Policy making in India suffers from a power-driven schizophrenia

Over the past three decades, both Congress and BJP have made opposition to each other's policies an end in itself, even if it amounts to a zero-sum game

One of the curious things about political parties is that they become defenders of the establishment when in power and transform themselves into implacable foes in opposition. This conversion afflicts the two major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress. Over the past three decades, both have made opposition to each other’s policies an end in itself, even if it amounts to a zero-sum game. 

Exemplars of discipline in Parliament, for instance, are transmogrified when in opposition into unruly and disruptive agitators, tearing up documents and “rushing to the well of the House”, to use the favoured phrase of news-speak, an unedifying spectacle that we witnessed recently in the Rajya Sabha. All through the nineties, the BJP remained the party of trenchant swadeshi until Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s second government transformed it into the party of economic reform supported by the business community. Meanwhile, the Congress, which owned the platform of economic liberalisation until then, became the party of the poor and disenfranchised under Sonia Gandhi. 

This power-driven schizophrenia means that all policy is fair game depending on each party’s Parliamentary majority, an affliction that was demonstrated in just a few months in mid-2020. In May this year, Narendra Modi’s government was forced to fall back on a programme he had once described as a “living monument of UPA’s failures”: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Wrong-footed by the spectre of worsening joblessness following the draconian 21-day lockdown, his finance minister allocated Rs 40,000 crore more for the programme to enhance employment opportunities for the large cohorts of migrant labourers returning to their villages. 

Back in 2005, when Mr Modi was chief minister of Gujarat, he sympathised with the agri-business and construction industries which complained of labour shortages owing to MGNREGA (a proposition that was never proven) and jeered at the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) for passing such legislation. In 2015, a year as prime minister of India had underlined the need to extend his appeal beyond the business and middle classes. So, like any adroit politician, he shifted his position a bit, claiming that he would retain MGNREGA but make it better. 

Still, the BJP had an uncomfortable relationship with this signature UPA programme which research showed had played a key role in poverty reduction. So in 2019, the agriculture minister told Parliament that the Modi government wanted to discontinue MGNREGA. Yet with rural distress mounting, it remained the BJP-headed National Democratic Alliance’s go-to solution in that year and this. It was an opportunity that Ms Gandhi adroitly exploited — that too, when criticism of the government’s poor management of the migrant crisis was at its peak — to write an oped in The Indian Express imploring the PM to mobilise MGNREGA to help migrants. 

If helping the poor or any other disadvantaged Indians were really the objective of politics as practised today, then the Congress party should not have opposed so vehemently the agriculture marketing reform legislations that Parliament passed in September. No Congressman has explained how this same policy that appeared in its own 2019 manifesto — offering farmers multiple marketing choices for their produce — has become a bad thing now that the BJP has come to own it. The complaint from some of them that the minimum support price would be scrapped has proved to be wrong. 

Like all policy, this, too, will have its downsides, just as the Comptroller and Auditor General revealed shenanigans in the operation of MGNREGA. But the wisdom of replacing a monopsony that has long outlived its utility is unquestionable, and the Congress should be welcoming it. 

If the Congress were looking for a viable policy to oppose the BJP, the new labour laws offer some scope. The move towards short-term contracts and benefits for workers and easier terms for labour contractors may be good in theory but the wholesale weakening of collective bargaining and labour rights embedded in the new laws is certainly cause for concern. Where, for instance, are the workable institutions for labour redressal if employers or contractors renege on contracts or violate safety standards? Yet there is radio silence on this “reform”. The fact that the vast unorganised sector work force requires energy to mobilise — which is why even trade unions haven’t done much for them, ever — could be a factor for a 134-year-old party that is clearly out of organisational steam. 

It is significant that the Congress has chosen to unconditionally congratulate the PM when his actions have involved muscular expressions of patriotism  — such as the two surgical strikes against Pakistan and the air force action over Balakot. Both moves warranted hard questions but no politician is likely to question decisions that come under that opaque rubric of “national security,” especially when they’re aimed against Pakistan. 

At the same time, a unique opportunity for cooperation arises with SVAMITVA, which Mr Modi launched with due fanfare on October 11 for streamlining and digitising property records. A pilot project has been launched in six BJP-ruled states. The Congress manifesto said the party “promises to work with state governments to digitise land ownership and land tenancy records”. Will it actually make good on this promise now that it’s the BJP that has surged ahead in owning the scheme?