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The 2024 Union election is underway, having election dates been declared last week. The next couple of months will be filled with drama, name-calling and rhetoric. As usual, important issues will be swept under the carpet, and it will be a tussle between personalities. The Congress, primary opposition to the incumbent has betted on social justice with the caste census being its spearhead, and other socialist promises. In this article, I argue how this devotion to socialism will not serve the Indian people well, and the Congress will be better off by shedding such ideals.
- Farmer Justice: Promises include exempting GST on agricultural products; enacting a law on MSP; imposing controls on import-export; crop insurance; and a loan waiver.
Nobody can deny that these promises subsidizes farming at the expense of other industries, and regulates farming further. The already cumbersome regulations have strangled and crippled the farming economy of India. These promises don’t solve the inherent problems of Indian farming which arise largely due to small land holdings, low-skill and a lack of dynamicism in the mindset of Indian farmer. These measures will keep the farmer poor and also lead to increased costs for the consumer. The need of the hour is to take out people from farming, whereas these measures while not uplifting farmers will act as an illusion for the unskilled to return back to villages.
- Woman Justice: Under the Mahalaxmi scheme, the promise is to pay one woman of poor families a sum of 1 lac rupees annually.
Besides fiscal indiscipline, the scheme is deeply entrenched in socialism, taking money directly from the able sections and handing it to the poor with no expectation from the beneficiaries. First, this will lead to an inflationary environment and the higher costs will hurt the same people more than helping them. As Milton Friedman said, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own”, will people really respect the money they have been handed down without any grit and employ it towards constructive purposes? Will this lead to any kind of upward mobility for these families, when all as such receive the money? Again, I believe the end result will only be inflation, and no upward mobility in any real sense. For the record, I am not in favour of the Madhya Pradesh’s government “Ladli Behna Yojna” though the sum assured was miniscule in comparison.
- Youth Justice: Under the Right to Apprenticeship, they promise to provide with a year’s work to at least a crore of youth with a 1 lac stipend. They also promise fresh government hiring to the tune of 30 lac people.
Again, besides fiscal indiscipline, the need to increase the Central government personnel is absurd. There are about 33 lac central government employees currently, and to double that number with fresh hirings plus an additional of a crore temporary workers every year, would take the central government personnel to 1.6 crore workers in a given year. This can only mean one thing: more regulation, more centralization, and more control. I dearly think that this will only mark a u-turn to the deep, dark days of Socialism.
It is difficult to understand the party that was at the epicentre of the poverty stricken socialist ways, and to finally carry out economic liberalization wants to go back to its old ways of regulation and control. Though this time, this socialism and prism of social justice is in the guise of rights and laws if not direct central planning. The proposal for mass hiring in the government sector is a call to return to the poor ways of distribution of poverty and abject hopelessness. This will only lead to more control leading to larger regulation and lesser freedom for the Indian people.
The country is in dire need of a credible opposition. The Congress must come out of its socialist bubble and embrace smaller governments, lower regulations and free enterprises. While at one end, the Prime Minister gives hope by saying that “government should recede from people’s lives”, Congress is going directly towards the opposite end of the spectrum. I believe that there should be a bipartisan view in New Delhi that the way forward is smaller governments and lesser regulations and not the other way around. The give-away policy of the Congress government didn’t work and cost them the state elections last year and will now cost them Union elections as well. Congress hugely needs to shed its socialist bubble or else the country will have more lost decades sooner or later!
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