Vivek Kaul
Poverty in India has fallen between 2004-05 and 2011-12, or so suggests data recently released by the Planning Commission. The poverty ratio was 37.2% in 2004-05 and fell to 21.9% by 2011-12.
The Congress led United Progressive Alliance(UPA) has been quick to claim credit for this fall in poverty. The opposition parties from the left and the right have slammed the government, and questioned the numbers put out by the Planning Commission.
So who is right on this occasion? The government? Or the opposition? Before we get around to answering these questions, it is first important to understand how the Planning Commission decides who is poor and who is not.
A poverty line separates the poor section of the population from the non poor section. Those below the poverty line are deemed to be poor and those above it are deemed to be not poor. And what exactly is a poverty line? As S Subramanian writes in The Poverty Line “A poverty line is identified in monetary units as the level of income or consumption expenditure required in order to avoid poverty.”
So how is the level of income or consumption expenditure required in order to avoid poverty decided on? An essential criterion for avoiding poverty is the availability of adequate nutrition, writes Subramanian. Hence, a calorie norm is identified. The amount of money required to consume the identified number of food calories becomes the cut off point, or the poverty line. Those who consume less than that are deemed to be poor.
This criteria was first clearly addressed by the Indian planners in 1979 in a Planning Commission Report of the Task Force of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand. As Subramanian writes “In identifying consumption expenditure poverty norms for India, the Task Force employed a nutritional norm of 2,435 (rounded off to 2,400) kilocalories per person per day in rural areas, and a norm of 2,095 calories (rounded off to 2,100) kilocalories per person per day in the urban areas. These were average figures based on calorie allowances recommended by a Nutrition Expert Group in 1968…The Task Force was able to come up with an ‘average’ requirement of calories for what one might call a ‘representative’ Indian, in each of the rural and urban areas of the country.”
So what does this mean? It means that anyone in rural India consuming less than 2,400 kilocalories per day was deemed to be poor. For urban India this number was at 2,100 kilocalories. Through a statistical regression the total expenditure necessary to consume either 2,400 kilocalories or 2,100 kilocalories was estimated.
The Tendulkar Committee formula, a new formula to estimate the poverty line, came into effect in 2009. This formula, other than considering the expenditure on food, also took expenses on education, health and clothing into account.
When Professor Suresh Tendulkar changed the formula he argued that the old formula did not take into account the fact that calorie intake had dropped to 1770 kilocalories in urban areas. Despite this change the influence of the old calorie norm on the new formula is considerable, feel experts.
And how much is the expenditure as per the Tendulkar Committee formula ? As the Press Note on Poverty Estimates, 2011-12, released by the Planning Commission points out “for rural areas the national poverty line…is estimated at Rs. 816 per capita per month and Rs. 1,000 per capita per month in urban areas. Thus, for a family of five, the all India poverty line in terms of consumption expenditure would amount to about Rs. 4,080 per month in rural areas and Rs. 5,000 per month in urban areas.”
Assuming 30 days in a month, this expenditure comes to Rs 27.5 per day for the rural areas and Rs 33.33 for urban areas. Hence, anyone whose expenditure per day is less than these amounts is categorised as poor.
How adequate is this poverty line of Rs 27.5-Rs 33.33 per day? If one were to believe film star turned Congress politician Raj Babbar, this amount is more than enough. “Even today in Mumbai city, I can have a full meal at Rs 12. No no not vada paav. So much of rice, dal sambhar and with that some vegetables are also mixed ,” he told reporters today (i.e. July 25, 2013).
Of course, this clearly proves that Mr Babbar has not stepped onto the streets of Mumbai for a very long time. His days of struggle in the film industry having been long over.
Even if we believe that one can get a meal for Rs 12 in Mumbai, eating is not the only expenditure that a man needs to incur in order to survive.
Given this, it is easy to prove that the poverty line in India has been set at a very low level. There have been a spate of comments criticising this. Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh called the Planning Commission figures a cruel joke on the poor. “I would like to ask the Prime Minister and Congress president whether they could have their meal in just Rs 32(if one divides Rs 1000 by 31 days, it comes to Rs 32.25),” Chouhan said.
