Politics

Mr Chidambaram, falling inflation is not deflation

P-CHIDAMBARAM
The former finance minister P Chidambaram writes a weekly column for The Indian Express newspaper. The latest column published on April 26, 2015, was headlined Across the Aisle: Inflation is bad, but is deflation good?.
Normally I never read economic columns written by politicians for the simple reason that you can never expect them to take a line which is different from their party line. And given that one knows what the party line is on most occasions, there is no point in reading the column. In most cases the politician tries to come up with reasons in order to defend the party line, irrespective of the fact whether that makes good economics or not.
But on this occasion I did read Chidambaram’s piece because the word ‘deflation’ caught my attention. The headline of the piece suggests that deflation is not good. Deflation is the opposite of inflation. Inflation is a situation in which prices are rising. Deflation is a situation in which prices are falling. Why is deflation not good? Once people figure out that prices are falling, they are likely to keep postponing their consumption in the hope of getting a better deal in the days to come.
If this happens, business revenues will most likely fall and so will economic growth. As business revenues fall, companies may try and maintain profits by firing people, among other things.
Those who get fired will spend money only on the most important things. Further, the firings will also have an impact on others who will fear that they might also get fired and in the process postpone expenditure. And so the deflationary cycle will work.
Hence, deflation is bad.
The only thing is that Chidambaram does not define deflation as a scenario of falling prices. As he writes: “Deflation and its consequences: The decline in the rate of inflation could be attributed to many reasons.”
Chidambaram essentially talks about a fall in the rate of inflation and defines that as deflation. A fall in the rate of inflation means that prices are rising, only that they are rising at a slower rate than they were earlier. This is very different from prices falling. The term Chidambaram should have used is disinflation, which essentially refers to a fall in the rate of inflation.
A former finance minister and a Harvard MBA to boot, should not be making a mistake in the usage of these terms. This is Economics 101.
In his column Chidambaram goes on to defend the economic policies followed by the Congress led UPA government between 2004 and 2014. Chidambaram writes that the current government has added to the woes of the farmer by “a paltry increase in Minimum Support Price (MSP), inefficient procurement, increase in prices of fertilisers, poor compensation for lost crop etc.” He goes on to suggest that the UPA tried to help the farmer in different ways: “introduction of MGNREGA in 2006 to supplement farm income/wages; farm loan waiver in 2008 to give partial relief from past debt; and generous increases in MSP between 2004 and 2014.”
Let’s look at these points one by one starting with the debt waiver which was made in 2008. The total amount of debt waived off to farmers was Rs 71,680 crore. While this one time waiver did not bring down any bank, it built in a huge moral hazard into the system. Economist Alan Blinder writes in After the Music Stopped that the: “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it.”
