Appearances have never been more deceptive. Most visitors wishing to savour the thrills of Indian general elections this year may not realise that the country is going through its worst financial crisis in recent decades.
The situation looks ominous even in terms of official stats. India has seen unemployment reaching its lowest level in 45 years. During the last 12 months alone, an estimated 110 million people have lost their jobs, there being no growth for major consumer goods production sector. Only in the infrastructure sector and real estate activity in some parts of the country, there are signs of positivity. But there has occurred a sharp slide in the demand for cars, high end flats and upmarket luxury items.
The notional minimum monthly wage figure for a family worked out for India in 2019 is Rs 18,000, according to experts. At present, an estimated 67% of all Indian households on average are earning only Rs 10,000 or less, says a recent survey. Further, 92% of all working women earn less than Rs 10,000 a month, while the position of men is not much better either, at 82%.
Post liberalization since 1991, employers have seen their powers increase almost phenomenally in their dealings with organised labour and the working class. Hire and fire, low wages and long hours are the new norm.
Neither the Indian National Congress (INC) nor the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been noted for their concern about bread-and-butter working class issues. In fact the systematic destruction of the workers’ rights began under Dr Manmohan Singh as India’s Finance Minister. Dr Singh’s attitude towards organised worker’s protests and mass movements by poor peasants and informal sector workers, as his critics would agree, makes the late Margaret Thatcher sound like a progressive liberal!
No wonder, the ‘great’ Finance Minister, currently out of power, remains the darling of the pro-west media establishment in India and abroad. One of his more remarkable pronouncements----- about poor tribal populations resisting the forcible takeover of their traditional forest land by rich national and international mining interests----- deserves special mention. The great, much overrated economist described them as a major threat to India’s security!
Yet when the BJP won power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised to create 20 million new jobs annually, in a major bid to kickstart the stalled economy he inherited from the outgoing UPA regime.
But apart from project-based contracted labour in the major infra projects, there were no new jobs created since 2014. In West Bengal alone, the introduction of the new GST rules, led to the closure of 50% of MSME units, the only sector where there was some economic activity, which saw a steady rise in employment to the tune of 30,000 people annually.
The economic crisis has occurred on a national scale. Government sources in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, an industrially advanced state, reported the loss of work for nearly 40% of its industrial workforce! Not only are the unemployed, even those with jobs clearly no longer safe, even as India rose from the sixth to the fifth largest economy under the BJP, overtaking France. Jobless growth is the new norm, the concentration of wealth the new trend.
Millions of Indians may suffer from backbreaking misery and hardships. But that has not prevented the rise of scores of multi-millionaires from the ranks of industrialists in India, or the control of over 50% of the country’s economic assets by about 1% of India’s super rich.
What has all this to do with Indian general elections?
The true and straightforward answer is, very little. Banglatribune readers may be shocked to learn that major opposition parties in India have NOT made any issue of such ominous trends in the national economy. They have studiously ignored the increasing pauperization of the organised labour over the years. Even in Europe or the US, organised and unorganized labour and workers have launched massive agitations and protests all over the place against the big corporate houses. But in India, opposition parties, whether regional or national, have let the INC (now part of the opposition) and the BJP off the hook. Except for the weakened left parties, there has been no effort by regional parties to build any kind of agitation on the daily sufferings of the people.
In any case the hallmark of this year’s pre-poll campaign in India has been a phenomenal growth of plainly abusive rhetoric used by both the ruling party and the opposition. Political culture has reached its lowest depths.
As for ‘highlighting critical economic issues’, an example can be made of how the Trinamool Congress takes on the BJP in Bengal. ‘Where are the 10 crore new jobs you promised us Modibabu, do you have any answers?’ asks Ms Mamata Banerjee at public rallies and passes on to other things. She is known to have not much interest in economic issues.
It is not too different elsewhere either. Apart from India’s ex Congress finance Minister P.Chidambaram, no one, not even Rahul Gandhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav or Ms Mayabati, have seriously criticized the BJPs failure to improve the economy or tackle India’s joblessness problem! This was not so in the past, when leaders like Dr Hiren Mukherjee, Madhu Limaye, Prof N.G.Ranga, Somnath Chatterjee, Meghnad Saha, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, Ram Manohar Lohia, Hari Vishnu Kamath or George Fernandes were the members of the Indian Parliament.
As Kolkata-based economist and analyst Shounak Mukherjee puts it, ’Today you have actors like Dev, Moon Moon Sen and others getting elected as MPs. I have nothing against them. But their contribution to the daily parliamentary debates or active participation in public life and affairs and social work, is almost zero.. You have Mamata Banerjee calling Mr Modi ‘Haridas Pal, gadha, bhonda etc’, in public meetings, to cheering crowds. The other day she threatened to slap him! Rahul Gandhi also called Modi ‘chor’ while Mani Shankar Aiyer taunted him as a chaiwala… Modi may not react much, but other BJP leaders do and they also start abusing opposition leaders..The net outcome: a total trivialization of India’s major burning issues and problems, and the decline of political campaigning into a deplorable slugfest.’
And if such devaluation of India’s political standards and discourse benefits anyone in the long run, it is Mr. Modi and the ruling BJP. They do NOT have to answer the hard questions that people are eager and impatient to ask them through their elected leaders and policymakers.
However, whoever wins the 2019 elections---it seems that for now Mr. Modi and his party are ahead of the competition--- would be well advised to address themselves without further delay to India’s worsening financial crisis. Time is running out and they can ignore it only at their own peril.