The lowdown on tall poll promises

POLLING began in Mumbai at 7 am on May 20. I was there at 6:55! I voted in 1952 and in all elections held thereafter. I have voted in the Lok Sabha, Maharashtra Assembly and the Mumbai municipal elections. I have never missed any chance to cast my vote as a concerned citizen, except when the call of duty pinned me down to Punjab and, later, Romania.

Will INDIA win? I have my doubts. But it is true that the contest this time is much closer than it was in 2014 and 2019.

I went with my neighbours, Satish Sahney and his wife Neelam, to the polling station, a five-minute walk from my home. I was happy with the arrangements for the aged, except for the lighting in the polling booth. To confuse voters, a person bearing the same name as one of the two leading candidates had been fielded. Since the symbol assigned to him resembled somewhat the one I wished to opt for, a brighter light was needed. At 95, the eyesight is not the same as it was even five years ago. However, I am not one to make a mistake.

Every vote is going to count in the current elections. The margins between the leading candidates in every constituency in Mumbai are bound to be slim. This is the unintended consequence of the coup carried out two years ago which led to the split of two major parties in my state — the Shiv Sena and Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party.

“If re-elected in the Lok Sabha polls, we will liberate Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK),” declared Home Minister Amit Shah in one of his election meetings. His possible rival for the post of Prime Minister after Modi, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath, said at another poll meeting that “PoK will be in India six months into Modi’s third term”!

At yet another election meeting of the BJP, Assam CM Hemanta Biswa Sarma said he would “shut down places producing Mullahs” and “end four marriages”, referring to the widely held but mistaken belief that every Muslim man has four wives! It will be easier for Sarma to fulfil his promise than for India to take back PoK from Pakistan, as the two aspiring Prime Ministers have announced. That exercise would involve war with a nuclear-powered neighbour which would certainly invoke Chinese help. Going to war is not the type of decision that can be taken at election meetings where tall promises are made to attract voters.

Election promises, like poll manifestos, are closely scrutinised by rival parties and analysed and commented on. The Congress has offered to double the ration — presently,

5 kg of rice or wheat to each below-poverty-line (BPL) ration-card holder — that is now being distributed free of charge by the Modi government. Since more than half the population has been included in the BPL category (contradicting the government’s statement that it has lifted millions from that category), the new Finance Minister is going to have her or his work cut out in case INDIA wins.

But will INDIA win? I have my doubts. But it is true that this time the contest is much closer than it was in 2014 and 2019. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has succeeded in putting many Opposition bigwigs in jail. It has also succeeded in nudging many other Opposition leaders to defect to the BJP lest they were pursued by the ED or the CBI. But fear of the probe agencies has also brought the Opposition parties together lest Modi achieved his dream of an Opposition-mukt polity.

In the interregnum, Opposition parties are making their own tall promises that, if implemented, will spell disaster for the country’s economy. Moreover, our country’s citizens may get used not only to perpetual freebies but also to not working. No economy can sustain freebies for any length of time. Any government that is voted to office will necessarily have to equip our youth to undertake tasks that require different sets of skills, some manual but increasingly more service-oriented.

Modi has repeatedly predicted that the INDIA bloc will disintegrate after the Lok Sabha elections. It is a warning that needs to be taken seriously by all concerned. It would be ideal if the polity is divided into two competing blocs — one right of centre, led by the BJP, and the other left of centre, led by the Congress, the Trinamool Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party. Parties like the Telugu Desam Party and the YSR Congress Party of Andhra Pradesh, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi of Telangana and the DMK and AIADMK of Tamil Nadu have only regional relevance. They cannot be clubbed with the Right or the Left. Similar is the case of the regional parties that dot the northeastern states.

But to compete for power at the Centre, two main ideologies, one right of centre and the other left of centre, would be ideal. It will be more intelligible to political workers at first and through that route to ordinary voters so that they make up their minds about which side meets their requirements and their aspirations better.

Sharad Pawar, that dyed-in-the-wool practitioner of realpolitik, had predicted that the small regional parties would merge with the BJP or the Congress after these elections. Considering the ambitions of the leaders involved in the current elections, such as Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal, I doubt if that could happen so soon.

A constant refrain that is heard is that there is no leader comparable to Modi and that is why the voters are not ready as yet to consider a changing of the guard. Well, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of a noble family, has done a lot of catching up in the past year. It cannot be claimed that he has caught up, but he has made himself relevant now. During the course of electioneering, I heard people who preferred to give him a chance, which was not the case a year ago.