Opinion No Proof Required: The change is here
In the Modi regime, profit-making and job creation is no longer seen as dirty work.
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The BJP is possibly worse than the UPA on tax terrorism.There is an ill wind blowing. And its tune is something like this: No matter where you look, India under Narendra Modi is not much different than India during the last years of the UPA.
How credible is this appraisal? Not very. I will document 10 areas in which the India of today is substantially different from the India of yesterday. But before I do that, let me list two important areas in which the BJP’s performance is actually worse than even Sonia Gandhi could manage. The previous 10 years had precious little to do with the intellectual qualities or policy direction of economist Manmohan Singh or, for that matter, lawyer P. Chidambaram. They had everything to do with the welfare state and the populist ideas of Sonia Gandhi. Further confirmation of this is the fact that, unflattered by the humiliating and extraordinary loss of the Congress in the 2014 elections, the heir apparent, Rahul Gandhi, not only continues in the same vein as his mother, but is trying to outdo her with demagogic populism.
The BJP is possibly worse than the UPA on tax terrorism. I have yet to meet anyone with an adequate explanation of why it pursued tax terrorism through the MAT notices to FIIs. Chidambaram is absolutely right when he states that, with a simple majority in the Lok Sabha, the Modi government could easily repeal this obnoxious law.
The second area in which life is worse under the BJP is non-economic. Apart from the unwarranted proclamation that all Indians must be Hindus until death do us part, there are the negative vibes emanating mostly from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Recommending that the best place for women is on the delivery bed, banning comedy and beef consumption, the preservation of cows at all costs (how holy is it to starve a cow to death?) — what is going on? Two explanations: First, there is the BJP Cow Party (similarity to the US Republican Tea Party is not coincidental), whose sole purpose is to take revenge on Modi for being the BJP’s leader, rather than the post being filled by one of their own. The second explanation is that the two chief ministers, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Devendra Fadnavis, may be planning a long-run (cow) campaign to be the alternative to Modi. In this regard, they are
no different than Rahul Gandhi in completely misjudging history and the mood of the electorate.
Otherwise, India has changed substantially. The biggest lie is that the BJP had little role in bringing down inflation, that this was only because of the fortuitous decline in oil prices. A simple empirical fact that disproves this conjecture: Even the most die-hard Congress apologist will concede that price behaviour before September 2014 had nothing to do with the subsequent decline in the price of oil. For the first nine months of 2014, consumer price inflation was only 5 per cent per annum; for the first nine months of 2013, it was 9.3 per cent. But the smartest girl in the Congress class states that this is on the basis of seasonally adjusted data. And you know, such data is tricky.
But inflation as measured by GDP data for the agricultural sector, the source of considerable price-rise over the last decade, is conventional and not tricky. For the first nine months of 2013, agricultural inflation (read food inflation) was 9.7 per cent; in 2014, it was just 5.1 per cent.
The 2014 election campaign was fought on issues of inflation, corruption and growth. Again, even the most rabid Congressman will admit that corruption at the highest levels (ministers) has been substantially reduced, if not eliminated. There are no financial scams today, just scams that have to do with politicians overstating their level of education.
Regarding growth, most indicators are showing improvement. Conventionally measured year-on-year IIP growth registered 2.1 per cent in March 2015, somewhat better than the minus 0.5 per cent of March 2013. The new GDP data shows that growth is accelerating by at least 0.5 percentage points over the previous year.
But the greatest change brought about by the Modi government is the beginning of the change in the mindset of the Indian electorate. Making profit and creating jobs are no longer considered the work of the devil. Labour laws are set to be changed in a big way and the Neanderthal land acquisition law passed by the Congress is set to be dumped.
All these changes have to do with economic freedom. There is no example in history of an increased dose of economic freedom not leading to accelerated growth. We are just witnessing the beginning of major positive change in India. So please, let us not lie and claim that the more things change, the more they remain the same. This time it is different.
The writer is contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’, and co-author (along with Ankur Choudhary) of ‘Criconomics’
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