No return to the Liberal Hour

But we are losing it entirely. As economist Jean Dreze pointed out, the statistics behind the public sector funded ad campaigns make one wince. The opposition is not to be outdone and I was horrified at an angry looking Indiraji in an ad. She was not like that. She was bright and cheerful and always made you look ahead. She asked you to see to it that our people were fed. Once, seeing how we were uncomfortable at her question on what we were doing for her constituents, she smiled and said, I mean small kisans and landless labourers.

Development politics is good politics. Some issues should be discussed. For one thing, people don’t leave their brains at home when they go to the polling booth. Honestly, you can’t fool all of them all of the time. What voters think of depends on how they feel. The question is, do you know?

Both our major political parties are committed to feeding the hungry population with state assistance. This assurance was contained in the budget speech of the government and the Congress president monitors it in her states. Here the only real question is, who is doing it better in the field and whether the Central bureaucracy is doing its job in releasing the grain. But beyond that arise the real issues. The lowest 60 per cent of the population is not hungry, but has aspirations for a good job, a road to connect them to their sites of work and pilgrimage — because that is what socialisation is all about — education for their children and medical aid if they fall ill. They become poor since they can’t work. The story is the same all over but its variation fascinates me. In this country everybody wants it his way. The question is, are political leaders alert to this diversity?

I don’t think that in time the dream merchants will be forgiven. This didn’t happen in the ’90s and it won’t happen now. Good or bad policies will make the difference between five million jobs a year and seven million jobs a year. Will you train all those young women and men in services and the new jobs in IT, entertainment, communications and the schools and clinics of tomorrow? To say you are doing it now is incorrect and you need to just read the Labour Ministry’s reports and also the venerable Planning Commission when it is free from the TV camera and doing its job. Incidentally, making the planners part of electoral ads was a cruel blow for they are the Planning Commission of India, of all its states and not just of the ruling party at the Centre. Do we have a functioning elite left at all?

In a bumper year when you grow less cotton and sugarcane than the early part of the last decade and millions suffer with less cash, you can be taken seriously only if you show that for each of the ten big crops this country grows and from milk and eggs and poultry and from the wealth of the forests you have a picture of how we will make more money and more wages will be paid. Also, how will the dalits, women and adivasis be safe? This is what the debate has to turn to and may the best (wo)man win.

Technology and new ways of doing things have to relate with the (wo)man on the road and that is what politics in India should be all about. It is stupid to say we are not growing. We grew at 5.8 per cent annually in the ’80s and 5.7 per cent in the ’90s. With those numbers our statistics are just not good enough to tell the difference. The late Rabin Mukherji of the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata had with his colleagues worked out that in the ’80s a real 1 per cent increase of input in labour or machines was giving us 3.8 per cent additional output. This was 3.6 in the ’90s, but has to go up to 5 if we are to grow at 7 to 8 per cent annually, a dream which Rajiv Gandhi showed us for the first time. This is worth fighting for and it won’t come from ads, but by working harder, learning more, saving a bit more and being healthy and telling the world we are there. Our trade will have to go up to 4 per cent of GDP, not for the money but in order to learn to compete out there. If we do that we will be the third largest power in the world — if not, we’ll be a has been of history. Will our leadership stand up and debate the real issues?