The message that was sent to farmers was that in the future there was no need to repay your loans because eventually the government would waive it off. In a country where the banking penetration is low and that remains starved of credit, this was a very short sighted measure aimed at the May 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act(MGNREGA) was launched in 200 of the most backward districts of the country on February 2, 2006. It was extended to all rural districts from April 1, 2008. The scheme aims at providing at least 100 days of guaranteed employment in a financial year to every household whose adults are willing to do unskilled manual work. The trouble was that MGNREGA essentially became another scheme where money was simply given away without any substantial assets being created.
As T H Chowdhary wrote for The Hindu Business Line in December 2011 “Villages cannot sustain so many unskilled labourers and not-so-literate labour. By creating useless “work” we are promoting dependency among the unfortunate rural, illiterate and unskilled population…An example of the village Angaluru in Krishna district will illustrate how good money is being thrown away for bad results. Out of 1,000 families, 800 had registered themselves as BPL, seeking work under NREGA. So far, it was 100 days at Rs. 100 per day. Even at this, 80,000 mandays of useful work in a year is impossible in a village and that too, year after year.” Hence, MGNREGA essentially became an exercise of giving away money without any comparable increase in production and this led to high inflation.
These moves didn’t help the Congress led UPA government win many votes either. As Swaminathan Aiyar wrote in a recent column in The Times of India: “The Congress claimed that its farm loan waiver and MGNREGA (its rural job scheme) won it the 2009 election. Really? Congress won only nine of 72 seats in three very poor states where these schemes should have helped most — Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.”
Chidambaram also wrote about the generous increase in the minimum support price or wheat and rice between 2004 and 2014. The MSP is the price at which the government buys rice and wheat from the farmers, through the Food Corporation of India(FCI) and other state government agencies.
Between 2005-2006 and 2013-2014, the MSP of wheat was increased at an average rate of 14% per year. In 2005-2006, the MSP for common paddy(rice) was Rs 570 per quintal. By 2013-2014 this had shot up to Rs 1310 per quintal, an increase in price of around 11% per year.
This rapid increase in the MSPs led to very high inflation in general and food inflation in particular, between 2008 and 2014.  As economist Surjit Bhalla put it in a November 2013 column in The Indian Express “For each 10 per cent rise in previous years’ procurement prices, there is a predicted 3.3 per cent increase in the current year CPI…When the government raises the MSP, the prices of factors of production involved in the production of MSP products — land and labour — also go up.” Food inflation hurts the poor the most. Half of the expenditure of an average Indian family is on food. In case of the poor it is 60% (NSSO 2011).
To conclude, if the policies of the Congress led UPA were so pro-farmer, why did the lose the 2014 Lok Sabha election, so badly? Guess, Chidambaram’s next column can try answering that question as well. 

