Maharashtra cooperation minister Babasaheb Patil from the Nationalist Congress Party bared his heart on Friday. Talking about the people’s obsession with loan waivers, he shared an apocryphal story. During an election, a leader visited a village, and the residents told him that they would vote for whoever brought a river to their village.
“Alright, we will give you a river, too,” the leader said. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) minister then explained the moral of the story: “That’s why I say people should decide wisely what they demand…. We (politicians) make promises because we want to win elections, but all these things need serious thought.”
How candid! Somebody needed to say this. Patil might have learnt this art of plainspeak from his party chief, Ajit Pawar. On a visit to the rain-hit Marathwada region last month, Ajit got upset when a farmer asked him about a loan waiver. “Give him the chief ministership,” the Maharashtra deputy chief minister had snapped. He is known for his uncanny, brusque remarks that often trigger controversies.
In 2013, referring to a person’s hunger strike for the release of water from a dam, Ajit had said, “But where are we going to get water from? Should we urinate? And when we are not getting water to drink, even urine is not coming easily.”
Ajit’s outburst over the loan waiver demand in Marathwada had to do with the financial constraints that he has been grappling with as the finance minister of Maharashtra. “We are giving Rs 45,000 crore under the Ladki Bahin scheme. We have waived electricity charges for farmers. We are paying those bills,” he sought to explain.
You can question Ajit and Patil for their manners and poor communication skills, but they were only trying to state the facts or speak the truth. The factual truth is that politicians find it easier to lie and mislead.
As American-German political theorist Hannah Arendt says in her book, On Lying and Politics: “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”
Bihar’s never-ending issue of unemployment
When it comes to lies by Indian politicians, one lifetime is not enough to write about them. For the purpose of this column, therefore, let me confine it to election promises and/or lies, starting with Bihar, which will go to the polls next month. Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav has promised to provide a government job for every household. He said that he will bring a legislation to this effect within 20 days of coming to power and implement it within 20 months.
There are 2.76 crore households in Bihar. The state has an estimated 26 lakh government employees.
It means that Tejashwi, if he becomes the chief minister, shall have to create 2.5 crore new government jobs. That is, a job for every third voter in 20 months. That’s more daunting than what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised for the entire country—2 crore jobs every year. We know what happened to that promise.
Unemployment is a big issue in Bihar, with 3.16 people registering on the government’s e-Shram portal to look for jobs. As per a report by The Indian Express, the net value added by Bihar’s tertiary or services sector has reduced as a percentage of the total net state value added—from 61.2 per cent in 2019-20 to 54.8 per cent in 2024-25. Bihar had 3,386 factories in 2023-24—just 1.3 per cent of all factories in India. Bihar housed just 1.17 lakh or 0.75 per cent of the total number of workers employed by the Indian industry.
Tejashwi’s promise, however, smacks of desperation. Bihar lacks both resources and capacity to create that many jobs in 20 months. Nitish Kumar-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is doing no better. Look at just one of the many poll time bonanzas the government has announced—Rs 10,000 each to around 1.1 crore women under Mukhya Mantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana. If their business shows promise, the government has promised to top it up with a much more substantial amount of Rs 2 lakh each. Just think of it.
If even 50 lakh of the targeted beneficiaries start their business, the state will give them Rs. 1,000,000,000,000 (one lakh crore) after six months—that is, more than double the state’s estimated capital expenditure of Rs 42,000 crore for 2025-26. Does Bihar have the resources for this? And we are talking about just one of the many poll-time sops the Nitish Kumar government has announced. The NDA is looking equally desperate.
Also read: Tejaswi Yadav’s govt job promise in Bihar tells us about the real problem in India—unemployment
Desperate lies
So, are these Bihar politicians misleading or lying to people? Of course, they are. When a leader makes a promise, knowing fully well that it can’t be fulfilled, it has to be called a lie. See what’s happening in other states. Ahead of the 2022 Punjab Assembly election, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had promised a monthly allowance of Rs 1,000 each to women. Three-and-a-half years since coming to power, the Bhagwant Mann-led government hasn’t fulfilled it.
The Karnataka government fulfilled its five pre-poll guarantees but is now constantly complaining about a lack of funds for development works. Maharashtra deputy CM’s angst about the money being spent on pre-poll sops is well-known. Similar stories are coming in from all the states that saw politicians and parties compete in revdi distribution, especially since the 2023 Karnataka Assembly election in which the Congress unveiled its ‘guarantees’.
They are already becoming a big drain on resources in many states. It can’t be sustained. As late Ajit Singh of the Rashtriya Lok Dal once told me, people’s expectations keep rising in every election. “You promise them (voters) roti and deliver, but that’s not good enough for the next election. In the next election, they would ask for mutton and chicken. You deliver them, too. But in the subsequent election, they will ask you something more. The expectations will keep rising. There is no end to it,” he said.
Could Ajit Singh tell that to voters and reason with them? Obviously not. PM Modi, with his huge popularity, could have done that. He started in right earnest, attacking the ‘revdi’ politics of opposition parties. That could have been his legacy. He opted for survival instead and started outmatching the Opposition in distributing revdis in one election after another.
The competitive revdi politics essentially involves lying. Because every party will keep raising the bar in every election to outmatch the adversary. It will reach a level where the promises simply can’t be fulfilled. The revdi competition in economically backward Bihar is a perfect case study. That also means gradually making our politicians compulsive liars.
They must, however, listen to David Bromwich, the Yale University Sterling Professor, who has the following to say in the introduction to Arendt’s book: “The liar has a jump on the audience; he is the performer and he takes the initiative. The liar in a democracy who operates with a political purpose…will tell the people what they want to hear. But in a democracy, too—and Arendt relishes the dramatic reversal—the liar is fated to become part of the audience. ‘The more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end up believing his own lies’.”
And this applies beyond elections and revdis.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)