Whose election is it anyway?

At the start of this week, the Kejriwal government scrapped the earlier government’s approvals for FDI in multi-brand retail in Delhi. It is not clear if this represents a sign of the party’s thoughts on the national economy; but it appears to be depressingly familiar reaction of many fresh incumbents to the actions of their predecessors.

So far, the Aam Aadmi Party has behaved almost exactly like all other victorious parties in the first flush of their power: shown great generosity with public funds and animus for the policies of the previous government.

We do not as yet know what the AAP’s plan for the economy is. That could be worrying in the run-up to the elections.

The AAP has company because so far neither the BJP nor the Congress has come out with a significantly cogent view of what it intends to with the complex problems facing the fissured economy: one is looking inward into its own ‘backwardness’ and the other, westward with all the vestments of modernity.

The AAP thinks it can ride through the portals of power on its broom, the BJP on a personality who has been turned by the media and some experts into a marker of its identity, while the Congress appears to be suffering from paralytic amnesia.

The Prime Minister who could have turned the UPA’s achievements into its resume instead created his own at his press conference.

How else are we to see the main party-blocs gearing for what may turn out to be a watershed election?

Realistically speaking, this election must cope with the seminal changes that took place — or did not take place — in the last decade, and their consequences.

The organised economy faces problems that run deep on account of mounting debt. The corporate sector, or at least chunks of it, is highly leveraged and banks are saddled with bad assets.

The cancellation of 62 coal blocks could further add to the woes of banks — so the Finance Ministry warns. Should the inquiry into the allocation of the coal blocks not take place, this government will have to contest the election with the knowledge of its own malfeasance.

The next government will have the unenviable task of dealing with the moral repercussions, that could pose a bigger problem for it than simply managing banks’ NPAs.

As for the unorganised economy, the problems are too well documented to require recalling except to say that they cover the gamut of issues from malnutrition to non-governance.

So where do the parties stand on these matters? We could, perhaps, look at the booklet entitled Swaraj that Arvind Kejriwal wrote much before the election campaign for clues to his party’s national perspective.

Swaraj deals with one idea, namely decentralisation of governance.

The discourse has a homespun quality to it, expounding on the idea of people taking control of the administration of their resources, and of their administration through the agency of the gram sabhas in villages and resident welfare associations in towns.

These two form the bedrock of Kejriwal’s concept of decentralised governance, though RWAs for cities merits less attention.

It is a laudable model because decentralisation certainly would reduce corruption by diffusing the decision-making process sufficiently to make it more transparent and therefore accountable to the people most affected by them

But Kejriwal’s concept of swaraj drops from the sky as if nothing existed where it has to land. After all, the past five decades have witnessed experiments in decentralisation — never mind if for better or worse.

He offers critiques of Panchayati Raj but does not examine the important constitutional changes that the 73rd and 74th amendments of 1992 represented.

Bypassing them entirely, he offers his own blueprint for gram sabhas and RWAs with just a brief look at the draft of the ‘Model Nagar Raj Bill’ circulated to state governments three years ago.

This is a pity, for both the amendments take us substantially down the path to the kind of decentralisation he holds up as a model.

His examples from the US and Brazil would have carried more weight had he cast his critical eye on the ways various state governments have skirted both the amendments.

Swaraj also ridicules NREGA, calling it a “joke”. Read against the backdrop of the forthcoming elections and the AAP’s aspirations, however, the tract fails to offer an alternative discourse on national economic problems.

Some clues to an attitudinal stance towards multinationals lie in the beginning — “Why this book” — where he recounts an experience from his time as an income tax officer with a multinational who was caught evading tax, to ask much later: “Did they really have control over our Parliament?”

It is ironical that the BJP should hold up Narendra Modi’s Gujarat as a paradigm rather than its own NDA tenure at the Centre. It was during the 2003-09 period that the organised economy began to bloom as a result of a favourable global environment that recovered very quickly from the dotcom bust, and a set of policies that favoured the IT sector.

The NDA had little to offer the rural or the unorganised sector. Its policies were urban-centric and presaged many of the policies that were attempted in the UPA’s first term, such as, for instance, the disinvestment of PSUs.

And it is not likely to be different this time around. The Modi model the BJP wishes to offer is a more idealised version of the same discourse the UPA has followed in the last decade.

And yet the UPA was different. It is indeed astonishing that Manmohan Singh did not use his press conference to draw up a checklist of the achievements of his government.

Had he done so, he would have provided the nation and especially the non-organised sector, the largest voter community, a glimpse of the first comprehensive programmatic action for the underprivileged undertaken by any government since 1991.

In 2004-05, the UPA team began with a common minimum programme that may have been faulty but with its heart in the right place.

Over the next 10 years, the UPA offered the nation’s poor and deprived a string of rights-based legislations, the Food Security Bill, and finally the Lokpal law that future governments will be called to deliver upon.

The Congress should claim that credit and it hasn’t, so far.

So what is common to all three, we might ask?

As things stand today, all of them appeal to the middle class and ignore the vast majority of non-urban middle class that still forms the base of at least more than half of the population.

In a poor country, will soon see an election by the middle class, for the middle class, of middle class.