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Luring with Largesse

Badal is on a statewide cheque doleout spree in preparation for the approaching assembly elections, finds out India Today Special Correspondent Ramesh Vinayak.

It's an unlikely time and place for the Santa to bestow beneficence, but the people of Punjab are not complaining. Eyes glued to the skies, they strain to hear the familiar whir of the copter, for their Santa is none other than Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.

With the assembly elections less than a year away, the Akali supremo is flitting across the state, distributing cheques for development work at sangat darshans—a public interface he conceived of to redress public grievances soon after coming to power. At the 24-odd sangat darshans that he has attended in the past month, Badal has distributed Rs 100 crore worth of grants on demand by panchayats and urban civic bodies, according to his official aides.

Though the redressal meetings have been held regularly in the past four years, of late, Badal has gone into an overdrive, converting these meets into a populist exercise to draw political mileage. Desperate to stem the anti-incumbency factor and portray himself as a development-oriented leader, Badal has repackaged the Sangat Darshans in tune with his brand of politics of populism. For the first time, these meets have also been extended to urban areas in an attempt to appease the BJP vote-bank.

The recent spurt in cheque-loaded darshans has given currency to rumours that Badal plans to announce elections before February next year when the term of the present assembly expires. However, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP combine is wary of preponing elections in the wake of the mounting public outcry over the worsening power crisis. There have also been increasing protests by farmers over the tardy procurement of wheat by government agencies.

Perhaps in a bid to placate the disgruntled lot and deliver on the much-touted promise of providing a Maharaja Ranjit Singh style of governance, Badal conducted a surprise raid last week on a government school, hospital and grain market in Fatehgarh Sahib.

Interestingly, Badal is doling out grants despite the state's precarious financial situation and despite most of his previous populist schemes—shagun scheme and houses for the poor, among others—having come a cropper due to shortage of funds and shoddy implementation. The motive for this drive then clearly seems to be to derive as much political advantage as possible before the polls.

"It's an exercise to quicken the pace of development that would accrue political benefits to the party," admits Finance Minister Captain Kanwaljit Singh. The sangat Darshan—dubbed "vote darshan" by the Opposition—will certainly come in handy for Badal to mount an election campaign.

However, brows-and objections-are being raised over the source of grants. While the chief minister's aides insist the cheques are from the budgeted funds, the opposition parties accuse Badal of diverting them from the district planning and development boards, rural development funds and the Central schemes.

The Opposition is also crying foul over the manner in which a "bulk" of cheques are being handed over to the panchayats owing allegiance to the ruling party. "Badal's sangat darshan is a brazen attempt to convert government funds into vote-bank," alleges state Congress chief Amarinder Singh.

Badal is also being charged with scuttling the functioning of democratic institutions and centralising powers by disbursing grants himself. "Badal's new style of governance has reduced the ministers into clerks and the local development bodies into a farce," says CPI MLA Hardev Arshi. Even the ministers are peeved. Badal, however, is unfazed. "The Sangat Darshan is not a pre-election stunt but an exercise for genuine grass-root level development," says the chief minister. There aren't many takers for this line of argument.

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