Manifest Failure

Ensconced in Madhya Pradesh for most of the campaign to coordinate the BJP’s efforts, Union Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley said the first few sentences of the Congress manifesto on poverty alleviation are itself ‘‘a confession of failure’’.

Madhya Pradesh had brought down poverty levels by five per cent in ten years while the country had paced ahead at double the rate, the minister said.

Buried under stentorian promises on employment, power, industry, poverty eradication and infrastructure development is the only strong point of the administration — the decision to establish a panchayat in every village.

Panchayati raj has been consistently touted as a major achievement by Digvijay, and the empowered sarpanchs are considered important players in this election.

The existing panchayats so far cover a group of villages often spread over a large geographical area, and in several cases, this had caused administrative bottleneck. The recent malnutrition deaths brought up the problem once more, with sarpanchs attending to the villages they stayed in, at the cost of the panchayat cluster.

The decentralisation move is, apparently, the only point the government has to push about. Digvijay himself singled out the matter while briefing reporters; as for the rest, he said, ‘‘MP Congress manifesto promises good governance; resolve for healthy, literate and prosperous Madhya Pradesh’’.

The anti-BJP ring is not missing though. ‘‘The Congress manifesto points out a sharp contrast between the practices and preaching of the BJP … The Congress in the last one decade fostered communal harmony and now vows to abort the BJP’s fascist designs.’’