March 23, 1998

Vajpayee should make economic reforms meaningful to the common Indian

Tavleen Singh

In the euphoria of coming to power in Delhi it will be unfortunate if the BJP's top leaders forget to examine what went wrong in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Only 10 more seats each from these states and Atal Bihari Vajpayee could have formed a government without needing to beg for support from post-poll allies. These are states ruled by the BJP and yet this handful of seats did not come the party's way. BJP leaders will do well to ask themselves why. In the answer could come the agenda that the new government must follow if it does not want to be dumped by voters at the very next chance they get.

Acres of newsprint have been filled since the election results came out with experts offering free advice to the incoming prime minister on what his agenda should be. Captains of industry, economists, pundits of hackdom, we have all sought to impress the new government with our deep comprehension of what ails the country. What worries me is most of the agendas I have read relate almost entirely to the needs of foreign investors, industry and urban India. Even if followed faithfully, they could make the BJP as unpopular in rural India as P.V. Narasimha Rao became, despite his celebrated economic reforms. Poor man, remember how he wandered the land in that election campaign of 1996, urging voters to keep in mind what he had done for the economy -- and remember the result? The Congress plunged to its lowest point ever.

Nobody in the Congress bothered to analyse why reforms that had met with such extraordinary approval internationally and in middle class India should have failed to inspire the average rural Indian. If there had been some reflection, it may have been discovered that rural India remained almost completely unaffected by the reforms.

Two years on, this continues to be true. The average Indian still does not understand what liberalisation means or why the economy needs to be reformed. He does not understand this because nothing in his life has changed. He continues to be held to ransom by petty officials who not only tell him what he can and cannot do at every step, but are usually corrupt as well. He cannot even sell his grain when and to whom he wants.

Sending his children to school is usually a nightmare because the local government school is likely to provide little or no education. If there is a private school and he can afford its fees, then getting admission is a story on its own. If someone gets sick then another nightmare begins. If you can get to the nearest "free" government hospital in time, you are unlikely to be able to afford the prescribed medicines which, in any case, may not be available.

If your children do manage to both survive and get educated then finding a job is nearly impossible. In more fortunate parts, factories have come up but they need skilled labour which they prefer to bring from outside, while your "educated" son can consider himself lucky if he gets a menial job. On top of all this, the average Indian lives in an environment so unsanitary and unattractive that the average Indian child grows up with the smell of open drains and dirty toilets.

Economic reforms have changed nothing because no government has so far made the minimal effort to make them comprehensible to those whose lives desperately need reform. The entire agricultural sector -- thereby, the rural economy -- has remained outside the purview of reforms. Nobody has made the smallest effort to loosen controls in this area nor has anyone attempted to create jobs by at least starting to introduce the sort of services sector that provides so many jobs in cities.

An example that has etched itself into my mind comes from a journey I took in 1997 with P. Chidambaram, finance minister in the United Front government, to remote villages in his Lok Sabha constituency of Sivaganga. Ironically, the example came from Chidambaram himself. He pointed out that one way of solving employment problems would be for the Tamil Nadu Government to allow unemployed youth to run transport services in villages that the state transport corporation could not serve. There must be thousands of other examples of this kind which no BJP state government has so far paid the smallest attention to.

The BJP has been so obsessed with attacking the Congress' economic reforms that it has not even bothered to find out how its own governments could do things differently. So all we have had from the party's economic think tanks is swadeshi rhetoric and foolish tirades against globalisation and the World Trade Organisation. Inevitably, the BJP has failed so far to articulate its own agenda for change.

The BJP's state governments have done nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Indians. So why should the people of Rajasthan or Maharashtra vote for them? In earlier times, the Congress got many chances because the average voter had learnt to expect almost nothing from the government. But voters have now become angry and impatient. So the BJP is unlikely to get more than one chance to prove it can make a difference.

When Vajpayee gets down to "reforming the reforms", he needs to remind himself that real change is required -- and not just an Atalji Awas Yojana or an Advani Rozgar Yojana to replace tired, old schemes currently named for Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

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