An IndIAn PAstorAl
by ModI & JAItley
p to the mountains and down to the
countryside—that was another piece of
poetic invocation by the slogan-prone Mao.
China is the countryside, and it’s where
revolutions begin, so the Chairman sent
thousands of urban-spoiled youth there for a
bucolic education. the Chinese economy
is what it is today because the distance
between the countryside and the cities has greatly been reduced
by a generation of post-Maoist leaders. It’s glorious to be rich,
no matter where you live. there are many things to be dreaded
in capitalism with Chinese characteristics, fettered minds
in a free market among them, but there is one thing to be
admired: China is not as unequal a society as we are. Wealth
travels up to the mountains and down to the countryside.
Long before Mao’s slogan, which is always realised in the
blood of revolution’s bad eggs, there was Gandhi’s wisdom:
India lives in its villages. Like almost everything else said by
Gandhi, this too remained an orphaned quote even as those
who claimed his political mantle
took India up to the socialist
mountains. As the latest statistics
show, and as starkly brought out
by an Economist cover story, what
makes India distinctive is not its
minuscule middle-class but its
sprawling poor—its abandoned
villages. they are the ones who
win elections. And they are the
ones who have consistently been
defeated by elections. So much
for ‘Garibi hatao’.
It takes more than a slogan to
win a village—or a country. Indira
Gandhi knew it first. Modi made
the best creative use of it. his
favourite t-word during the
campaign for 2014 was not‘temple’ but ‘toilet’. In power, Modi had no intention to
be India’s Reagan, for the simple reason that India was not
America. India still needed the knowing state. even as the
middle-class grumbled, it was the poor and the young who stood
by him during demonetisation, when AtM queues resembled
communist food lines. they would indulge the prime Minister
as long as he remained a compassionate nationalist.
Arun Jaitley’s Budget 2018 showcases that compassionate
nationalism. For too long has a desperate political class used
the Indian village for their bestselling but vacuous slogans. By
making the countryside the pivot of this Budget, Jaitley is not
just rewarding the constituency that made prime Minister Modi
a reality four year ago. It is also a huge correction in retrospect:
India needs a non-socialist to utilise the ideas abandoned by the
apostles of the ism that failed India.
take healthcare. Indians could be one of the world’s most
uninsured people against illness. For a large number of
families, a single member falling ill could mean death and
destitution. this Budget’s boldest gesture intends to stop this.
It comes from a state that cares. harrumphers may cite our
inadequate primary healthcare infrastructure to debunk this
proposal, but that’s cynicism. You have to begin somewhere,
someday, and this Government has finally done it. Add to that the
stress on agriculture and job creation, and you get a new sense of
urgency in recognising the cracked core of a future superpower.
What redeems the compassionate state in this instance is that it
draws a clear distinction between being popular and populist.
All the shrieking headlines about a ‘political budget’ only
add up to a tautology. every budget is political; governance
itself is political. Being political is not being amoral, so long as
governance is not a mere drama of distributing happiness, as
perfected by socialist regimes. this Budget doesn’t take a
self-conscious effort to please all. We have been spared another
sop opera on the eve of a general election. Realising the urgency
of a rural renewal is not a show of kitschy populism. It’s a moral
position. It is political, and thank God for it.
‘India does not live in its towns
but in its villages. But if the cities
want to demonstrate that their
populations will live for the
villagers of India, the bulk of their
resources should be spent in
ameliorating the condition of and
befriending the poor. We must not
lord it over them, we must learn to
be their servants. When the cities
realise that they must live for the
welfare of the poor, they will make
their palaces and institutions and
the life of their inhabitants corre-
spond somewhat to our villages,’
wrote Gandhi. As we approach his
150th birth anniversary, it’s nice to
have a touch of Gandhi in India’s
modernisation project.U
LOCOMOTIF
by S PRASANNARAJAN10 12 february 2018