This is something that Praful Patel of the Nationalist Congress Party, which is a part of the UPA, agreed with. “The ceiling set by them (Planning Commission) is totally wrong. In today’s time, Commission should set a new ceiling keeping in mind inflation and high cost of living. We do not agree with this data,” Patel said. Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) said that the Planning Commission figures were “dubious” and “discredited” and added “salt to the wounds of the poor”. Similar reactions came in from other political parties as well.
So, the poverty line in India is at a very low level and hence needs to be increased is a conclusion that can be easily drawn from. As N.C. Saxena, member of the National Advisory Council, who headed a Planning Commission panel on poverty told The Hindu “the narrow definition of poverty we have been using, where the line is really what I call a ‘kutta-billi’ line; only cats and dogs can survive on it.”
But raising the poverty line is not simple and has serious implications. As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya write in India’s Tryst with Destiny “While reasonable people may differ on whether it is reasonable to further raise the poverty line, the subject is far more complex than commonly appreciated.”
And why is that the case? “The dilemma in raising the poverty lines is best brought out by considering the implications of poverty lines that are significantly higher than those currently in use and are advocated by many of the current critics of the Planning Commission. Thus, for example, suppose we raise the rural poverty line to Rs 80 and the urban one to Rs 100 at 2009-10 prices. What would these lines imply?” ask Bhagwati and Panagariya.
This would designate 95% of the rural population and 85% of the urban population to be poor. The impact of this would be that the money that the government spends to tackle poverty would be spread over a much larger number of people and thus would have less impact in tackling poverty. As Bhagwati and Panagariya point out “With tax revenues still relatively modest, significant redistribution in favour of the destitute requires limiting such redistributions to the bottom 40 percent or so of the population. Spreading them thinly over a vast population will give too little to the destitute to make a major dent in poverty.”
Lets understand this through an example. Let us say there are 100 people. Of this 20 are deemed to be poor. The government decides to spend Rs 100 to help them. Hence, on an average each one of them benefits to the extent of Rs 5.
Now lets the definition of poverty is changed and 90 out of 100 people, are deemed to be poor. The government still spends Rs 100 on them. The benefit per person comes down to a much lower Rs 1.11 (Rs 100/90). Hence, the more poor lose out at the cost of the less poor.
In fact, this is not the first time such a situation has arisen. In 1962, the Perspective Planning Department (PPD) of the Planning Commission had discussed a similar dilemma. As Subramanian writes partly quoting a PPD document “’The balanced diet recommended by the Nutrition Advisory Committee together with a modest standard of consumption for other items would cost approximately Rs 35 per head (per month). But at present less than 20% of our population can afford it’…The implication is quite clear. A poverty line of Rs 35 per person per month would have plunged 80 per cent of the Indian population into poverty: wiser counsel advocated a more modest norm of Rs 20 per person per month.” This brought down the poverty rate to 60%.
Hence, there is no point in pushing up the poverty line without having the resources to tackle it. If resources are limited they should be deployed to help those who need it the most.
But the Congress led UPA government has done exactly the opposite by getting the President to sign on the Food Security Ordinance. The food security scheme aims at providing subsidised rice and wheat to nearly 82 crore Indians or 67% of the total population.
This effectively means that the government thinks that 67% of the Indian population is poor and cannot afford to buy rice and wheat at market rates. But as per the current poverty line only 21.9% of the population is not getting adequate nutrition. So which is the right number? 21.9% or 67%? The Congress led UPA government needs to answer that question.
It seems the government is working on a new poverty line to justify the massive expenditure that it will incur on the Food Security scheme. As The Hindu reports “economists advising the Ministry of Rural Development have told The Hindu that the exclusion criteria to be derived from the ongoing Socio-Economic and Caste Census are likely to leave out the top 35 per cent of the population while the bottom 65 per cent will be considered below poverty line.”
Meanwhile, it will claim that the poverty has come down on the basis of the current poverty line and numbers put out by the Planning Commission because of the social programmes it has launched over the last few years.
As the old saying goes “heads I win, tails you lose”.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 25, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Congress
Why Congress' new found love for FDI wont help rupee much
Vivek Kaul
Foreign direct investment(FDI) seems to be new buzzword of the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Earlier this week the government relaxed foreign direct investment norms in twelve sectors including telecom, insurance, asset reconstruction, petroleum refining, stock exchanges and so on.
This sudden love of the government for FDI after nearly nine years of sitting on their bums, can be attributed to the rupee losing value rapidly against the dollar and creating huge economic problems. The hope is that with FDI reform foreign investors will bring in dollars into India to set up new businesses, increase their investment in existing businesses or buy up businesses.