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Apr 28, 2015

Jibe specialist Rahul Gandhi needs to understand why ‘Make in India’ matters

rahul gandhiVivek Kaul

In his new avatar, Rahul Gandhi, the current vice president of the Congress Party and successor to the throne that has been kept warm for him over the last ten years, has become a jibe specialist.
His latest jibe has been at the ‘Make in India’ programme. “The prime minister talks about ‘Make in India’. No one does more ‘Make in India’ than the farmers of Punjab. They have made this country stand (on food grains production),” the Gandhi family scion, who recently returned from a 57 day foreign sojourn, told the media earlier in the day today (April 29, 2015).
This potshot was uncalled for, simply because no nation has gone from being a developing country to becoming a developed country without the support and the rapid expansion of its manufacturing sector, which is what the ‘Make in India’ programme is all about.
As Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang writes in Bad Samaritans—The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations & the Threat to Global Prosperity: “History has repeatedly shown that the single most important thing that distinguishes rich countries from poor ones is basically their higher capabilities in manufacturing, where productivity is generally higher, and more importantly, where productivity tends to grow faster than agriculture and services.”
India has failed to latch on to a manufacturing revolution. The services industry was India’s big hope. But services by their very design have certain limitations. As Chang writes: “There are certainly some services that have high productivity and considerable scope for further productivity growth—banking and other financial services, management consulting, technical consulting and IT support come to mind. But most other services have low productivity and, more importantly, have little scope for productivity growth due their very nature (how much more ‘efficient’ can a hairdresser, a nurse or a call centre telephonist become without diluting the quality of their services?).”
Also, for the services sector to flourish a strong manufacturing sector is required because that is where the demand comes from. Hence, as Chang puts it: “This is why no country has become rich solely on the basis of its service sector.” This is something that Rahul needs to understand.
India needs a strong manufacturing sector which it currently lacks. The reason is simple. Only a vibrant manufacturing sector can create enough jobs for the 13 million Indians who enter the workforce every year. The ‘Make in India’ programme is a step in that direction.
In his interaction with the media Rahul further said: “When the poor do ‘Make in India’, is it not ‘Make in India’? Is it something else?” What does this statement even mean?
Rahul’s concern for agriculture may be genuine, but a simple point he needs to understand is that there way too many Indians dependent on farming. Agriculture forms around 18% of the gross domestic product and employs more than 50-60% of Indians, depending on which estimate you trust.
Only 17% of who work on farms survive only on money they make from their farm. Everyone else does some extra work. As Mihir Sharma writes in Restart—The Last Chance For the Indian Economy: “Our agriculture simply does not earn enough; and it has too many people…We no longer need to ensure that enough food is grown; for decades, we have been growing enough food. The country that invented granaries cannot build enough to store its vast stockpiles of grain; and yet we plant and harvest more.”
A major reason for this has been a rapid increase in the minimum support price(MSP) of wheat and rice, during the Congress led UPA government. The MSP is the price at which the government buys rice and wheat from the farmers, through the Food Corporation of India(FCI) and other state government agencies. Rahul told a farmers’ rally in New Delhi earlier this month: “We increased the MSP of wheat from Rs 540 to Rs 1400…The MSP has not changed, no benefit to farmers.”
But what the Gandhi family scion does not realize is that this rapid increase in MSP has led to other major problems. As Sharma writes: “It distorts the choices that farmers make—those who should be finding ways to grow vegetables, which grow more expensive every year, are instead growing wheat we no longer need.”
It has also led to a situation where a state like Punjab which is essentially a semi-desert is growing a large amount of rice through the extensive use of underground water. This has led to water table falling rapidly over the years.
Given these reasons, Rahul Gandhi needs to get his economics right. The country has suffered enough over the decades for the garibi hatao politics of the Congress party. Sadly, Rahul and Congress continue to practice the garibi hatao politics of doles. What we need now are jobs and more jobs. And those jobs can only be created through the rapid expansion of the manufacturing sector.
This bit of wisdom is nothing new. It was known nearly 300 years back as well. As Chang writes: “[Robert] Walpole [the first British prime minister] knew this nearly 300 years ago, when he asked George I[the British King at that point of time] to say in the British Parliament: ‘nothing so much contributes to promote the public well being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw material.’”
Being in the opposition, Rahul obviously needs to criticize the government. The ‘Make in India’ programme in its current form is a little more than a marketing slogan. If this slogan needs to be turned into a reality, there is a lot more that needs to be done—from improving the ease of doing business to labour sector reforms. Nothing much seems to be happening on these fronts.
Why can’t Rahul criticize this for a change? It might just turn out to be a real reinvention than the forced “angry young man” image that he seems to have adopted in the recent past.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 29, 2015

