Why unemployment doesn’t worry the BJP

Before every election nowadays, Opposition supporters say that this time the BJP is bound to lose. They say that people, especially the young, are angry that there are no jobs. The argument goes that unemployed job-seekers have cut PM Modi a lot of slack and that at some point, their anger is bound to translate into anti-incumbency.

Yet, as the recent Assembly election results show, unemployment is simply not a decisive election issue. In fact, job growth — or the lack of it — has never been an election issue. RBI-KLEMS data tells us that jobs grew at an average annual rate of 2.3 per cent when Atal Behari Vajpayee was the PM. That is almost twice the rate at which the labour force was growing. Yet, the NDA got voted out in 2004.

In Manmohan Singh’s first stint, between 2004 and 2009, jobs grew at just 0.8 per cent per year, which was lower than the rate at which job-

seekers were getting added. Yet, the UPA came back to power with a larger majority. In his second stint, job growth gathered pace, rising at 1 per cent per year. In fact, in the final year, 2013-14, employment grew by 3 per cent, the highest growth rate since the 1980s. But the voters threw out the UPA and reduced the Congress to its lowest tally ever.

The exact opposite happened during Narendra Modi’s first government. We only have RBI-KLEMS employment projections till 2018, and it tells us that in the first four years, during 2014-18, there was an absolute fall in employment in India. The number of jobs reduced at the average annual rate of 0.2 per cent. Remember, this is data produced by a state agency. We can corroborate this with data from the CMIE (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy), which began doing employment surveys in 2016. If we take the three-year period between May 2016 and May 2019, employment fell at the rate of 0.9 per cent per year. Keep in mind, that this drop in job opportunities was taking place while the number of people wanting jobs was increasing.

Many thought that Modi would lose a large chunk of his seats in the 2019 elections, even if he did manage to return as PM. As we know, the BJP not only came back, it also beat its own record in terms of the number of seats. The jobs situation has only deteriorated since 2019, partly because of Covid and partly because of the general slowdown India’s economy has been facing for over a decade now. It has made no difference to the BJP’s electoral fortunes.

We can get a clue into the reason for this by unpacking the unemployment data. If we look at the CMIE’s latest four-month ‘sweep’ data for September-December 2021, we find that 10.6 per cent of those who want jobs were unemployed. That’s a massive unemployment rate for any economy. But a large number of the unemployed are those between 20 and 24 years old. If we focus only on men between the ages of 25 and 59 years — who constitute the bulk of decision-makers in Indian society — the unemployment rate drops to just 2 per cent. In absolute numbers, it is just about six million men within that ‘decision-making’ age-group who are unemployed.

Remember, only those who are willing to work are counted when unemployment is calculated. There are others who will not work, even if they are offered a job. In India, women’s participation in the labour force is abysmally low. Only 13 per cent of women in the 25-29 age bracket want, or actively seek, paid work. The biggest reason is that they have so much work to do at home that they simply don’t have the time to go out and look for employment. Older men, above the age of 60, also fall out of the labour force. Only a quarter of them look for work.

This means that in an average household, it is only men below 25 years who are affected by the paucity of jobs in the economy. Those without jobs are unlikely to get a suitable match for marriage, which means they most probably live in their parental homes, instead of being treated as a separate family unit, outside or within the larger joint family. This reduces their chances of independent thinking, and making voting choices which are different from those of the patriarch of the household.

As I mentioned above, only six million men within the 25-59 age bracket were unemployed in the September-December 2021 period. That works out to an average of just 11,000 votes per Lok Sabha seat. If one assumes a turnout of 70 per cent, that’s an average of just 7,700 unemployed ‘decision-making’ men per parliamentary constituency. This can hardly make a dent in electoral outcomes.

In fact, 10 million or 3 per cent of the men in the 25-59 age-group do not want to work, even if they were offered one. This is significantly higher than those who want work but don’t have jobs. Many amongst these would be vagrants, criminals and beggars who would not be considered to be employed, even if they have an income flow. There are still others who have lost all hope of ever getting any work. They might be illiterate and have already reached their mid-40s without any job. They might be too frail and malnourished to do hard manual labour, which would be the only type of work available to them.

Such people would be content to have a life of basic subsistence. This is exactly what the Modi government provides to the poorest people in India: Not jobs, but freebies and handouts that keeps their nose above water. It ensures that they will have two square meals on most days and some cash for additional spending. Other schemes help them replace the tattered tarpaulin on the roofs of their hovels and make it pucca. This fetches votes, especially when packets of free grain come with photographs of the PM and BJP CMs plastered on them. That is why freebies trump jobs.

The author is a senior economic analyst