On The spot
Tavleen Singh
By the end of next week we will know who is going to be India’s next Prime Minister so this is a good week to examine what this endless campaign offered voters by way of choice. This is a particularly important exercise because for the first time in any general election Indian voters were given a choice between two diametrically opposed economic ideas. In elections past the choice has been between divergent political ideas but on the economy our two main political parties have been in agreement that India must remain socialist forever even if socialism has failed to provide Indians with their most basic needs. If the Congress Party defined its socialism as Nehruvian the Bharatiya Janata Party defined theirs as Gandhian and this was the only difference. In the six years that India was ruled by a BJP prime minister it became abundantly clear that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was no opponent of Nehruvian socialism. He tinkered with privatization and built some highways but made no effort to reduce the powers of the state to interfere in economic activity and no effort at all to improve governance.
So this time the Congress Party seemed to be taken by complete surprise when Narendra Modi made development and governance the two main pillars of his campaign. Modi’s campaign message was ‘minimum Government, maximum governance’ and he managed to make the average voter understand exactly what this meant. So wherever I traveled during the campaign I met voters, rich and poor, who said they supported him because they wanted ‘vikas’ and ‘parivartan’: development and change. When questioned about exactly what they meant by these two words they explained that they were tired of hopeless public services and hopeless prospects to improve their lives. Unemployment has been the biggest election issue wherever I have gone and nobody seems to have understood this better than Modi.
In an interview to the Times of India last week he said, ‘The first priority of the Government will be to restore the health of the economy and put it back on track. This is not only important for reviving growth, but also important for generating employment. If there is one single thing that I feel needs maximum attention, it is generating employment for our youth.’ In his campaign speeches he has explained this in ways that have made complete sense to the new urban middle class voter whose voice has been heard loud and clear for the first time in a general election.
Halfway through the campaign the Congress Party woke up to what was happening and Rahul Gandhi began to raise economic issues instead of banging on about secularism and communalism. Sadly, all that he offered voters was more of the ‘rights based development’ that has been the leitmotif of his mother’s Government in the past decade. Indians have been given the legal right to education, employment, information and cheap food grain but when translated into action these rights become meaningless. What is the point of having a right to education if there are not enough schools? What is the point of MNREGA if rural Indians are guaranteed only 100 days of employment out of 365? What is the point of a legal right to cheap food grain when the public distribution system is broken?
When the Modi onslaught began what made Rahul Gandhi’s task harder was his seeming inability to understand how much the average Indian voter had changed. He appears not to have noticed yet that the ‘aam aadmi’ he pitches his speeches at has almost vanished. The ‘aam aadmi’ today wears jeans and t-shirts and nearly always has a cell phone. The ‘aam aadmi’ today has access to TV and when he sees how Indians live in Delhi and Mumbai it makes him angry that he has been denied a better standard living and been given ‘rights’ instead. The ‘aam aadmi’ no longer wants handouts from the government he wants a real job and a house and if possible even a car. Rahul in the latter half of the campaign changed his pitch to include promises of free medicines and homes with running water and electricity but by then people had started to ask why these things had not been made available in ten years of Congress rule.
Modi capitalized on Rahul’s dodgy comprehension of economic ideas by mocking him for needing to spend nights in rural homes to do some poverty tourism. ‘The prince needs to see what poverty looks like…I don’t because I grew up in poverty.’ And, while Rahul continued to list the rights and freebies that a Congress Government would give people if re-elected Modi offered nothing by way of handouts choosing to speak instead of how India could become one of the richest countries in the world if everyone worked together to make this happen. He did not condemn Nehruvian socialism in so many words but talked of the ‘aarthic azaadi’ (economic freedom) that came after the economic reforms began.
In the last days of the campaign the Congress Party has been forced to rely almost entirely on the vaunted charisma of the Dynasty. So Priyanka has made herself more available to TV reporters than usual and has gone out of her way to attack Modi directly for such things as ‘snooping’ and for using language that did not befit a man who wants to be prime minister. The ‘charisma’ card has been played to the hilt with even Sonia Gandhi coming forward to make a televised appeal to the nation for the first time in the ten years she has been India’s de facto prime minister. In this appeal she warned that India would lose her ‘bharatiyata’ if Modi became prime minister because her plurality would be destroyed.
In saying this she echoed sentiments that have been expressed throughout the campaign by liberals and leftist intellectuals in the salons of Delhi and Mumbai ever since Modi’s long shadow first appeared. In these salons they use secularism as their reason to fear Modi as prime minister but what they seem to be more scared of is that Modi’s popularity signals the monopoly on ruling India that people like them have had since 1947. They fear that with the ‘chaiwallah’ from Gujarat will come a new kind of elite that will change the way India has been governed and that they who represent the old order will become increasingly irrelevant. Their fears are not entirely groundless but perhaps the change they fear is the change that India really needs.
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