Congress manifesto: Back to big government

The Congress has released an interesting manifesto of intentions, with several talking points. Yes, in a pre-election document, you can promise the moon, but this one also specifically carries Rahul Gandhi’s words that he has never broken a promise. And a statement of purpose needs to be taken at face value, as a serious offer to the people of India. And what do we see there? First, a kind of palpable inversion of ivory-tower policymaking, a consultative spirit—interactions with experts, even crowd-sourcing of ideas, preceded the final writing of it.

More than that, one sees a kind of responsiveness to ideas and points of criticism in circulation in civil society. That is why one sees a compassionate revisionism on various points—the proposed amendment to AFSPA, removal of the sedition and defamation laws, rolling back on the use of Aadhaar biometrics in PDS. All of those things, it is apt to remember, came about in mostly during Congress-led policymaking. Responding to criticism is not a bad thing per se. 

There is revisionism on another front too—not relating to social life, but the economic life of people. Yes, there are attractive-looking proposals to revive the economy at large to generate jobs as a side-effect. For instance, freeing up start-ups from angel tax and giving a leg-up to MSMEs. But a critical nuance: Rahul Gandhi also proposes to expand jobs in the state sector, by filling up the huge vacancies (about 4 lakh at the central level itself).

This is a way of saying that, since the private sector has not exactly lived up to its promise of trickling benefits down the line, it’s back to Big Government. Add to that the proposed revival of the Planning Commission: What you get is almost a dizzying Back to the Future time-lapse vision of the Soviet era. A new Seventies for this century, then?