There is something grotesque about welfare schemes for the poor announced by leaders and politicians from glitzy ramparts and state-of-the-art vehicles and cavalcades. Yet, this is the only coherent script that has surfaced from an otherwise incoherent political landscape. ‘Freebies’ from choppers by well-heeled and even manicured politicians is the main image that has emerged from this all-important election season in Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Telangana. And we can only surmise the big spending on rallies, social media messages, bussing of voters to venues and parachuting of star campaigners. This expenditure would easily be in the hundreds, if not thousands, of crores. Political leaders across the spectrum are competing to declare the most cut price for an essential commodity or public good. This image nevertheless points to at least five, if not more, emerging patterns.
New political trends in an old guise
Political funding is robust, mobile, in big play and going for the big kill for starters —It would be myopic and downright foolish to simply focus on electoral bonds and their opacity as the key issue that is blighting Indian democracy. Whether it is a small party, the ruling behemoth or the contender to the provincial throne, the scale of election campaigning has been staggering in which money, it seems, has not been scarce. What this is doing to political work, leadership, and democracy deserves its own column. I will turn to it soon after this so-called semi-final of the 2024 Lok Sabha election is played out.
Second, India’s welfare system looks broken. If, in an important election season, politicians have been reduced to clamouring for the lowest price to be given on cooking gas cylinders, it points to both the presence of widespread economic distress and an absence of institutional mechanisms and policies to meet this all-important challenge of inequality. It will be cynical, if superficially accurate, to call it populism. It is indeed a populist plea to the voter to cast in a party’s favour.
This transactional plea will no doubt trouble technocrats and policy specialists whether or not they believe in welfare. For the economic reformers, giveaways, or ‘freebies’ as they would call them, are but a drain on the exchequer. For those persuaded by democracy’s core relationship to public goods (as I am), this is bad because it lacks the institutional design and depth of real distributive mechanisms. These last-minute guarantees betray a total lack of vision for India’s skewed political economy.
There is much that can be done, but these slogans and declarations hinder that process and don’t even begin to meet the challenge. For instance, is it too much to ask the fifth-largest economy in the world to have a national health service that is free on delivery? What would that take? However audacious an idea, there is no time and space to ask this when the political scene is captured in a breathless loop of rallies, studio fights and slugfests on social media. This takes up time, but above all, it takes a lot of money.
There is clearly a lot of money about, but it is being diverted and spent on transforming and influencing the relationship between the leader and the people, the ruler and the ruled.
Third, if – as it is increasingly becoming clear – expensive benevolence is going to be the hallmark of a political leader, then the power of personality is making politics feudal. I don’t simply mean the flourishing of mini-rajas and their prajas (subjects) who are caught up in the ritual of cyclical popularity contests alone, but rather the coming of a new and deep division of political labour. For all the hyper-modern digital and sonic bombardment, memes and message forwards, the political leader is increasingly looking and behaving like the long-forgotten, rightly reviled and junked jajman (not a precise translation, but an overlord would fit).
Despite all the renewed talk on caste that is reanimating Indian politics, the leader is increasingly looking and behaving like a jajman. Surrounded by entourages, almost always in a cavalcade, standing atop or, better still, sitting in airspace, political leadership is displayed as distance with carefully choreographed moments of connection and proximity with the vast populace.
While it is only correct to debate a caste census, the graded entitlements or lack thereof among sub-castes, and the inherent injustice of caste, the greatest gulf is increasingly between the leader and the people. Personalised pledges of showtime guarantees by top leadership are fast recasting the elected political representative as a hybrid between a celebrity and a feudal overlord. The only crucial difference is that the voter’s loyalty is not necessarily a given, so the leaders must come out and sweat it out during campaign season.
Also read: Call it revadi or welfare scheme, pre-poll promises are draining state exchequer
Gaming elections: welfare or campaigns?
In such a scenario, welfare schemes and guarantees convey and enforce a rhetoric of gifting and generosity by the ruler for the ruled rather than a web of democratic rights. If anything, India’s economic story now urgently needs a new welfare system or even a welfare State that is rules-based, long-term, and above all, institutional.
Fourth, this personalisation of public policy through grand gestures of benevolence has converted India’s democracy into a theatrical spectacle and entertainment. Elections, now, are not a battle of ideas; they prioritise speculation over debate and analysis. ‘Will the latest guarantee scheme for girls and women succeed in wooing them?’ seems to be the highest order of the political stake.
Little wonder, then, that mood surveys, exit polls and two-a-penny psephologists have taken over the political debate, with many becoming well-heeled politicians themselves. For all the seemingly complex number crunching and easy-on-the-eye graphs, it is, as one flagship show aptly calls itself, a form of political stock exchange.
To be sure, this is not to say gender and guarantees are not significant. Rather, their trivialisation and gamification are attested by the piecemeal and pathetic measures declared in lavish campaigns. Look no further than the thousand-odd rupees for women per month, as announced in one guarantee.
Such a scenario of spending big, only to shout and throw small sums at the poor, would be dismissed more robustly on the grounds of malevolent hypocrisy, if not myopic thinking, were the spectacle not so distracting.
Finally, this is not to say in the least that political change is not afoot. From gender and caste to minorities, Hindu-first agendas to the changing future of federalism and political parties are all in play. Precisely as these are in flux, this critical election season has been high on campaigning and low on new ideas. As adept gamers, politicians in this high-stake season have thus been risk-averse in laying out their political stalls overtly or clearly. Or maybe exhausted from all the bandobast [organising] and campaigning, they, and their back-room offices, have run out of ideas.
As neither a psephologist nor a gamer, I can only try, in a manner of speaking, to follow the money on the emerging big picture. But a little help is needed. In the absence of public data, I can only appeal to the adept number crunchers to start speculating and creating data sets on how much a small rally costs, in comparison to a big one, state by state, district by district, and party by party, and add all approximations of digital and other advertising. What would be an approximate number?
I can start with a wild guess of a very conservative number of Rs 1 crore per average-sized rally. And just that and the scale of spending that might have happened in this season alone indicates that more than any welfare system, it is our electoral system that is broken. It is lavish and profligate. For all the talk and criticism of expensive giveaways, the real object of spectacular spending is elections and campaigns.
Unaccounted for, we only see the effects of that big money in mass spectacles with leaders vying for visibility. As political leaders get rich, the poor are becoming targets of guarantees and gratitude, with only a widening gulf between them. It is not guarantees for the poor, but protection from big money in politics that is needed. Hidden in plain sight, it is not competitive welfarism but the emerging shape and size of the political order that has been glimpsed before the 2024 elections. I am willing to bet that it will be the most expensive election yet.
Shruti Kapila is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)