Now that election fever is in the air, the chattering classes have a new mantra - bring in the BJP. This preference has recently been articulated by both an eminent industrialist - Rahul Bajaj in a TV interview - and a respected leftist liberal (to be distinguished from left-over leftists) Lord Megnad Desai, in an article entitled "It is endgame for the UF", (Business Standard, Nov. 10, 1997). In financial markets, there is a saying that when the last buyers throw in their towel, then stocks have bottomed. If I were a BJP member, I would be worried for surely the Bajaj-Desai endorsement means that support for the BJP can henceforth only decline!
As talk of second-generation reform gathers steam, it is appropriate to review the patchwork quilts to onions framework that has characterized Indian policy making for the last five decades. The quilts came from socialist patches to competitive instincts of ordinary human beings. The patches were deemed necessary by the we-know-better economists and wannabe policy makers in the sixties and seventies. Courses were taught, and theorems proved, on the advantages of central planning and budget deficits. Leading international institutions like Harvard, MIT, World Bank and the IMF recommended interventions against human nature, and freedom. To our blame, we willingly lapped it all up because it suited our wretched political economy favouring the BLIPs – Babus, Left-intellectuals, (major) Industrialists and Politicians.
There are good reasons to analyze the recent voting behavior in some detail, for after a surplus of Lok Sabha elections, we may not have another for the next five. The first issue of interest is whether the major parties gained or lost because of alliances. In the case of the Congress, the answer is clear – the leadership-less Congress crashed to even a worse performance than the wholesale rejection of Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1977. The numbers are revealing – at that time, Congress won 154 seats; today it just managed to cross double digits with 112. The share of the vote then – 34.5 %; today, 28.4 percent.
A multiple choice question - the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in India will be determined by: caste; personalities, dynasties, and foreign status of same; nuclear explosions and victory at Kargil; political stability; the inherited advantage of being from the Nehru-Gandhi family; corruption; one-party rule; anti-incumbency. What about the economy? The conventional wisdom (CW) is that “the economy does not figure in our political rhetoric”. So what is your choice?
In his reply, Dr. Bhalla gives compelling evidence about the beneficial impact of large dams on irrigation and, using Ms. Roy’s “facts”, calculates the internal rate of return on big dams to be in the range of 3 – 9 percent, one of the highest for infrastructural projects in India or anywhere else in the world! A number of data sources are cited to conclusively establish that the Big Dam displacement figures are close to 3 – 4 million rather than Ms. Roy’s 50 million.
The only website to feature these 3 articles. Strangely, the NGO website www.narmada.org has ignored posting these. The first article suggests that the noted novelist Ms. Arundhati Roy’s claim that about 50 million people have been displaced by the construction of 3300 big dams in India is wildly off the mark. Using six different methods, it is shown that the figure is close to 3-4 million.
The mid-term 1998 elections have just ended, but it is too early for Indian politicians to take it easy. There were several losers from the elections of ’98 - and a few winners. Among the losers were two: First, politicians in general, and the political clout they carry in affecting the (mis)fortunes of the electorate. Second, the major parties - Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress - have been issued notice of their increasing irrelevance. The winners - coalition politics, “leadership” and economic liberalization. The future, while it will revolve around the two major parties, does not belong to them. The spin, therefore, on the just concluded elections - may there be several more, so that we can finally gravitate towards our eventual destiny of being ruled by technocrats - as most of the world, and almost all of the developing world, already is .
The last almost three decades of the structural Congress decline has seen the transformation of the Indian polity from a Congress-non Congress arena to a BJP-non BJP contest. If this was not destruction enough, the Congress party would have us believe in its make believe world of party without a leader; or a party which is going into elections without its President contesting for any Lok Sabha seat ( is there a seat safe enough for Kesri ?). To make matters worse, there are rumblings that the new Congress god is "the party" i.e. the party will decide what is to be done. With this no-leader no-brain policy, the Congress party is likely to walk off the cliff into oblivion - and take its lemmings with it.
