THE HUGE victory of the bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the recently concluded General Election 2014, and utter rout of the United Progressive Alliance coalition led by the Congress party (estb.1885) which has ruled in New Delhi for over 60 years in post-independence India, is a historic electoral verdict. Even if unwelcome to many, the people’s judgement merits the respect of all right-thinking people committed to democratic governance. Moreover, it’s pertinent to note that the BJP led by its barnstorming prime ministerial candidate former Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, has won a majority (282 seats) in the Lok Sabha in its own right.
However, given the BJP and Modi’s close association with the RSS, the Hindu cultural organisation with a history of Hindu majoritarian assertiveness and anti-Muslim and Christian prejudice, there’s a danger of cadres of associated fringe organisations, even if not Modi and the BJP leadership, interpreting this massive electoral endorsement as a licence to practice crude or subtle majoritarianism and harass religious and caste minorities. It would be in its own and the national interest for the BJP high command — entrusted with the popular mandate for its promises to revive India’s flagging economy, tame inflation and provide clean and firm governance — to quickly disabuse its notoriously communal associate organisations of notions of majoritarian triumphalism. Communal peace and harmony is the necessary precondition for delivery of the economic growth and development promise of prime minister Modi. In particular, every care needs to be taken to ensure that the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat which has stained Modi’s governance record, is not replicated in any constituency or corner of India.
Moreover, it would be useful for the BJP leadership to note that rather than having won the recently concluded election, it was gifted to them by the Congress. Its clueless leaders wrecked the economy with inflationary giveaways and subsidies while the party’s ministers and rank and file availed the manifold opportunities provided by a weak and delusional leadership to engage in open, continuous and uninterrupted corruption and extortion. Having failed to govern despite a decade of opportunities, the national interest demands this grand old party discards its obsolete socialist nostrums and begins afresh while discharging its duties as a responsible opposition committed to nurturing India’s envied democratic system.
Meanwhile, it’s also incumbent upon the country’s effete intelligentsia to encourage rather than ridicule new political parties and formations such as the Aam Aadmi Party, Lok Satta and the Children First Party of India, which have emerged as political responses to the grave challenges rooted in pervasive corruption, maladministration and shameful neglect of abundant human resources, confronting the world’s most populous democracy. For India to attain its full potential and destiny, not only the lotus but other flowers must also bloom.
Jettison neta-babu socialism
THE SWEEPING victory of the bjp and comprehensive defeat of the Congress party in General Election 2014 offers the new government at the Centre an unprecedented opportunity to exorcise the ghost of neta-babu socialism and licence-permit-quota raj which has debilitated the high-potential Indian economy for the past 67 years after independence. Since it was founded in 1980, the BJP — and particularly its parent party, the Jana Sangh — has had a robust mercantile and free enterprise tradition which it seems to have abandoned in recent years, favouring a large role for the State in industry and business.
It could be — and it is — argued that the BJP’s failure to accelerate the process of dismantling the licence-permit-quota regime was due to the compulsion of coalition politics with most of the country’s political parties having absorbed the discretionary culture of neta-babu socialism which offers vast opportunities for corruption.
But this time around with the BJP having secured a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha (282 of 543), the stage is set for prime minister Narendra Modi to begin the process of dismantling post-independence India’s globally infamous licence-permit-quota regime which mired the high-potential Indian economy in the rut of the so-called Hindu rate of growth (3.5 percent and 1.1 percent per capita per annum) for over 40 years before the process of gradual liberalisation and deregulation of business and industry began in 1991.
In this context, it’s pertinent to note that for several centuries, if not millennia, before 1947 the Indian subcontinent was globally famous for its private enterprise and mercantile tradition. Indeed until the end of the 17th century, the subcontinent’s private industry and trade accounted for 20 percent of worldwide GNP. Right until the outbreak of the Second World War when imperial Britain’s India office imposed industrial licencing upon Indian industry to direct and control production for the war effort, Indian businessmen including JRD Tata, Walchand Hirachand, G.D. Birla and Lala Shri Ram had established an industrial base for independent India. Unfortunately, this advantage was nullified by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — a great democrat and nation builder, but poor economist — who favoured the centrally-planned, public sector-led model of economic development which has reduced India to the bottom decile of the world’s poorest nations.
From all accounts, prime minister Modi born into Gujarati business traditions, is naturally inclined to arouse the entrepreneurial spirit of the nation suppressed by imposition of the licence-permit-quota system for the past 67 years. The BJP’s comprehensive victory in the recently concluded general election offers a great opportunity to complete the process of liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy. In 1947, the country attained political freedom. Now the time has come for economic freedom.