When these dollars come into the country they will have to be converted into rupees. This will increase the demand for rupees and ensure that the rupee will gain value against the dollar. That is how things are supposed to work, at least in theory.
But this is easier said than done. A foreign investor looking to get money into India through the FDI route is committing to stay invested for the long term. In comparison, a foreign investor investing money in the stock market or the bond market, can sell the stocks or bonds, take his money and leave, the moment he sees things going wrong.
An investor who has got in money through the FDI route cannot exit like an investor who has invested money in stocks or bonds. Selling a business or a factory is not as easy as selling stocks or bonds for that matter. And more than that setting up a profitable business to justify the investment being made in a foreign country is not so easy. It is worth remembering that the Western world in general and the United States in particular is currently dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis. There is great pressure on companies to set up new businesses or expand current ones in their home countries. In this scenario if they do decide to go abroad and set up new businesses, it needs to be a very good proposition for them.
Given this, any investor getting in money through the FDI route is likely to look at many factors than get in money simply because FDI is the flavour of the week with the government.
Take the case of the South Korean steel company POSCO which has pulled out of setting up a steel plant in Karnataka. The company had signed an agreement to set up a steel plant with a capacity of 6 million tonnes in the state in June 2010. The project would have got in $6 billion worth of FDI in the state. Along similar lines ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant, has decided to opt out of a $12 billion steel plant in Odisha. So the country lost out on FDI worth $18 billion within two days of the Congress led UPA government discovering FDI.
The reasons for pulling out cited by both the companies were similar. They couldn’t get the land required to set up the steel plant and at the same time iron ore linkages weren’t in place. Iron ore is used to produced steel.
What this tells us is that it is not very easy for a foreign investor to set up shop in India. The process of acquisition of land for the Posco plant in Karnatka had been on for around two and a half years. ArcelorMittal also had been trying to acquire land for its plant in Odisha for more than three years now.
Every year the World Bank puts out a ranking which measures the Ease of Doing Business across countries. In the 2013 ranking, India came in 132nd on the list. India’s ranking was the same in 2012 as well. When it comes to enforcing a contract, India came in 184th on the list. When it comes to starting a business India is 173rd on the list. What this means is that foreign investors have an option of starting their business in a much easier way in 172 countries other than India. Given this, why should they be hurrying to India?
In fact ArcelorMittal had announced last year that India was no longer a priority for them when it came to making major investments. Of course these withdrawals would have had much more impact on prospective investors than the announcements made by the government welcoming FDI.
Then there is issue of corruption. Over the last few years a spate of scams from coalgate to the telecom scam have come to light. This also has an impact on the foreign investor looking to get in money into India through the FDI route.
As Ali Al-Sadig writes in a research paper titled The Effects of Corruption on FDI inflows written for the CATO insitute “From a theoretical viewpoint, corruption—that is, paying bribes to corrupt government bureaucrats to get “favours” such as permits, investment licenses, tax assessments, and police protection—is generally viewed as an additional cost of doing business or a tax on profits. As a result, corruption can be expected to decrease the expected profitability of investment projects. Investors will therefore take the level of corruption in a host country into account in making decisions to invest abroad.”
And empirical research shows that there is a negative relationship between corruption and FDI inflows. As Al-Sadig writes “That is, ceteris paribus, a one-point increase in the corruption index causes a reduction in per capita FDI inflows by 11 percent.”
In another research paper titled Foreign direct investment, corruption and democracy Aparna Mathura and Kartikeya Singh reported a similar result. As they write “We find quite convincingly that corruption perception does play a big role in investors’ decision of where to invest. The more corrupt a country is perceived to be, the less the flows of FDI to that country.”
So corruption is another factor which will continue to have an impact on FDI into India in the days to come, given that its not going to go away any time soon.
Then there is the perpetual problem of India’s infrastructure. Businesses need roads, ports, power, rails etc to function. There is a clear lack of supply on this front. And this also has an impact on the amount of money coming in through the FDI route. As Rajesh Chakrabarti, Krishnamurthy Subramanian, Sesha Meka and Kuntluru Sudershan write in a research paper titled Infrastructure and FDI: Evidence from district-level data in India published in March 2012 “We find that while there is indeed a positive relationship between physical infrastructure and FDI inflows, the relationship is essentially non-linear with a “threshold level” of infrastructure after which the positive effect becomes significant.”
