It was a time when if you bought a foreign car or went on a foreign holiday you could expect to be subjected to an income tax raid. The number of Indians who used Indian Airlines or Air India was so small that there were jokes about how our two airlines employed one person for every passenger.
A crime is being committed by our political leaders that is likely to have immense and irreversible consequences and it worries me that it has gone almost unnoticed. This is the crime of turning voters once more into supplicants. They were forced to be supplicants in those socialist decades when Congress ruled most of India. We had just got rid of the British and political leaders enjoyed being benefactors, or as we say in Hindi as the ‘mai-baap sarkar’. This literally means the government is our mother and father. In rural parts of our ancient land, you need only visit the Collector’s office to see that these mighty officials continue to treat people as supplicants.
The Collector is a colonial post that should have been abolished long ago but inexplicably still exists. This official is so powerful that he behaves like a provincial potentate. He usually lives in the grandest bungalow, usually set in sprawling gardens and, if it is an old British official’s house, can also have a tennis court and swimming pool on the premises. Outside the Collector’s heavily secured palace are to be found, at a safe distance, queues of anxious people who sometimes come repeatedly for a small matter to be settled. In the old days I used to see people groveling, with their hands joined in supplication, when they were granted an audience with the ‘Burra Sahib.’
When Narendra Modi became prime minister, one reason why I became a ‘Modi Bhakt’ was because he showed signs of bringing real change. With his Jan Dhan scheme he forced people to open bank accounts into which he transferred welfare funds to prevent the money from ending up in the pockets of corrupt officials instead of the hands of the needy. Slowly, Indian people, even the neediest, stopped thinking of themselves as supplicants and a new aspirational middle class emerged.
COVID was when millions of Indians who lost their jobs in cities and towns, because of that brutal first lockdown, became supplicants again, dependent on the free rations that the government provided. After COVID, Modi continued the free rations and he and his chief ministers started using the euphemism ‘beneficiaries’ to disguise what was happening.
Before the Lok Sabha election earlier this year, opposition leaders cleverly deduced that the way to shatter this new vote bank was to promise voters many, many more benefits and ‘khatakhat’. Monthly pocket money for women, free transport in cities, subsidised cooking gas, scooters, cycles, free electricity and the promise of government jobs. This has led to a new era of competitive populism. So, in Haryana when the Congress Party promised women Rs 2,000 as monthly pocket money, the BJP promised Rs 2,100.
After the results of these elections come next week, dates will be announced for Maharashtra. Since the coalition government of the BJP, Shiv Sena (breakaway) and NCP (breakaway) is on shaky grounds, money spent on luring voters has doubled. According to a report in a rival newspaper last week, Rs 87,000 crore is being spent on welfare schemes of which monthly pocket money for women will alone cost Rs 46,000 crore. This new scheme, called Ladki Bahin Yojana, will give an estimated 2.5 crore women Rs 1500 every month. Alongside this report was another one that revealed that millions of women have yet to get the money they have become newly entitled to. In my own village, there is a very poor Adivasi settlement and many women from it complained that they have not yet received any money.
Once schemes like this are started, they are almost impossible to reverse. So, whoever wins in Maharashtra, taxpayers’ money will continue to be poured into creating a new class of supplicants. Instead of creating jobs and encouraging women to participate in the work force, they are being encouraged to stay at home and wait for their monthly pocket money. Countries that turn their people into supplicants never become fully developed so we can forget about that ‘Viksit Bharat’ dream. There will not be enough money left to build ports, airports, roads, hospitals, schools and colleges since our money will be spent on populist welfare schemes instead.
My personal problem with turning voters into supplicants is that I remember well those ‘socialist’ decades when in the name of socialism most Indians lived on the verge of poverty and prosperity was considered a dirty word. There was almost no middle class then. Millions of Indians lived in horrendous poverty and the handful of rich people who survived socialism secretly sent their wealth to bank accounts in Switzerland while pretending to live in genteel poverty.
It was a time when if you bought a foreign car or went on a foreign holiday you could expect to be subjected to an income tax raid. The number of Indians who used Indian Airlines or Air India was so small that there were jokes about how our two airlines employed one person for every passenger. They were gloomy times, and as someone who lived through them, I pray that they never come back. But as a taxpayer when I see our political leaders spend recklessly on populist schemes in the name of welfare, I fear the worst. They appear bent on taking us backwards to a time when the world saw India as an economic basket case or, as foreign friends said to my face, a ‘land of starving millions.’
