BJP: From one electoral gimmick to another

BJP: From one electoral gimmick to another

FPJ BureauUpdated: Friday, May 31, 2019, 02:51 PM IST
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New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and party veteran L K Advani during the BJP Parliamentary Party meeting at Parliament Library in New Delhi on Tuesday. PTI Photo by Subhav Shukla (PTI5_3_2016_000095B) |

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to rid the country of the menace of middlemen. In fact, his new slogan is “middleman mukt Bharat” and he intends to achieve this by taking recourse to technology, so that intermediaries cannot siphon off welfare benefits intended for the poor. This might also go a long way in ensuring that farmers get remunerative prices for their produce. The initiative is laudable as middlemen had come to be accepted as an unavoidable malaise. A case in point is that of a farmer in Maharashtra who after resorting to a distress sale of more than 950 kg of onions, the price of which had crashed, received just one Rupee remuneration after all the deductions.

Be that as it may, there has been widespread criticism of the government for going overboard in commemorating the two years in office. Nobody is grudging the BJP-led NDA government its celebrations. However, the five hour extravaganza on the lawns of the India Gate in the national capital last Saturday (May 28) with Bollywood contributing its mite, just went over the top.

The Prime Minister cautioned against the Opposition trying to feed a feeling of despondency among the masses with regard to the performance of his government. But what does he expect in the backdrop of the multitude of pledges made by him and not even one close to  materialising. Suddenly there is a hush and the “aache din aane wale hai” song is not being hummed in the corridors of power. Aggravating matters is the agragrian crisis with a drought persisting for the second successive year and affecting no less than 30 million people.

With the mid-term appraisal round the corner, there are hardly any indications so far of an upswing in the economy. No other leader in this country in recent times had created a groundswell of such great expectations of bringing about a major transformation. But despite the ‘growth’ numbers that are bandied about there has been no perceptible movement in the direly needed economic reforms to boost development. Even Modi’s rapid fire foreign trips have not yielded anything tangible and seldom go beyond ceremony, pageantry and personal bonhomie with leaders. In the immediate neighbourhood the relations with Pakistan remain intractable despite the impromptu bonding  that the two heads of state showcase from time to time.

Modi faces the prospect of his honeymoon with the people coming to an end sooner than later. The period of innate goodwill usually lasts two-and-a-half to three years. In the Assembly elections, the Lotus made a significant dent for the first time in Assam, which is an electoral gateway to the Northeast. But in all fairness, the anti-incumbency factor against Tarun Gogoi was too strong to be wished away; also, the sentiment was largely aided by a critical defection to the BJP from the Congress.

There was another flip side: Modi has not been able to consolidate his hold even in urban pockets of Kolkata and wean away the bourgeois voter; the BJP continues to remain irrelevant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and has barely been able to leave its footprint in Kerala. The less said about the electorally insignificant Union Territory of Puducherry the better.

There is a palpable fear among the minorities and it has been whipped up by those owing allegiance to the Hindutva agenda. So even though Modi has refused to be drawn into any of the controversies — be it beef eating or love jihad —  the studied silence on such matters encourages the fringe elements to stoke communal ambers and keep them smouldering.

An impression is gaining ground that Modi believes in a powerful and interventionist state. Amid all this, the Head of Government has asked his MPs to get back to their constituencies and talk to people about the achievements of his government. He observed at one of his public functions that if Doordarshan is to outline the achievements of his government it will take it a week. All this is indicative of an underlying feeling of unease that people at large need to be galvanised and made aware of the “far reaching” achievements of his government.

However, the perception about the policy paralysis at the Centre has not changed since the previous Congress led UPA regime. The question being widely asked is when will things change. This is also true of those in the saffron brigade and others who are staunch supporters of the BJP.  What is intriguiging is that some are wondering if the government’s agenda has changed from development to social engineering with the crucial assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh scheduled for early next year.

Having deftly admitted that the promise of bringing back black money hoarded abroad within a hundred days was just a ‘chunavi jumla’ (electoral gimmick), there is suspicion that many other promises may also be just that. There is no denying that wholesale inflation has been reined in but  the food inflation continues to hurt the common man. The price of all services including transportation has risen.

The Modi government has been lucky that depressed global oil prices diminished the burden on the exchequer. However, the government has desisted from passing on this benefit to the people, as evidenced in the country’s immediate neighbourhood. India’s exports have been declining for more than a year and are in no tearing hurry to start rising. Even though the growth rate is increasing there has not been a commensurate increase in jobs. This ‘jobless growth’ is agitating the youth in various states and Universities.

In the given circumstances will the Modi government undertake course correction or will it continue to tread on eggshells lest the deviation emits wrong signals? The NDA has embraced many of the programmes of the UPA. Economists still don’t see any real break in policies from the past as far as the Modi government is concerned, which is far remote from meeting the needs of the people.

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