What this means is that districts in India which have a better physical infrastructure attract more FDI. What it also means is that significant FDI inflows happen once physical infrastructure is of a certain ‘threshold’ level. So there is a clear link between physical infrastructure and the total amount of FDI that comes in. And India loses out on this front.
All these factors have led to a situation where FDI into India has fallen in the last three out of the four years. For 2012-2013(i.e. the period between April 1, 2012 and March 31,2013), FDI fell by 21% to $36.9 billion, as per government data. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in a recent release said that FDI inflows to India declined by 29 per cent to $26 billion in 2012.
To conclude, while the Congress led UPA government might have fallen in love with FDI, it is unlikely to lead to a flood of dollars in the months to come. For that to happen the country first needs better governance which will lead to better infrastructure, lower corruption and a greater ease of doing business. But governance is something that has gone missing from this country. And given this, the rupee will continue to have a tough time. It is currently quoting 40 paisa lower at Rs 59.74 to a dollar against yesterday’s close of Rs 59.35 to a dollar.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 20, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Chhattisgarh attack: Is DDLJ attitude the heart of Naxal problem?
Vivek Kaul
Raman Singh, the chief minister of Chhattisgarh should resign, taking moral responsibility for the killing of 27 people by Maoists near Darbha in Jagdalpur district, 340 km south of state capital Raipur.
Or so feels the Congress Party. “Raman Singh should step down… We did not want to say anything political as we felt that the chief minister would himself resign owning responsibility…The irresponsible attitude of the state government has led to a huge loss to democratic values and the chief minister should resign admitting the security lapse,” Congress spokesperson Bhakta Charan Das said on May 28,2013.
Those killed included state Congress leaders Mahendra Karma and Uday Mudliyar. The state Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel and his son Dinesh were also killed. Senior Congress leader Vidya Charan Shukla, who was the information and broadcasting minister during the dark days of the emergency, was severely injured and is now battling for his life.
It is clear that the Congress party has woken up only after its leaders came under direct attack. The party had been very quiet when 76 CRPF jawans were killed by Maoists in April 2010, near Chintalnar village in Dantewada district. So by wanting the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh to resign does the Congress party want us to believe that a life of a politician is more valuable than that of a CRPF solider? And that every time a Congress politician is killed democracy in this country comes to a standstill?
The second point that comes out here is that by asking Raman Singh to resign, the Congress party is trying to project Naxalism as a state level problem, which it clearly is not. Naxalism is a menace in other states like Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, as well.
The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had acknowledged this in May 2010, after the massacre of CRPF jawans. “I have been saying for the last three years that
remains the biggest internal security challenge facing our country…We have not underestimated the problem of Naxalism,” he had said.
Also what is interesting is that Chhattisgarh is one state where the Maoists are concentrating on. Most of the top Naxalite leaders in this area are Telgu speaking and not locals. As Ramachandra Guha writes in a column in The Hindu “From the 1980s, Naxalites had been active in the region, asking for higher wages for tribals, harassing traders and forest contractors, and attacking policemen. In the first decade of this century their presence dramatically increased. Dantewada (in Chhattisgarh) was now identified by Maoist ideologues as the most likely part of India where they could create a ‘liberated zone.’ Dozens of Telugu-speaking Naxalites crossed into Chhattisgarh, working assiduously to accomplish this aim.”
This is further evidence of the fact that Naxalism is not just Raman Singh’s problem. For the sake of argument, if the Maoists had decided to concentrate on the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, from where they have been driven out, an attack of similar proportions could have happened there. So would the Congress party then have asked for the resignation of its own Chief Minister?
Also the party seems to be trying hard to pin all the blame on on the state government. As an earlier article on Firstpost had pointed out, in a meeting that party Vice President Rahul Gandhi had with the Chhattisgarh government after the attack, he kept asking “who will take the responsibility?”
Naxalism did not start overnight. It started in the late 1960s, taking its name from the Naxalbari village in West Bengal. The story goes that an anonymous poet wrote on the walls of the city that was then known as Calcutta “Amar bari, tomar bari/Naxalbari Naxalbari”(My home, Naxalbari/Your home, Naxalbari)”, giving the movement its name.
