The CPM has told us Narendra Modi cannot be defeated electorally. In India and abroad, the Left has never been enamoured of democracy and elections. That perhaps explains why CPM leaders, not even elected through Rajya Sabha, presume they have a right to determine what is right for the entire country. We have also been told Modi must be defeated ideologically. Ideology is about ideas. Now that the sitting duck government at the Centre has become a lame duck government and post-mortems of Gujarat are converted into ante-mortems for UPA, what kind of idea of India should be sold in 2009, if not 2008? In differentiating between Congress and the BJP, there is an economic strand and there is a political one, although the two are related. It can be no one’s case that Gujarat elections were won, or overwhelmingly won, on development alone. However, consider these facts. First, Gujarat’s state domestic product (SDP) growth has been phenomenal. The decimal point depends on year taken as cut-off. But that apart, from around 7.5 per cent in the 1990s, real growth shot up to 10 per cent-plus in the last five years. That’s per capita growth of 8 per cent-plus and has no parallel among major states. It’s also far higher than the national average.Although the last few years have been relatively quiet, before that, growth was despite exogenous shocks, nature-made and human-made. Since citizen myopia exists, note acceleration in the last five years. In election mode, it is better to have higher growth in the second five-yearly cycle than the first. It is impossible to believe that benefits of growth didn’t trickle down. How sensitive is growth to an incumbent CM’s policies? Hasn’t Gujarat all along been a high-growth state? The facilitating environment matters. If a CM has limited tenure, credit or blame for the environment cannot be appropriated, but not if a CM has a relatively long tenure. Investment proposals, conversion of investment proposals, SEZ policy, petroleum and natural gas, turnaround of PSUs like Gujarat State Fertilizer Company and Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals and even figures on registered unemployed (an imperfect indicator though) tell the same good governance story and there has been no whiff of corruption at the CM-level. Had history alone explained everything, there is no reason why other historically high-growth states should now flounder.The failure of India Shining and Chandrababu Naidu’s loss has been interpreted as failure of reforms to deliver electorally. This is a doubtful proposition and hinges on what one means by reforms and how broad-based their benefits are. Take the industry/services versus agriculture divide, at best a bad example, because in sectoral compositions of income, Gujarat’s template doesn’t mirror India. Gujarat’s agricultural output has increased. Courtesy Narmada, so has irrigated area. The soil health card system helped disseminate information about crop patterns and fertiliser usage. Despite warts and delivery falling short of promises, the Jyotirgram scheme has improved power supply in villages. If one visualises a continuum on economic policies, BJP increasingly occupies space to the right. And notwithstanding what one now realises was an aberration between 1991 and 1996, Congress occupies space to the left. Contrary to perception, this Congress space is a natural monopoly. It has little to do with Left clout. Would a Congress government have dared institute criminal cases against more than 1.5 lakh farmers for power theft? More important, how do voters trade-off assured power supply against these? Are a few farmer suicides more important than overall agricultural prosperity? Is populism necessarily popular?Rural Gujarat doesn’t perform as well as urban Gujarat. That’s one way to interpret the inclusive growth debate, though it is better understood in regional terms (say Saurashtra). More importantly, how does one respond to what Planning Commission calls divides and disparities? Isn’t provision of physical infrastructure (roads, ports, power,drinking water) and social infrastructure (Girl’s Education Scheme, Beti Bachao Andolan) the best response? At this generic level, no one is going to disagree with this governance response. The difference lies in mode of delivery. Right of the economic continuum, one accepts privatisation, user charges, alternatives to public sector delivery, choice and competition. Left of the continuum, one has blind belief in public delivery, with no more than lip service paid to accountability and transparency. While on the last, note the urban development drive, with citizen participation, in Gujarat’s small municipal towns. There is an even more important point of disagreement, witnessed in the recent National Development Council meeting. Modi didn’t bring caste and religious calculations into politics. That dubious legacy belongs to the Congress. However, that having been brought into the picture, Modi (and Mayawati) have exploited it better. To return to the NDC point, should deprivation be understood through collective identities like caste and religion?For obvious reasons, they should not. There are deprived among so-called forward castes and majority religions and there are non-deprived among so-called backward castes and minority religions. Except where there are clear inequities in access to physical and social infrastructure in some backward districts and villages, deprivation is an individual concept. The apparent religious deprivation flagged by the Sachar Committee breaks down, once one controls for other variables like class and educational status. There should be legitimate resentment at UPA’s attempts to equate deprivation with collective caste and religious categories and this brings one to a difference between the two major political parties on what may be called a social-cum-political continuum, with ideology now focused on what one means by secularism. Does secularism mean rejection of religion for formulating public policy and neutrality across religions, or does it mean positive affirmation in favour of minority religions? The soft vs hard Hindutva labels aren’t the core issue. Gujarat has almost certainly voted on this and, in all probability, so will India in 2009, though outcomes may well be different. But this issue will not disappear.Gujarat’s economic reform template won’t work for India in its specifics, but there is no reason why the general thrust can’t be replicated. At least in part, Gujarat has voted for reforms and development, the clichéd bijli, sadak, paani, aspiration. Those are often still public goods. Market failure no longer exists for roti, kapada, makaan and these have become private goods. Despite India Shining, in 2004 India didn’t vote on reforms. This may well change in 2009, provided we have merchants of development.The writer is a noted economist bdebroy@gmail.com