 

Modi needs Rahul

narendra_modi
Rahul Gandhi is back. Back from his 57 day foreign sojourn, during which, if Congress leaders are to be believed, he was thinking about how to revive the Congress party.
And now that he is back he has come out all guns blazing against the Narendra Modi government. The Gandhi family scion has blamed the Modi government for being very close to the corporates and not being worried about the farmers. In a speech in the Lok Sabha yesterday he accused the government of being a “suit, boot ki sarkar.”
For the time that Rahul was not in the country, several leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) took potshots at his absence. Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, had recently said at the two day National Conclave of the party in Bangalore that: “Instead of raising non-issues and fictional issues, they[the Congress party] should find out where their leader is.”
After Rahul returned to India, Sambit Patra, a BJP spokesperson said: “He (Rahul) is confused. He does not know what he wants to do with his life, whether he wants to continue in politics. He has to answer to the people.”
Such statements are a part of the broad strategy of BJP of talking about a Congress mukt Bharat (an India without the Congress party). “Congress Mukt Bharat is not merely a slogan, but the determination of the people of India,” Narendra Modi said in January 2014, when the campaigning for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections had started. Since then, many leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) have used this slogan on many occasions.
Nevertheless, a slightly strong Congress party might work to the advantage of the BJP. And a Congress mukt Bharat may not necessarily be good for the party. Why do I say that? Take a look at what happened in the recent elections to the Delhi assembly.
The BJP got 32.2% of the votes polled. This was marginally lower than the 33.07% of the votes that the party had polled in the assembly elections held in December 2013. The Congress had polled 24.55% of the votes in December 2013. This collapsed to 9.7% in the recent elections. The gainer was the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The vote-share of the party jumped from 29.49% to 54.3%, helping the party win 67 out of the seventy seats in the assembly.
What this clearly tells us is that the entire collapse in the vote for the Congress moved to the AAP. This in a way ensured that the anti-BJP vote did not get divided and helped AAP win almost 100% of the seats in the assembly. If the Congress vote hadn’t collapsed as much as it did, it would clearly helped the BJP win more seats in the Delhi assembly. Hence, a stronger Congress would have helped the BJP in Delhi.
Now, along with this let’s look at an interesting piece of analysis on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections carried out by Neelanjan Sircar, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASI at the University of Pennsylvania. In his analysis Sircar found that: “Consider the constituencies in which the BJP and Congress were the top two vote getters; there were 189 such constituencies, and the BJP won 166 of them for a whopping strike rate of 88 percent. By contrast, the BJP’s strike rate was even (49 percent) in the remainder of the constituencies it contested.”
What this clearly tell us is that when it’s on a one on one with the Congress, the BJP does well. But the same cannot be said of a situation where there is a multi-party contest. In a multi-party contest, a strong Congress party can help in dividing the anti-BJP votes. While this may not matter in the bigger states like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and smaller ones like Chattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh, where there is a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress, it matters in many other states like Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam, where the electoral contest is multi-party.
In fact, in the first past the post system (an electoral system where the candidate winning the most votes wins, even though there might be more votes against him in total) that India has, a divided opposition can really help the ruling party. And for that divided opposition to become a reality, the Congress party needs to be on a slightly stronger wicket than it currently is.
This rule comes with a corollary. The BJP has to hope that the Congress does not come together with other opposition parties like it did in Bihar in August 2014, when bye-elections to 10 assembly seats were held. The vote percentage of the BJP plus the Lok Janshakti Party was at 37.9%. The vote percentage of Rashtriya Janata Dal plus Janata Dal (United) plus the Congress party came in at 45.6%. So, all said and done, the anti-Modi vote does remain strong. And it can create huge problems for the BJP.
But the other parties coming together is not a possibility in every state. Take the case of West Bengal where the Trinamool Congress and the Left Front are unlikely to come together for the assembly elections scheduled in 2016. A weak Congress party will mean that its votes will move to the Trinmool Congress and that can’t be good for the BJP.
The BJP cannot be expected to form the government in West Bengal. But in the 2014 assembly elections it got 17% of the votes polled. Given this, the party can expect to win more than a few seats in the state assembly.
Further, the assembly elections in Bihar are due later this year. It is important that the BJP does well in the state given that it elects 16 members to the Rajya Sabha. West Bengal also elects 16 members to the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP currently has only 47 members in the Rajya Sabha and hence can be held to ransom by the opposition parties in the upper house, whenever it wants to pass any important legislation. The Land Acquisition Bill is an excellent example of the same.
In order to increase the number of members in Rajya Sabha the party needs to do well in the state assembly elections scheduled over the next few years. And for that to happen, the BJP needs a stronger Congress party. In short, Modi needs Rahul.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on April 21, 2015