The state of West Bengal was then ruled by the Congress party and so were large parts of India where Naxalism spread in the decades to come. Raman Singh became the chief minister of Chhattisgarh only in December 2003.
Also, the home minister of the country is responsible for the internal security of the country. When the attack happened home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde was in the United States on an official tour. He has since extended his stay there. The Indian Express reports that sources say that the minister is visiting close relatives of his wife in Maryland.
So much for the seriousness of the Congress led UPA government in tackling the Naxal problem. Of course, the official Congress line is that Shine is monitoring the situation from the United States. But as BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi put it “You can sit on the moon and say we are monitoring everything but that is not what is expected of a person who needs to be on the ground and be in control of the situation.”
Hence, the Congress is more responsible for the Naxal problem in this country than any other party. And in time like this to seriously tackle the issue of Naxalism, it should be working together with the state government rather than asking Raman Singh to resign.
One of the Congress leaders killed in the attack was Mahendra Karma. He was the leader of the opposition in the Chhattisgarh state assembly between 2004 and 2008, and was instrumental in the formation of Salwa Judum (which means purification hunt in the Gondi language).
Salwa Judum was essentially a local militia which was created to take on the Maoists. On July 5, 2011, the Supreme Court of India declared the militia to be illegal and called for its disbanding. Karma had the support of Raman Singh when it came to the Salwa Judum operating freely in the state.
Ramachandra Guha recounts his meeting with Karma in his column in The Hindu. He writes “We spent an hour in the company of the movement’s originator, Mahendra Karma. He told us that he was fighting a dharma yudh, a holy war. We asked whether the outcome of this war was worth it. We told him of what we had seen, of the homes burnt and the women abused by the men acting in his name and claiming that he was their leader. He answered that in a great movement small mistakes are sometimes made. (The exact words he used were: “Badé andolanon mein kabhi kabhi aisé choté apradh hoté hain.”)”
Karma’s quip was inspired from the famous dialogue from the Hindi film Dilwale Dulhainya Le Jayenge (DDLJ), which went like this: “Bade bade deshon main aisi choti choti baatein hoti rehti hain (in big countries these small things keep happening)”.
Salwa Judum further exaggerated the Naxal problem in the state. The tribals had to bear the brunt of it. As one of them told Guha “ “Ek taraf Naxaliyon, doosri taraf Salwa Judum, aur hum beech mein, pis gayé” (placed between the Maoists and the vigilantes, we adivasis are being squeezed from both sides).” And Salwa Judum ultimately even consumed its creator in the end.
The broader point here is that the attack by the Maoists was primarily against Mahendra Karma and a few other Congress leaders instrumental in launching Salwa Judum. As a letter sent across by the Maoists after the killings clearly says: “The purpose was to punish Mahendra Karma who had launched the anti-Maoist armed movement Salwa Judum and some other Congress leaders.” Or as the old saying goes “live by the sword, die by the sword”. Or in Karma’s own words “ Badé andolanon mein kabhi kabhi aisé choté apradh hoté hain.”
So the Congress party (with more than a little help from Raman Singh) was instrumental in ensuring that Naxals got further determined, after unleashing a private militia on them as well as the people of the state.
These lessons should have been well learnt by the Congress party by now. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards after she messed up big time in Punjab and propped up Bhinderwale against the Akalis. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE, a problem created first by his mother Indira.
The final point I want to make is that the tradition of taking moral responsibility and quitting doesn’t exist among the politicians of this country anymore. Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as the Railway Minister in 1956 after a rail-accident occurred in Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu, killing 144 people. As an editorial in The Hindu points out “In fact, he had put in his papers when an accident had occurred in Mahboobnagar three months earlier, killing 112. But Nehru had not accepted it. He refused to continue in the post after the Ariyalur accident.” They don’t make men like him these days.
When was the last time you heard a Railway Minister quitting after an rail accident which killed hundreds of people? In fact in July 2011, Mukul Roy of the Trinamool Congress, who was Minister of State for the Railways, even refused to visit Assam, where a train had derailed injuring hundreds of passengers.
The Congress government did not resign when Bombay (now Mumbai) was bombed by Dawood Ibrahim and the ISI in 1993, even though it was a huge lapse of security. Neither did it resign when rains and floods brought the city to a standstill on July 26, 2005. It finally took the savage attack of November 26, 2008, to get the heads rolling. Shivraj Patil kept bungling up as the Home Minister of India between 2004 and 2008, but was allowed to continue, finally being forced to resign after the attacks of November 26, 2008. Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat did not resign after the 2002 riots, despite almost everyone calling for his resignation, including those in his own party.
