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In less than a week, India starts voting for a new government. By all accounts, the Bharatiya Janata Party is best placed to form a new government. The BJP argues that it is best placed to take India forward, to work on development, and so on and so forth. It is difficult to argue with this point – because we have absolutely no idea what it intends to do. The party’s manifesto is missing.
Manifestos do matter.The Congress promised an employment guarantee act and the right to information in its 2004 manifesto; and food security in 2009. And as for the BJP, the story is often told of how nobody should have been surprised when Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government conducted the Pokhran nuclear tests – because a re-evaluation of India’s nuclear posture had been promised in the party’s 1998 manifesto.
But, for the 2014 BJP, it seems details are superfluous. Voters, by their way of thinking, aren’t interested in specifics – unless those specifics are specific claims of development in Gujarat, presumably. Voters aren’t entitled to a discussion of where the BJP stands on foreign direct investment(FDI) in retail. Where it stands on privatisation and disinvestment. Where it stands on reservations, on the goods and services tax(GST), on food security or procurement prices or petroleum subsidies or healthcare. Voters shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about these tiresome little things – that’s what Narendra Modi is there for.
More than one BJP spokesman has, in fact, said outright that a manifesto is unnecessary – the party programme is all there in Mr Modi’s speeches. Well, then, news television’s habit of showing all of Mr Modi’s election rallies live should mean that we have a clear idea of what is in store. Sadly, other than a vague promise that we’ll all become more Gujarati, I have no idea. I hear, for example, that dozens of new cities are needed. Sure – but where? Is this different from the dozens of new cities that the Congress-led government is building along the industrial corridors? And how will they be paid for? How will land be acquired? In a speech, Mr Modi does not need to expand on a pious ambition of this sort; in a manifesto, it’s there in black-and-white, so that these questions are forced to be asked. But Mr Modi doesn’t like questions. And his party prefers ambiguity.
Ambiguity is, of course, strategically important for the BJP. Its campaign has been a masterful performance in which it succeeds in being all things to all people. Its record since 2009 features it speaking out against any form of major economic reform, while trying to outdo the Congress in welfarist promises; meanwhile it highlights throwaway lines in the middle of Mr Modi’s vast oeuvre of speeches to suggest he is Milton Friedman reincarnated, except better this time because he’s Gujarati. Its spokesmen, official and unofficial, proclaim piously on television that it is interested only in economic development; meanwhile Mr Modi’s closest aide wanders riot-hit areas in Western Uttar Pradesh telling Hindus that this is an election of “honour and revenge”, and that they must not vote for those who “give compensation to those who killed Jats”. For the BJP, clarity on its agenda can only harm it, not help it.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