Rahul Gandhi’s ‘suit boot ki Modi sarkar’ jibe stinks of hypocrisy

rahul gandhi
Vivek Kaul

Rahul Gandhi, the Gandhi family scion and the vice-president of the Congress party, is back from his two month holiday (57 days to be exact). And if nothing else, he surely has discovered his political machismo during the period. Speaking in the Lok Sabha today (April 20, 2015) Rahul said that the Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance(NDA) government was a government of industrialists, or as he put it: ‘suit, boot ki sarkar‘.
In a speech he made at the Ram Lila Maidan in New Delhi on April 19, 2015, he made similar allegations when he said: “Let me tell you how Modi ji won the election. He took loans of thousands of crores from big industrialists from which his marketing was done. How will he pay back those loans now? He will do it by giving your land to those top industrialists. He wants to weaken the farmers, then snatch their land and give it to his industrialist friends.”
There are multiple points that need to be made here. Is Rahul Gandhi trying to suggest that the Congress party did not get corporate funding to fight the 2014 Lok Sabha elections? Is he trying to suggest that the Congress party has never got corporate funding to fight elections? Is he trying to tell us that the Congress party has never used “black-money” to fight elections?
Or is it more a case of sour-grapes—the fact that when it came to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the corporates where on Modi’s side, given the sordid performance of the Manmohan Singh government. As Jairam Ramesh told The Times of India after the Lok Sabha elections: “We were out-campaigned, out-manoeuvred, out-funded and out-spent by Modi.” So, it is clearly a case of sour grapes for Rahul. Also, in all these years that Congress was in power, why did it never try to clean up political funding? Does Rahul have an answer for that?
Rahul, further said in his Lok Sabha speech that: “You know as well as I do, that this government is one that works for industrialists.” So, does this imply that the last Congress led United Progressive Alliance government did not work for industrialists?
If that was the case then why did so many scams involving corporates happen in the second term of the Congress led UPA government? Was the telecom 2G scandal a creation of the Modi government? Did the Commonwealth Games scam happen under the Modi government? Did the coalgate scam, where the governments loss lakhs of crore happen under the Modi government?
Rahul also suggested in his two speeches that the Modi government is hell bent on taking away land from the farmers and giving it to corporates. The question is what were multiple Congress governments doing since the independence?
Until 2013, the land acquisition act 1894, governed land acquisition in India. A 1985 version of this Act stated: “Whenever it appears to the [appropriate Government] the land in any locality [is needed or] is likely to be needed for any public purpose [or for a company], a notification to that effect shall be published in the Official Gazette [and in two daily newspapers circulating in that locality of which at least one shall be in the regional language], and the Collector shall cause public notice of the substance of such notification to be given at convenient places in the said locality.”
The language of the 1894 Act shows that it gave unlimited power to the government to acquire land. This wasn’t surprising given that the law came into being when the British ruled India. The Act allowed governments all over India to acquire land from the public. Many governments passed on this land to corporates, and in the process both the government and the corporates made money.
The only one who did not make money was the individual whose land was being acquired. Of course, this did not go unnoticed. People saw politicians and corporates making a killing in the process. And the trust that is required for any system to work completely broke down. The various Congress governments which led the country between 1947 and 2013(nearly 66 years) chose to do nothing about it. In 2013, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) brought in The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013.
By ensuring that corporates got land on a platter, the Congress party essentially helped build a system of political-corporate corruption. Further, given that governments acquired land for them, Indian corporates have become lazy over the years. Also, many of them started to see themselves as landlords and wanted land just for the heck of it. This can be said from the inefficient use of industrial land in India. Narendra Modi had no role in building this system. He just inherited it.
And there is more. Along with the budget document, the government releases a statement of revenue foregone every year.  “The estimates and projections are intended to indicate the potential revenue gain that would be realised by removing exemptions, deductions, weighted deductions and similar measures,” the statement points out.
For the year 2014-2015, the government is expected to forego revenues of Rs 62,398.6 crore because of exemptions and deductions given to corporates. Interestingly, the bigger the corporate the more deductions and exemptions they take. Corporates which make an operating profit within the range of Rs 0-1 crore have an effective tax rate of 26.89% Those in the Rs 50-100 crore range have an effective tax rate of 24.29%. Whereas those making a profit of greater than Rs 500 crore have an effective tax rate of 20.68%. The overall rate is 23.22%. This is not a recent phenomenon. It has been true for many years.
Who has built this tax system which favours the corporates? The Congress party is the answer. The party has been in the government in every decade after independence. Narendra Modi has not been in power even for a year. Once these factors are taken into account, the only thing one can say is that Rahul’s “suit boot ki Modi sarkar,” comment, stinks of hypocrisy. Guess, the two month sojourn hasn’t done him much good.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 20, 2015 

Time to change your jingle: Rahul Gandhi’s garibi hatao rhetoric is like the Nirma ad

Vivek Kaul 

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?
Guess who’s back? – Lines from Without Me by rapper Eminem 