The culture of politicians resigning taking moral responsibility does not exist anymore. And this works across the political spectrum. Hence, the Congress asking for Raman Singh’s resignation sounds very hypocritical, when it’s leaders have behaved differently in similar situations in the past.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 29,2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Why Congress has learned the wrong lessons from India Shining
Vivek Kaul
Human beings love a good story. And a good story is complete. If something has happened then there is needs to be a ready explanation available for it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this in Fooled by Randomness. Taleb recounts watching Bloomberg TV, sometime in December 2003 around the time Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq.
At this point, American government bond prices (commonly referred to as treasury bills) had gone up, and the caption on television explained that this was “due to the capture of Saddam Hussein”. Some thirty minutes later, the price of the American treasury bills went down, and the television caption still said that this was “due to the capture of Saddam Hussein”.
The question is how could the capture of Saddam Hussein lead to have two exactly opposite things? That is simply not possible. But there is a broader point here. If something happens, the human mind needs a reason, an explanation or a cause for it. Without it, the loop is not complete. Hence, the human mind actively seeks causes for events that have happened, whether those causes are the real reasons for the event happening is another issue all together.
As Ed Smith former English cricketer wrote in a recent column “The point, of course, is that causes are being manipulated to fit outcomes. They weren’t causes at all, merely things that happened before the defeat. The ancient Romans had an ironic phrase for this terrible logic – post hoc, ergo proper hoc, “after this, therefore because of this”.”
An excellent example of this phenomenon in an Indian context is the defeat of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Of the explanations that followed the one that gained most credibility and is still holding on strong, is the India Shining Campaign.
Since the results of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections came in, it has been widely held that BJP lost the elections because of the “insensitive” urban centric India Shining advertising campaign, which ignored the aam aadmi. The irony is that even the BJP came to believe this.
As Arati R Jerath points out in a recent column in The Times of India “Significantly, L K Advani was to acknowledge later that the India Shining slogan was “inappropriate” for an election campaign. In hindsight, many in the BJP realized that the tone and tenor were arrogant and insensitive and that it glossed over prevailing social and economic inequities that the NDA government had failed to address.”
This logic doesn’t hold true against some basic number crunching. The difference in vote share between the Congress led UPA and the BJP led NDA was a little over 2%. The NDA got 33.3% of the vote whereas the UPA won 35.4% of the vote. As economist Vivek Dehejia, the co-auhtor of Indianomix – Making Sense of Modern India, said in an interview to Firstpost “That 2% difference in vote share can equally be attributed to a number of other explanations, such as bad luck, as it is to anything else. Or let me put in another way; if you look at those results, basically it came down to a coin toss. A third of the voters voted for the NDA, another third voted for the UPA and a third voted for somebody else.”
Hence, if the NDA had got 1% more vote and UPA had got 1% less vote, the situation would have been totally different. And maybe in that situation, people would have been talking about how the India Shining campaign really worked. Given this, it is not always possible to figure out why something happened. The broader point is that India is too diverse with too many issues at play to attribute the win or a loss in Lok Sabha elections to one cause, which in this case happened to be the India Shining campaign.
But such has been the strength of this explanation that it continues to prevail. In fact, the Congress party has gone at length to explain why there recently launched Bharat Nirman campaign is totally different from the India Shining campaign of 2004. “India Shining was hype, hoopla and spin. Our campaign is different. Bharat Nirman is not a poll campaign, it tells the India story of the past nine years,” the information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari was recently quoted as saying.
In fact, the India Shining campaign had put too much emphasis on India, people came to believe, and missed out on Bharat. So the Congress has taken great care that the Bharat Nirman campaign caters to Bharat.
That difference notwithstanding prima facie there doesn’t seem to be much difference between India Shining and Bharat Nirman. Both are campaigns launched to highlight the achievements of the incumbent government. India Shining was launched well before the Lok Sabha elections and at that point of time, the BJP leaders maintained that the campaign was meant to attract international investment and beyond that nothing more should be read into it. The Congress seems to be doing the same. As Tewari said “Elections will be held on time. There is no need for speculation.”
