media attention as compared to any other piece of scholarly work. The crux of his thesis, as I am given to understand is that history has been unfair to Jinnah. In a sense, Jinnah’s complicity in the Partition of India has been exaggerated and that of Nehru’s Congress has been underplayed - perhaps in order to make for a more comfortable nationalism for the Indian masses to subscribe to.
The pork-eating, cigar-smoking Jinnah clearly does not make for a very good poster boy for the Two Nation Theory and Pakistani nationalism. Jaswant Singh’s argument is that Jinnah’s mutation from secular nationalist to communal scaremonger was caused by his desire to carve out a space in Indian politics that he could call his own in the face of increasing Nehruvian hegemony. Jinnah then, crafted a constituency that evolved into Pakistan. He reserved his antipathy for Nehru and the Congress, not the Hindus. The idea of Pakistan, which germinated in the brain of Cambridge student Choudhary Rahmat Ali in 1932 become a potent political weapon in the hands of Jinnah.
Perhaps it was a tad indiscreet for a practicing politician of national prominence to indulge in revisionist accounts of the founder of Pakistan whilst he remained a serving member of a political party. Winston Churchill for example, waited till his retirement from active public life before publishing his account of the Second World War. This abrupt expulsion however, smacks of an increasingly insecure leadership in the BJP that is keen to preserve the status quo and prolong its spell in power. The party is likely to lurch from one controversy to the other till the time a new generation of charismatic leadership is allowed to emerge. Jaswant Singh in the meantime has all the time in the world to write.
Budget 2009: Right, Left, Centre or Nowhere!?
by Unmesh Sharma
Mr Pranab Mukherjee took over the office of Finance Minister in 2009, 25 years after his last stint in that office. The needs of India’s post- 1991 economy are clearly very different from 1984. The economy is especially under strain from the global credit crisis. Mr Mukherjee has the responsibility of managing multiple interests: the left wing proponents in the party, the fiscal strain on the economy and the expectations of the people who have provided UPA with a firm mandate. At the same time he also has to keep an eye on upcoming state elections (notably in Maharashtra).
Something for everyone, Everything for no one
The budget tried to play to every gallery. In various news reports, right wing political analysts termed the budget as left-of-centre, while the leftists called it elitist and implied that it was too far to the right. Whenever that happens in India, it tends to show that the budget was either ‘just right’ or just ‘a maintenance budget’. I however think it was somewhere in the middle. The budget speech made a lot of the right noises. The Finance minister highlighted his focus on the rural economy (extension of the farm loan waiver and increased allocation to the rural employment guarantee scheme), infrastructure (both rural and urban) and disinvestment.
He also fulfilled his political duty by invoking late Smt Indira Gandhi while discussing state owned enterprises and pulling off a subtle stunt. (The skipping of two paragraphs aimed at minorities and then reading them out on receiving a note was quite effective. It showed the UPA’s focus on the minorities while quelling noise on blatant appeasement).
There was also a mention of Mumbai (storm water drain project) keeping in mind the upcoming state elections.
Generally negative reaction
The budget speech was however more a statement of intent and less of a plan. That is probably what spooked the market. On the day of the budget, the BSE Sensex fell 900 points (nearly 6%). The Indian Rupee depreciated 1.4% against the U.S. dollar while the government bond yield increased sharply by 16 basis points. To be fair to the UPA government, my personal opinion (as a participant in the financial markets) is that unnecessarily high expectations were built in before the budget.
That is not to say however that everything was right with the budget. The market clearly expected the UPA government to go on a path of fiscal consolidation. This has not come through. In fact, the budget finance minister’s estimate for fiscal deficit of 6.8% of GDP was higher compared to expectations of 6.0-6.5%. It is also notable that the target set by the UPA-1 government in the interim budget in February was 5.5% of GDP. It seems that the shortfall is mainly due to the loss in revenue from the changes in personal income tax and no reversal in any of the cuts in excise duty and service tax.
Rating agency S&P has estimated that if we include state government deficits and off-balance-sheet items such as oil and fertilizer bonds, the deficit could reach a whopping 12% of GDP in fiscal 2009-2010. This is clearly alarming. While the finance minister did mention that oil subsidies have to be brought under control, there were no concrete announcements made in the budget speech.
Importantly, the fact that the government will have to borrow even more, has other implications. It could lead to the crowding out of private investment, either directly or via higher interest rates.
