Global, not swadeshi

Power, said Lord Acton, tends to corrupt. But as can be seen from the way the BJP has changed in the last six years as the leader of a coalition, it also moderates.

No better demonstration of this is currently available than the party's economic manifesto released on Tuesday.

The main theme underlying it is one of more trade, more openness and greater integration with the world economy.

In other words, globalisation is in, economic paranoia is out. Gone is the obsession with the near-autarkic policies espoused by the RSS, not to mention the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch.

Reason and rationality, at least in the statement of the broader objectives, have prevailed. The country can only benefit from it "" provided the politically difficult aspects are tackled with adroitness.

On this, the manifesto has chosen to play safe and be content with placebos. It therefore leaves potential economic players little the wiser about what can be expected if the BJP is voted back to power.

This might be good politics but it is not the best way to achieve the larger objectives of the manifesto. That said, it is also important to note how economic thinking in the mainstream political parties is converging.

The economic staples of yesteryear "" public sector, self-reliance, role of the state, growth vs development "" have finally been discarded (though perhaps not entirely by a recidivist Congress).

With such a political consensus developing, it is reasonable to expect more structured and better sequenced reform in the years to come.

The pace, too, should quicken. But as so often, the devil is in the detail and the test is competence as much as it is ideology.

The BJP would like to turn India into a global manufacturing hub. That is a laudable objective, especially since employment on the scale required (at least 70 million jobs in the next decade) can only come from the manufacturing sector.

For that to happen, however, there have to be dramatic increases in the scale of production, as has happened in China.

This requires not just an exponential increase in investment but also, pari passu, a complete overhaul of the country's labour laws with a view to making the labour market more flexible, and the explicit recognition that small-scale industry reservation, by definition, is inimical to large-scale production.

Nor is its contribution to employment clearly established. On the former, the manifesto is equivocal "" "there is need for improvement in labour laws to ensure higher productivity and greater employment generation""" and on the latter it is silent. The section called 'Job-oriented growth' is just plain nonsense.

The party also wants to see India's exports reaching 1 per cent of global trade soon (something which may have already been achieved!) and then a doubling in the next five years.

This too calls for a major restructuring of industry, but the manifesto doesn't say how it is to be done. Scale is critical but no one in the party appears to know.

And on the most important sector of all, agriculture, the manifesto says nothing about how it intends to pursue reforms, if at all.

On education and its role in a knowledge-based economy, there is a silly line about time-bound accreditation! In other words, even if one allows a certain coyness to political parties when they prepare their election manifestos, there is a disjunct between where the BJP wants to go and how it thinks it can get there.