Eventually, the BJP got caught into its marketing blitzkrieg and advanced elections by six months. The extent to which Congress wallahs have gone to deny the link between Bharat Nirman and the Lok Sabha elections being advanced, leads this writer to believe that most likely elections will be advanced. As the line from the great British political satire Yes Minister goes “The first rule of politics: Never believe anything until it’s been official denied”. The Congress, like BJP, is in the danger of getting caught in its own spin.
India Shining cost the taxpayer around Rs 150 crore. Bharat Nirman has already spent around Rs 200 crore of the taxpayer money. As an article in the Brand Equity supplement of The Economic Times points out “Sources close to the campaign say that close to Rs 200 crore has been spent on this campaign under various heads. So large is the campaign that in recent months the government has been the single largest consumer of air time and media space on many of the major channels in volume terms.”
What hurts is the fact that the revenue stream of the government at this point of time is stretched. The Ministry of Finance has even gone to the extent of running an amnesty scheme for service tax defaulters. A defaulter can declare and pay his taxes and thereby avoid any fines or even other penal proceedings. If finances are so stretched, why is money being wasted on an advertisement campaign like Bharat Nirman?
More than anything else this government has lost so much credibility that any advertisement campaign cannot help. As Jerath puts it “The campaign is a pathetic attempt to sweep the controversies of the past three years under the carpet. A slick film and a lyrical jingle cannot erase the stench from various corruption scandals or make up for non-performance as food prices rise and the economy slows down.”
The lesson drawn from India Shining should have been that feel good advertisement campaigns run by the government and paid for by the taxpayer, do not really matter in an electoral democracy as diverse as India. Instead the government, which is seen tom-tomming its own achievement, comes across as arrogant. But the parties in power love it. As the Brand Equity points out “The temptation has been too great and a campaign of similar proportions has been released. Perhaps the only difference is that ‘India’ has been replaced by ‘Bharat’ and ‘Shining’ by ‘Nirman’. While the Congress insists that this is not a political campaign (just as the BJP insisted with India Shining), the timing and the quantum of spends seem to belie that.”
The only person Bharat Nirman benefits is the information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari (and the media houses which get paid for carrying these advertisements), who after taking over as the I&B Minister had to show that he was doing new things that could revitalise the image of the Congress party and he has done precisely that. But this benefit might be short lived because in the days to come if the Congress led UPA loses the next Lok Sabha elections (as it is likely to), then Bharat Nirman will be held responsible for it, like India Shining was.
And then Manish Tewari, might become the new Pramod Mahajan, the man behind the India Shining Campaign.
To conclude, what happens to the taxpayer who finances these expensive campaigns? Well all he can do is sing the old Mukesh song (sung in the style of KL Saigal) “dil jalta hai to jalne de. aansoo na baha, fariyad na kar”.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 20, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
How regional parties make the Rahul versus Modi debate pointless
Vivek Kaul
Sitaram Yechury, the CPI(M) member of parliament, was asked in a recent interview in the Outlook magazine, whether the next Lok Sabha elections were going to be a direct contest between RaGa (Rahul Gandhi) and NaMo (Narendra Modi).
To this rhetorical question Yechury gave a brilliant answer: “There is a lovely saying in Telugu: Aalu ledu choolu ledu, koduku peru Somalingam, which means ‘I don’t have a home, I don’t have a wife but my son’s name is Somalingam’!”
The debate whether the next Lok Sabha elections in 2014 (or even earlier for that matter) are going to be a fight between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi is basically a pointless one right now and at least till the election results are out. And there is more than one reason for the same.
In states that elect a large number of MPs to the Lok Sabha, neither the Congress Party nor the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to be the largest party and win substantial number of seats. In Uttar Pradesh, which elects 80 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. The BJP is expected to come third. In West Bengal, which elects 42 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between the CPI(M) and Trinamool Congress. Similary Andhra Pradesh, which elects 42 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between YSR Congress and the Telgu Desam Party. In Tamil Nadu, which elects 40 Lok Sabha MPs, the fight is between the DMK and the AIADMK. In Orissa, which elects 21 Lok Sabha MPs, Naveen ‘Pappu’ Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal is expected to do well.
In Karnatka, which sends in 28 Lok Sabha MPs, BS Yeddyurappa’s Karnatka Janata Paksha (KJP) is expected to play spoilsport for the BJP. In Bihar, which sends in 40 Lok Sabha MPs, if the Janata Dal(United) and BJP, do not enter into an alliance and fight elections on their own, it is likely to benefit Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. And on top of all this factor in the impact Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party may have on the elections.