At the same time, we should indeed note that there have been some outright positive outcomes. The irritating fringe benefit tax has been withdrawn. The personal income tax surcharge has been removed, which helps only people in the highest income brackets but at the same time is likely to reduce tax evasion. (Even the US Republicans would have been proud of this move).
Some optimistic analysts are giving Mr Mukherjee the benefit of the doubt. The primary argument is that this was a budget focussed on growth versus consolidation. The government may also have erred on the side of caution, perhaps influenced by the volatile news flow on the monsoon. Some analysts also believe that the revenue growth estimates in the budget are too conservative and we may see some positive surprise by March 2010.
These are credible arguments but we wait and watch for some key upcoming events to get a handle on whether the UPA’s actions match their words.
What would we look for now?
Mr Mukherjee clearly indicated the government wants to return to fiscal consolidation at the earliest. We have to keep an eye on the report by the 13th (Kelkar) Finance Commission. The deadline for this is October 2009. This is likely to help get a sense of the roadmap for fiscal consolidation in the medium term. The contents of the new Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM-2) are also very important from this perspective.
Mr Mukherjee has also promised to release a new ‘Direct Taxes Code’ within the next 45 days. The bill is aimed at replacing the Income Tax Act of 1961 and some other tax laws, and will be tabled in the Lok Sabha’s winter session. This is aimed at simplifying the tax structure and can be path-breaking if correctly framed and implemented.
What should the BJP do?
S&P has rightly mentioned in their report that “the hefty fiscal deficits and debts outstanding (general government gross debt estimated at 85% of GDP at the end of March 2009) are two of the most significant negative factors…”. The BJP is clearly not under pressure from coalition politics, historical baggage and other compulsions that the UPA is subject to. It is time that the BJP come up with their own shadow budget, Instead of nit-picking in single aspects, it is time to ‘up the game’. This is an opportunity to cement its position as a credible and constructive opposition. It should present a paper in the public domain which provides a constructive criticism of the budget and present alternatives. (This is also likely to go down well with the urban population in cities such as Mumbai and may help in the upcoming state elections).
In summary, the government has moved away from the far left. Its lack of dependence on support of left parties to keep its majority in parliament is showing in its commentary. At the same time, it is also clear that the UPA government is most comfortable with its slightly ‘left-of-centre’ positioning. The BJP has to use the next five budgets as an opportunity to present shadow budgets and seem constructive (versus opportunistic or disruptive). That will be a big step in emerging as a credible alternative in election 2014.
The views expressed here by the author are his personal views, and do not represent the views of his employer.
Congress throws the Kitchen Sink at the Problem!?
by Unmesh Sharma
The BJP’s loss at the 2009 elections was quite a set-back for me personally. The primary reason was that we had failed to punish the UPA government’s dismal performance in the last 5 years. From my perspective (as a professional working in Mumbai’s financial services industry), the government had delivered close to nothing. We continued to suffer from the lack of financial sector reforms, lack of internal security, poor infrastructure and fiscal profligacy- all of which the left-of-centre Congress has now mastered. A quick poll I conducted amongst 5 of my friends (not an adequate sample but still representative) around 30 years of age showed that 2 of them considered, at least once, of moving abroad after the election results.
I continue to remain a BJP supporter but if I would like to take a step back and consider why that is the case. This is because as part of the ‘post 1991′ aspirational generation, I expect reforms to continue. For India’s talented graduates, we expect the government to provide a world class environment to live and (importantly) work in.
If we look objectively however, the noises made by the UPA cabinet in the last few days have been encouraging. They have identified some lacunae and decided to throw the proverbial’ kitchen sink’ at them. The urban ‘civil society’ would definitely find this attractive. I would like to highlight three in particular.
1) Mr Nilekani in government- a game changer
The participation of the private sector in the government is not without precedent. However the appointment of Mr Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and one of India’s most outstanding new-generation entrepreneurs is clearly a game-changer. The UPA government has practically given him ministerial status for the essential national biometric ID project. Mr Nilekani seems to believe in this project (it was mentioned in his book “Imagining India”) and he brings credibility to the table, which no politician can question. The convergence is captured by Mr Nilekani’s own words “The two worlds have come together”.
The US government is made of people from the private sector and despite its fair share of controversies; it is a model which works. India needs to realise that the best talent has moved away from the public services and government companies to the private sector, especially after the ’80s. And the UPA seems to have come to terms with this.
