Perspective
cial communication with any of them.
Indian diplomats using Hindi at the UN would, in other words, be speaking to themselves and to the Hindi –speaking portion of their domestic audience. This narrow, essentially political objective, does not justify expending vast sums of taxpayers’ money. the ‘ill-conceived’ terms of reference of the Fifteenth Finance Commission, revealed how a thoughtless decision by the Modi government had opened a Pandora’s box with incalculable consequences for the country.
The Finance Commission is one of the less well-known institutions of our governing system. It is appointed every five years to review and decide how the country’s revenue from taxation will be apportioned between the states. The Finance Commission uses various criteria to determine this, including each state’s percentage of the national population. But for more than four decades, it has based itself on population figures from the 1971 census.
That may seem odd, since we have had four censuses since 1971 and new numbers have been available to successive Finance Commissions. But the reason for this is very simple, and it was made explicit in relation to a far more vital issue — that of political representation in our Parliament. In 1976, the omnibus 42nd Amendment to the Constitution decided to freeze the allocation of Lok Sabha seats to our states for twenty-five years to encourage population control, by assuring states that success in limiting population would not lose them Lok Sabha seats. In 2001, the NDA government of Prime Minister Vajpayee extended this arrangement for another twenty-five years; its proposal, which became the 91st Amendment, was unanimously adopted by all parties in both Houses of Parliament.
The reasoning behind this policy was clear: it was based on the sound principle that the reward for responsible stewardship of demography and human development by a state should not be the cause of its political disenfranchisement…
It was Mr Modi’s instruction to the Finance Commission to use the 2011 census figures now that caused Mr Stalin to erupt. He was not alone…
While the furore raised by the Finance Commission has died down due to some skilful bureaucratic compromises, the country should pay attention to the greater dangers. While the northern states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh had a decadal population growth rate over 20 per cent between 2001 and 2011, southern states like undivided Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Kerala, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu grew at less than 16 per cent in the 2001-11 period. My own state of Kerala has the country’s lowest growth rate (4.9 per cent in 2001-11, and dropping, it is estimated, to negative growth by 2021). That is one-fifth of Bihar’s growth rate. Why should Kerala be punished for its impressive performance by losing seats in Parliament and thereby being forced to dilute its voice in national affairs?
THE MIRAGE OF ACHHE DIN
As we know, the Modi government was elected in 2014 on a promise of ‘achhe din’ for the Indian people. As I have shown , although the core supporters of PM Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party belonged to the Hindu right-wing, there is no doubt that what tipped it over the threshold of victory was an upbeat economic message of imminent growth and prosperity. CM Modi was portrayed as the dynamic CEO of his home state, Gujarat, who had presided over unprecedented growth and development and who would be able to do for India what he had done for Gujarat. A vote for the BJP, it was said, would be a vote for rapid and effective economic development. ‘Achhe din’ would soon follow.
It didn’t…
Mr Modi campaigned in 2014 on the insincere but attractive slogan that ‘government has no business to be in business’. But for four years he has contin-
THE NEW INDIA WE SEEK
‘New India’ is the latest phrase our current prime minister has been trying to create a buzz around. During his address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the occasion of the anniversary of India’s 71st Independence Day in 2017, he is reported to have used the phrase ten times in one hour…
What is this ‘New India’ he is urging us to create? The prime minister speaks of an India free from the shackles of casteism and communal tension, an India that successfully solves its endemic problems of corruption, nepotism and terrorism, an India where every woman, and man and child would be given an empowered and dignified standard of living, thanks to a society that harnesses India’s entrepreneurial spirit to become an economic powerhouse. But, as usual, between the rhetoric and the reality there falls a great shadow. For all these statements and ideals (which one can find very little to disagree with), one is struck by the complete lack of any idea of how our country is going to achieve any of this. On the contrary, the road to New India appears littered with the wreckage of all that was good and noble about the old India.
Whether it is the ‘Achhe Din’ of 2014 or the ‘New India’ of the present, under the BJP government, these phrases appear to be mere subterfuge, a smokescreen for the real agenda of New India that this government has pursued since coming to power four years back. As a progressive Indian, I too want a New India. But not this kind of New India.
The New India I want is a country where you won’t get lynched for the food you eat, marginalized for the faith you hold dear, criminalized for the person you love and imprisoned for making use of fundamental rights guaranteed by our own Constitution. Instead, we must look forward to a New India that celebrates and welcomes pluralism, an idea vindicated by history itself.
To me, this New India must be fundamentally rooted in the idea of India that our founding fathers believed in. After all, as I’ve asked in a different context, if you don’t know where you are coming from, then how can you know where you are going?
The nebulous ‘Idea of India’ — though the phrase is Rabindranath Tagore’s — is, in some form or another, arguably as old as antiquity itself.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru saw our country as an ‘ancient palimpsest’ on which successive rulers and subjects had inscribed their visions without erasing what had been asserted previously. We not only coexist, but thrive in our diversity which is our strength. Swami Vivekananda spoke of a Hinduism that not merely tolerates other faiths but accepts them as they are. This acceptance of difference has been key to our country’s survival, making ‘unity in diversity’ the most hallowed of independent India’s self-defining slogans.
India, as I have long argued, has always been more than the sum of its contradictions.