Rahul Gandhi is back. The vice-president of the Congress party is back to India after a 57 day sabbatical. Depending on which political gossip columnist you believe he was holidaying either in South East Asia or in Italy. A news-report also suggests that he was meditating in Burma. But all that doesn’t really matter.
While Rahul was away the Congress politicians put on a brave front. They told the nation that the Gandhi family scion was taking a break and figuring out what to do next. Among many such statements that were made the best one came from Mukul Sangma, the chief minister of Meghalaya. Sangma compared Rahul’s sabbatical (or disappearance, depends on how you look at it) to that of Alfred the Great, who ruled Wessex, an anglo-Saxon kingdom in the South of Great Britain, between 871 and 899 AD.
After a defeat at the hands of the Viking armies, Alfred retreated and came back strongly to win the subsequent war. Sangma compared Rahul’s sabbatical to that of Alfred the Great, when he told The Indian Express: “There are certain strategies, some secret plans that leaders always have. If you read stories, read history, Alfred the Great, after he lost the battle, he needed to plan, think and ideate and come up with another formula to defeat the enemy.”
Sangma suggested that Rahul was doing the same. The Congress party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala suggested the same when he said: “I don’t know where he is but I know he is not on a holiday. He has taken time off to reflect on how to strengthen the Congress. I see it as an extremely mature step.”
Companies these days regularly go on off-sites, at least once a year, to think and ideate, and to figure out the way forward. While no one quite goes on a two month off-site, but let’s not nitpick here. So Rahul’s sabbatical was along similar lines. Fair enough.
The question is what has he come up with at the end of the sabbatical? From what was visible in his speech to farmers at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi yesterday, Rahul hasn’t come up with anything new. In fact, he has gone back to the garibi hatao rhetoric of his grandmother Indira Gandhi.
Sample some of the things that Rahul said in his speech yesterday.

“Today when farmers go to sleep, they dont know what is going to happen when they wake up the next morning.” 

“We increased the MSP of wheat from Rs 540 to Rs 1400.” 

“Opposition asked us where will the money come for your loan waiver. Our govt waived Rs 70,000 crore of farmer loans.” 

“The MSP[minimum support price] has not changed, no benefit to farmers.”

What is common to all these statements? That India is a poor country. And that the Indian farmer is poor. And that he needs to survive only on doles given by the government. And that the Congress led United Progressive Alliance was excellent in giving out doles. And that the Narendra Modi led Bhartiya Janata Party is not doing the same thing.
This has been the Congress party rhetoric since Indira Gandhi took over the party in the late 1960s. And truth be said it worked beautifully for decades. But isn’t working any more. Why is that? One reason lies in the fact that agriculture contributes 18% of the country’s GDP while it employs almost around 50%(or more depending on which estimate you believe in) of its workforce. What this shows is that agriculture is not remunerative enough given that there are too many people dependant on it. It is also known that only 17% of farmers survive on income totally from agriculture. The rest do other things as well to make money.
Hence, truth be told India has many more farmers than it needs. People need to be moved away from agriculture. And that in turn means we need to create more jobs in other sectors. And that is clearly not happening. This is something that the latest economic survey points out: “Regardless of which data source is used, it seems clear that employment growth is lagging behind growth in the labour force. For example, according to the Census, between 2001 and 2011, labor force growth was 2.23 percent (male and female combined). This is lower than most estimates of employment growth in this decade of closer to 1.4 percent. Creating more rapid employment opportunities is clearly a major policy challenge.”
As per the Census the employment growth between 2001 and 2011 was at 1.8%. It was at 2.5% between 1991 and 2001. The Labour Bureau suggests that the employment growth between 2011-12 and 2013-2014 was at 1%.
The Congress led UPA was in power between May 2004 and May 2014. And it clearly did a lousy job of creating jobs. In fact, data from the last census tells us that nearly 4.7 crore Indians under the age of 25 are looking for jobs, but have not been able to find one. Who is responsible for this?
Once we take all this information into account, what it clearly tells us is that the garibi hatao rhetoric and the policies that have emanated from it, haven’t really worked.
It is time for the Congress(and all other political parties) to do this country a favour and move on from it. It is time to think jobs. But Rahul Gandhi is still stuck up garibi hatao. This even after taking a two month sabbatical.
In that sense, the Congress party is a bit like the Nirma washing powder advertisement, which worked beautifully for a long period of time. In all these years the ad has basically stayed the same. (I have watched it since television first came to Ranchi in 1984). But Nirma is no longer the company it used to be. And the same is true for the Congress.
It is time for both to change their jingle. 

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 20, 2015