In fact, last year there were reports of even a fourth front with strong chief ministers like Nitish Kumar, J Jayalalitha, Mamata Banerjee and Naveen Patnaik, being its constituents. Arun Nehru, a former bossman at Jenson and Nicholson, a former MP and minister seemed to be leading the charge on this front. As a report in The Indian Express had pointed out “One man who says he is working to get them together is former MP and perennial seat-predictor Arun Nehru. He’s set the “fourth front” ball rolling among CMs Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee and Naveen Patnaik and TDP leader N Chandrababu Naidu. Sources confirmed that the Bihar CM had been in constant touch with Banerjee and Naidu, directly and through Nehru, to “keep exploring possibilities.””
Given this it is likely that parties other than the Congress and the BJP might get sufficient number of seats allowing them to form some sort of a Third/Fourth Front. This front can then form the government with the outside support of either the Congress or the BJP. As Naveen Patnaik, the chief of the Biju Janata Dal and the Chief Minister of Orissa recently said “I think the Third Front is a very healthy option. But it is still early days.” In this scenario neither Rahul Gandhi nor Narendra Modi, will come into the direct picture.
How the situation develops will depend on how the post poll alliances evolve. As Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of Narendra Modi – The Man. The Times, told me in an interview “ The next election will in all likelihood see post-poll alliances determining who will head the next government.”
Given that, the entire hungama about the race to the top between RaGa and NaMo doesn’t really hold. It is the regional satraps who hold the key to real power. And in a situation of a Third Front being formed, UPA allies like Sharad Pawar and his Nationalist Congress Party will be the first ones to jump the ship.
Hence, the next Lok Sabha elections will not be a presidential sort of race that it is being made out to be. In fact neither the Congress nor the BJP will take the risk of naming a PM candidate before the elections. It will depend on how post poll alliances evolve and who is acceptable to the ‘potential’ allies i.e. if they have enough number of seats to negotiate.
Narendra Modi in his own way recognises this. As Mukhopadhyay said “I had asked Modi about the number of dwindling allies. He argued that if the BJP’s winnability increased, allies would automatically come. He said they had more allies when they were on the winning curve but they started deserting when the ship began sinking. If it becomes afloat again, other would jump in. It is with grave risk that one should indulge in crystal ball gazing. But if the situation does not alter dramatically within BJP, and in other parties – including Congress – I see little chance of any party naming their prime ministerial candidates…Modi’s chances will depend on the number of seats the BJP wins.”
Hence, even Modi understands at some level that it will be a liability for the BJP to declare him as their PM candidate in advance. So the BJP is likely to be as vague as is possible for them to be on Modi. But at the same time enough signals will be given to the core cadre of the BJP to project Narendra Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate.
When it comes to Rahul Gandhi he has clearly said that he is not in the race to become Prime Minister. The cynical interpretation of this is that all politicians say these kind of things. And that to a large extent this is true as well. The only people to whom this so called unwillingness of Rahul to be in the race, causes problems for, are the chamchas that the Congress party thrives on.
As Ian Jack writes in Mofussil Junction – Indian Encounters 1977-2012 “The Congress party became a machine largely bereft of ideology, with one purpose: to elect a prime minister called Gandhi…For without a Gandhi, even a Gandhi from Turin, the Congress fears it will be found out.”
While the chamchas in the Congress party may want Rahul to lead the charge, he clearly doesn’t see himself in the race. And here he may have picked up a thing or two from his mother, who after having refusing the PM’s post, was the defacto PM anyway. So if a Congress led coalition does come to power, and even if Rahul Gandhi chooses not to lead it, he would be leading it anyway. So it doesn’t matter if he is in the race or not. The Congress might choose even someone like a Pratibha Patil to be PM (like it chose Manmohan Singh), but the real power will remain with Rahul and his mother.
To conclude while, the social media might feel that this there is a direct fight on between NaMo and RaGa (or feku versus pappu) for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it hardly seems to be like that after some reflection. The sufi saint Nizamuddin Aulia once said Hunooz, Dehli Door Ast (Delhi is still far away) and that is as true for RaGa as it is for NaMo, at this point of time.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on April 17,2013.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)