There is a statue in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad which
is a faithful mirror image of our Prime Minister’s rhetoric in Davos recently.
It is the amazing two-faced statue which has the cruel looking Mephistopheles
on one side and the beautiful visage of Margaretta on the other. The latter was
on display in Davos, the former is the one most Indians are familiar with back
home.
Mr. Modi touched all the right buttons in his speeches to the
uber wealthy and powerful in this alpine Gymkhana club: the imperative of
globalisation, concerted action on climate change, cross border trade, India’s
position as the fastest growing economy in the world, the solicitation for FDI,
the political stability that India offers to global investors, the bold tax
reforms. Following after President Xi’s act last year at Davos, it would have
been impressive but for the fact that certain other developments at the same
time made his words ring a bit hollow and less than credible. At the very least
they gave the definite impression that the Prime Minister was being selective
in his presentations, that he was perhaps masking a darker underside to his
narrative.
The balloon was punctured by two reports released the same week-
first by the WEF ( World Economic Forum)’s own Inclusive Development Index
exposing India as one of the world’s most unequal countries- it placed India at
62 out of 77 countries, below our “poor” neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal
and Bangladesh. This shocking revelation
was further confirmed by another international agency- Oxfam reported that 73%
of the wealth generated in India last year was cornered by just 1% of its
population! This same 1% has appropriated all the additional income generated by economic growth between 1980 and 2014. This is the real and ugly underside of a ruthless pursuit of a pure capitalist driven GDP growth strategy and
economic reforms that ignore the ground realities. Policies that cater only to
the Sensex, billionaires and big industry but leave in their wake millions
unemployed, SMEs ruined and farmers devastated cannot be sustainable even in
the mid term. GDP in itself is being globally discredited as the sole indicator
of economic progress, and the “trickle down” theory does not work autonomously.
If there is no simultaneous investment in social welfare schemes( which has
been declining since this govt. came to power) GDP gains cannot be inclusive:
the Index of Inequality is as important as the Sensex.
A second area where Mr. Modi’s claims appeared less than
convincing was the Environment. The global EPI ( Environmental Performance Index)
released by the World Economic Forum on the 23rd January revealed
that India was the fourth worst country in terms of environmental performance,
ranked at 177 among 180 countries; even worse, we had slipped 36 places in the
last one year alone. This is not at all surprising given the govt’s track
record over the last three years: all environmental regulations have been
systematically demolished and the Ministry of Environment and Forests has
become the Ministry of “ Ease of Doing Business”, projects are being sanctioned
on a large scale in highly eco-sensitive zones such as national parks and Tiger
Reserves, highways such as the Char Dham one in Uttarakhand being rammed
through tens of thousands of trees, rivers are being linked without any EIA
studies ( 1.80 million trees will be felled for the Ken-Betwa linking project
alone), a huge chunk of the Western Ghats has been excluded from the ESZ
category to accommodate the building and mining lobby. The govt. suffers from
the twin illusions that (a) the climate change problem is limited only to
replacing fossil fuels with renewables, and (b) that technology alone can
provide all the solutions. It is wrong on both counts. As Mr. Al Gore pointed
out on a subsequent panel discussion at Davos, the fuel issue is only part of
the problem: the larger one is protecting our natural spaces and assets-
rivers, mountains, forests, deserts and the millions who depend on them for
livelihoods- from degradation, encroachment and ruthless exploitation. And this
requires political will, not technology. Mr. Modi’s govt. has to realise this
and reverse the dangerous course it has adopted in the interest of GDP growth,
as usual!
The third question which the delegates at Davos might have
pondered over, even while our Prime Minister was holding forth, was whether
India was a country governed by the rule of law or the rule of the mobs? The
question was inevitable, given the violence unleashed by the Rajput Karni Sena
and associated hooligans over the Padmavat screenings. It took the punch out of
the Prime Minister’s speech. The world would have particularly noticed that
governments belonging to Mr. Modi’s own ruling party in at least four states
defied the Supreme Court in going ahead with the ban in some form or the other,
sided with the Sena hoodlums, took no preventive steps to pre-empt violence and
were in fact complicit in their illegal and unconstitutional actions. India
certainly did not look like a very safe place in which to invest, the ability
of both central and state governments to enforce compliance with the law of the
land appeared questionable, even the Supreme Court’s effectiveness and
legitimacy came under a cloud. All reason enough for even a tourist to think
twice before coming to India, let alone someone with a few billion dollars to
invest. These developments would not have gone unnoticed at Davos.
Mr. Jaitley’s subsequent budget has raised more questions
than provided answers: the promised MSP increase for the Rabi crop is nowhere
in place and the new National Health Protection Scheme is only a rehashed
version of the 2016 Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana which has been a
non-starter: participation in it is less than 30% with as many as seven states
opting out of it. The budget for the promised 1.50 lakh “ wellness centres” is
nowhere in sight. The NHPS will certainly be a bonanza for the Insurance
companies ( as the crop insurance scheme has been) but the 500 million
“beneficiaries” may not benefit all that much.
Rhetoric, mega ideas and grandstanding alone cannot make India an attractive country for
investment or a world leader for, as Shakespeare said: one can smile and smile
and still be a villain. If the face of Mephistopheles has to be removed from
that statue the government will have to do a radical rethinking of the values
and principles behind its policies and stop thinking of merely the next
election. A " pakoda" cannot be a symbol of genuine progress.
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