Opportunities, not sops pay off in India
It took its time coming, but in the end Bharat (more on that later) trumped the so-called political experts from New Delhi's gin-n-tonic cocktail circuit. And how!
The recently concluded round of elections to five Assembly assemblies returned a verdict that can only be described as a thumping endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership of the country. The final tally reads BJP: 4 states; Congress: 1 state. We will now have BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and BJP-led coalitions in Goa and Manipur. The Congress won Punjab thanks to the personal charisma of Captain Amarinder Singh, the former Maharaja of Patiala and the party's chief ministerial candidate, as well as the two-term anti-incumbency of the government in which the BJP was the junior partner. Of the five states in question, Uttar Pradesh was undoubtedly the most important. Occupying about the same area as Great Britain, the state would have displaced Brazil as the fifth most populous country in the world had it been independent.
Then, it elects 80 Members of Parliament, i.e. about one out of six lawmakers, to India's Lower House. Conventional wisdom has it that the road to power in New Delhi runs through this crucial state and that whoever rules Uttar Pradesh rules India.
So, the overwhelming victory (325 out of 403 seats) in the state has sealed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reputation as India's most popular politician and the BJP's status as the most prominent pole in Indian politics. Many analysts have called this round of elections, considered the semi-final before the 2019 General Elections, a watershed - and with good reason. For it marks a decisive rejection of the top-down development model followed by the Congress and the many regional parties that have sprung up over the last quarter of a century to fill up the political vacuum caused by its decline.
That space has now been occupied by the BJP across most of India. Addressing party workers, as well as the nation, following the landslide win, Modi said: “A new India is emerging... The poor seek opportunities, not sops. The more opportunities you give them, the more the country will shine...” Management guru C.K. Prahalad had called it the “bottom of the pyramid”, others have referred to the “last man in the queue”. In the new Indian political parlance, it is called Bharat, the millennia-old name by which Indians refer to their country. Just consider the stats and you'll see why Modi has, within a short span of less than three years, one of India's most popular Prime Ministers ever.
- His government electrified 1,464 of 1,529 villages in Uttar Pradesh that no power connection. The previous state government had electrified only three villages during its five-year tenure and the government before it had electrified 23 villages only.
- Then, the Modi government provided over 5 million subsidised cooking gas connections to poor households cutting across caste, community and religious lines, saving them from the toxic fumes of the wood, kerosene and coal-fired stoves that they have used since Independence. That's more than 12,500 households per constituency.
- Under the MUDRA scheme, his central government has disbursed about $2 billion collateral-free loans to small and micro entrepreneurs across Uttar Pradesh, thus, generating livelihoods and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the informal sector.
- And it has distributed 15 million LED lamps to people living below the poverty line.
- All of the above has also been replicated on a smaller scale across the other four states and, indeed, across the rest of India as well.