What the people really want

Arun Maira

Former Member, Planning Commission

Majority Hindu votes hardly changed after divisive events, notes political strategist Prashant Kishor, such as the razing of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 Gujarat riots. Their choices of governments are based on other matters. The opposition to PM Modi should realise this and focus on what matters to the vast majority of Indian citizens, whatever their religion or caste, as should the government. One is the state of the economy. The other is the erosion of social values.

The time has come for a national dialogue to create a new vision for Bharat@100, and to discover who ‘we’ are.

Inadequate incomes are the most important concern for 90% of Indian citizens, cutting across religious and caste lines. For the last 30 years, UPA and NDA governments have concentrated on increasing the size of the GDP. In 2022, India is again the ‘fastest growing free market democracy’, as it was in the UPA regime. However, no government has solved the problems of ‘jobless’ growth and increasing inequalities. Rather than wringing their hands about religious divisions, liberals should change their ideas about economic management. India’s economic strategies are the same as that of the US and western countries (the Washington Consensus) where too liberalism is threatened by anti-liberal political movements.

The aim of India’s economic policies must be to substantially improve the ease of living of common citizens along with economic growth. Economists say the Indian economy’s problem is the large size of its ‘informal sector’, which constitutes over 90% of India’s economy. They would much rather that small enterprises were big, and that the informal sector was rapidly formalised. However, their solution of planting large firms here and there, with attractive incentives, will not create employment. The right solution is to nurture the growth of small enterprises. They generate more employment with less capital. Also, they are dispersed around the country in urban and rural areas. Their spread and growth will create employment on scale.

Every entity has the right form to survive and grow in its conditions. This is a natural law. Policy-makers are biased against ‘informality’. They think the informal is untidy and inefficient and difficult to administer. They would much rather that small firms adopt the form of large industrial enterprises. Industrial managers would prefer plantations with only tall timber trees in rows. They are easier to count and manage, and the forest is more ‘productive’ in terms of timber produced per acre than an organic forest with a mixture of varieties of bushes and trees. However, a ‘formal’ industrial forest also requires industrial inputs to sustain it (that harm the environment too), whereas the ‘informal’ organic forest is capable of sustaining itself. Similarly, economic policy-makers prefer that all entities have the form they consider best, to make it easier to track them, and also make it easier to provide them with resources (finance, training, etc.). However, this harms the viability of small enterprises and keeps the economy trapped in a ‘high capital-low employment’ mode of growth.

Social liberals and social conservatives have different views of a good society. For liberals, the rights of individuals to choose their own ways of life are paramount, whether it be the vocations they choose, the ways they dress, or their sexual preferences. Conservatives value conformity with societal traditions and norms. Hindu liberals have different views than Hindu conservatives, as do Muslim liberals and conservatives.

Cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion that the existential question for liberals, whose moral codes are individualistic, is ‘Who am I?’ Whereas for conservatives, with socio-centric moral codes, the question is ‘Who are we?’ He says both honour the universal principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘do no harm’. But conservatives go deeper. They also value ‘loyalty’ and ‘respect for authority’, values necessary for stability in societies. For liberals ‘traditions’ and ‘faith’, which provide comfort amidst uncertainty, are regressive values. Some liberal leaders in the US have insulted conservative citizens, calling them ‘scum’ and ‘deplorables’. In India, many liberals who prefer to see the world through lenses acquired from the West, dismiss conservative Indians as ‘anti-scientific’ and stuck in the past.

Twenty years ago, some Indian business leaders created a vision for India@75 with a strategy to achieve it. Independent India is 75 now, and the vision is not achieved. India’s leaders cannot be faulted for not having lofty goals, such as our ‘tryst with destiny’ in 1947, and the aims of all our five-year plans. Or doubling farmers’ incomes, hunger-free Bharat, universal education, jobs for all, etc. We have failed to achieve most of them.

Albert Einstein said, to continue with the same methods when they have not produced the results you want is madness because the methods may be the cause of the problems you want to solve. We need a new way for developing the economy to make growth more equitable and more environmentally sustainable. We also need a new way to come to agreements about the shape of the society we want to create, and how we will govern ourselves democratically.

Indians are searching for the soul of their country. They will not find it in written histories of India. The geographical boundaries of India have changed through history, as have the contours of who ‘we’ are. The Congress, at the Udaipur Nav Sankalp, called on all to follow the principles of Bharatiyata. The PM says our languages are the soul of Bharatiyata.

Bharat’s citizens speak many languages; they have diverse histories. Caste divisions are acute. Economic inequalities are increasing. The formal and informal live in different worlds. We must step out of our party affiliations and identities, and our self-righteousness, to listen to people not like ourselves. The time has come for a national dialogue to create a new vision for Bharat@100, and to discover who ‘we’ are.

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