A few months ago, the Parliament of India produced a spectacularly vacant Agenda for India to mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence. This resolution ranged lightly over challenges that India has grappled with for the best part of fifty years by promising primary education for all by 2005, drastic electoral reform, the end of criminality in politics, and a direction that the ``economy be prudently managed''. This hollow grandstanding has now met its match in a similarly vacuous manifesto by the United Front. This document promises ``good governance, a clean administration, all-round socio-economic development and social justice,'' no less. The manifesto does not neglect the possibility that a populace grown cynical after years of being let down would take such generalities with a pinch of salt. And so, it promises to put grain in every house, make every Indian healthy and literate and put every child in school. Fine aims all. And ones with which surely no political party - of the left, the centre, orof communal or even fascist persuasion - would disagree. Why would it want to?Political manifestos are documents that seek to emphasise not the universal goals of a society: those are implicitly understood, and generally spelled out in the country's constitution. In India's case, the goals that the UF has grandly espoused for itself could quite easily be found to originate in the Directives Principles of State Policy. Political parties' manifestos are different, or at least they are supposed to be. They are meant to emphasise certain means over others to achieve these ends, and a prioritising of the ends themselves. In this respect, the Congress manifesto offered a pleasant surprise a few days ago in the area at least of economic enterprise. Whether or not it keeps its promises in power, the country at least knows what it can pin the Congress party down to.No such thing could be said about the UF's manifesto. Well intentioned as it may be, no UF government could be expected to fulfill its promises ofputting grain in every house and making every Indian literate in a short time span and neither could any other party. Populism has its advantages, if it happens to combine desirable ends and means with popular appeal. But even populism must be dealt with in a way that an application of the mind towards specific ends and means is visible. Sad to say, none of this is in evidence in the UF's manifesto. Would it be too much to venture that such is the disunity of the ironically named United Front, and such the pernicious stranglehold of its allies on the Left, that it is unable to even articulate particular ends and the means it would deploy to achieve them? If the country hitherto had weak and bungling governance to thank the UF for, it now has yet another example at hand of its inherent paralysis. The Front described its manifesto as a common programme and a joint declaration. That would be fine but, after this claim, it turns out that there is in fact no real programme that the UF's constituents can get toagree on, except meaningless platitudes. That hardly augurs well for what this ragtag grouping would do in government.