(In its shadow cabinet, BJP should consider similar moves. Why not consider Mr KV Kamath of ICICI for a project to drive penetration of rural banking, Mr Sunil Mittal for rural telephony and so on).
2) Best man for the job: Kamal Nath in roads
After the impressive performance of BJP in 1999-04 (10km of roads built a day) to a dismal performance by the UPA in 2004-09 (daily execution was down 80%), the UPA has accepted that this may lead to their fall in election 2014. In a move which would make even a private sector company proud, they have decided to put one of their best men on the job.
In my opinion, Mr Kamal Nath (ignoring all other controversies) was one of the most effective ministers in the 2004-09 UPA cabinet. As commerce minister, his performance notably at the WTO was arguably very impressive. He also stood out as a reformer in the last few days of the UPA government with the indirect FDI liberalisation in practically every sector.
Extending the argument, the UPA government’s decision to give important ministries (of state) to younger members is akin to the private sector. Company promoters (Mr Ambani of Reliance, Mr Premji of Wipro, Dabur, HCL- to quote a few) have often placed the younger generation in junior management positions to ‘get their hands dirty before they take on senior positions.
3) Need of the hour: Kapil Sibal in HRD
The HRD ministry, in a country like India, has never been given its due. This is important and (for a change) the UPA government is making the right noises. While some of the moves made by Mr Sibal may be controversial and wrongly targeting the symptom (versus the disease), at least it seems that the intention is right.
Given the performance by Congress-led governments in the 60 years after independence, I am not sure if these moves are indeed sincere. It is easy for sceptics (including me) to believe that this is just an eye-wash and the Congress will not take too much time to move back to the left-of-centre, where they have frequently and habitually found their comfort zone.
But at this moment, we have no option but to hope that the UPA government takes advantage of the benefit of doubt that the voters have given them.
For BJP supporters like me, both possible outcomes are all-right.
>> If the UPA does what we expect it to and fritters away the advantage, the BJP will find it easier to win election-2014 (provided it sorts out other internal issues).
>> If the UPA does indeed deliver on the promise, India will indeed move towards becoming a world class destination. This implies a bright future with better infrastructure, a healthy financial and reform-oriented system and market/ business friendly environment.
Importantly, the game being played would be on the terms which BJP dominated in the ’90s. While the UPA would be difficult to unseat, this would result in the BJP having to present an even more compelling and progressive alternative in the 2014 election. This would be an even more positive outcome.
I am optimistic about the future and BJP’s prospects in election 2014. In the meanwhile, if the UPA delivers on the BJP promise, why fret?
The views expressed here by the author are his personal views, and do not represent the views of his employer.
Reinventing the BJP
N Vittal asks in the Mumbai Mirror: “Can the BJP do what the New Labour did in the UK under the leadership of Tony Blair and what Obama did for the Democratic Party in the United States?”
The BJP must re-brand itself as the party of the youth and the future. It must focus on the issues that concern the youth – productive employment and projecting a positive message of hope.
Good governance with a focus on (a) the rule of law (b) zero tolerance to corruption (c) encouraging productivity in every sector and (d) providing opportunity to every citizen and to realise that his full potential must be the leitmotif of all the policies pursued by the party.
Reinventing a party takes time but a systematic effort initiated now may help BJP emerge as India’s version of the New Labour or Obama’s Democratic Party.
On Education
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes about Kapil Sibal’s proposed education system revamp in Indian Express:
The HRD ministry’s 100-day plan has provoked the academic community out of its stupor. Many of the proposals — on connectivity, infrastructure, upgrading curriculum, independent regulation, etc — are unexceptionable. But the frenzy of proposals raises questions about the clarity over what is being proposed. The revolutionary fervour on display is indeed admirable. But more needs to be done to assure us that this is a revolution that understands the conditions under which it can be successful. Otherwise the revolution may turn more into a slash and burn exercise.
…Many of Sibal’s proposals seem to be working at cross purposes. The logic of autonomy, diversity, experimentation and differentiation is very different from the logic of centralisation, standardisation, excessive curricularcoordination and a single national system. The difficulty is that we seem to want the former outcomes with instruments designed for the latter system. The success of the revolution will not be the bold pronouncement; it will depend on who takes it forward with care, clarity and consistency.
What do you think?