“Reaching for
their grubby lecture notes, scribbled at the pre-war London School of
Economics, the second generation socialists went into action. They produced
between them, the Labour Party’s Manifesto of 1945. Under the inspiring title Let us Face the Future, its
authors planned to solve the problems of the past.”
- C. Northcote Parkinson in Left Luggage
Instead of the ‘second
generation socialists’, the motley crowd of Naxalites and pseudo-economists that infest the
NAC, have gone into action, with a similar backward vision to produce the Congress party’s 2014 Manifesto.
The grand document
opens with a lie in its first paragraph, in the statement that the “Indian
National Congress made seminal contribution to India’s unity, integrity,
secular polity and democratic federalism.” Wasn’t it under the Indian
National Congress that India lost 38000 square kilometres of land to China and 78000 squarekilometres to Pakistan?
And then, instead
of telling the voter what it intends to do to solve the myriad problems that plague the nation, if it were returned
to power, it gets down to bash its principal
opposition, the BJP. Scroll down to the next page and you will have a surprise.
Splashed in the centre of the page in large caps is the question, ‘CONGRE SS OR
BJP’ without the question mark. The space you see
between ‘CONGRE’ and ‘SS’ is not a typo in this article, but is as seen in the
downloaded .pdf document.
The party’s report
card informs us that ‘the Congress-led
UPA has brought 14 crore people out of poverty in the last ten years.’ Oh,
yeah! These people can now eat a sumptuous meal @ between `1
and `12!
Whoever has written the manifesto is adept at fabricating history.
The economic reforms were advanced by a decade to credit them to Rajiv Gandhi
and the dynasty and to rob P. V. Narasimha Rao of his due:
“In the
1980’s, economic reforms were launched in response to new challenges, to modernise
the Indian economy…”
There is this ‘Right
to entrepreneurship’ in the ‘15 Point Agenda For Socio-Economic And
Political Transformation’. Now, what the heck is ‘right to
entrepreneurship’? Is it ‘entrepreneurship’ of the Robert Vadra variety or the crony capitalism of the A.
Raja type? For the rest there is a ‘pledge’ in answer to every criticism levelled
by Narendra Modi in his critiques of UPA’s 10 year misrule in his
electioneering! The party pledges to achieve in five years what it could not in
ten years! The pernicious Communal Violence Bill finds a place in this section.
Sonia Gandhi’s ‘tireless
campaign and vision’ does not fail Parkinson! How does one reconcile [the
resolve to] ‘promote a more flexible labour policy as needed for maintaining
competitiveness’ (3 i. p. 10) with ‘strengthening collective bargaining’
(5. p. 14)? Was page 10 written by Jairam Ramesh and page 14 by the bots in the
NAC?
Having run the
economy into the ground during the last ten years the party seems to have woken
up to the perils of its profligacy. It therefore slips this slice of wisdom
into the fine print of the section, ‘An Economic
Roadmap for 2014 - 2019’ (This section seems
to have been written by a different hand, as evidenced by the fact that the
articles in this section are not numbered with Arabic as elsewhere but Roman numerals.):
vii. Subsidies:
Given the limited resources, and the many claims on the resources, we must
choose the subsidies that are absolutely necessary and give them only to the absolutely
deserving.
And then there is
the middle class which is the most pliant in conforming to economic laws.
Having been conditioned to put up with abysmal levels of service in all public
utilities for over six decades under its decadent rule, the Congress party feels it would not now mind
being taxed to receive what is its due:
We will also
consider introducing sensible user charges because many more people are willing
to pay for better quality services, for example, uninterrupted power and better
quality train services. We will use this money saved to expand health,
education and infrastructure.
The difficulty with
this formulation is that it ignores the amorphous nature of the middle class.
The middle class ranges from a call centre employee who
draws a monthly salary of `10000 to a software engineer who is
paid upwards of `100000.
Even after the Supreme Court threw the `10000 plus crore Aadhaar card scheme out of the window the
following paragraph finds mention in the section, ‘Accelerating Job Creation and Skill
Development’:
4. Aadhaar is a
powerful tool for protecting the interests of migrant labour, as well as
ensuring the smooth flow of remittances to their families. All migrant labour
will be covered under the Aadhaar programme in the next one year, through a
special campaign.
The party considers
the Communal Violence Bill so important that it finds a second
mention under the section, ‘Safeguarding
Minorities’ in the ‘Detailed Action Plan 2014 - 2019’. There are several others, detailed
elsewhere, which were repeated in the section, probably to make up the bulk.
The party does not
bother to broach about terrorism (the section on Internal Security deals with Left Wing Extremism) but has a
small paragraph tucked in the foreign policy section:
7. On Pakistan we
will encourage the new government’s stated position to improve relations with
India but calibrate the dialogue consistent with delivery on accountability for
26/11 as well as dismantling of the infrastructure of terrorism on Pakistani
soil.
The manifesto, long on rhetoric and
short on substance, ends with again cribbing and cawing about its principal
opposition, the BJP.
It is for the people
of this country to decide whether they would like to vote for a party that does
not even wish to utter the word ‘terrorism’ in its manifesto.