Ep. 125: The Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat is a key bellwether, as it offers a classic clash of visions

Which of these metaphors (Congress and BJP) will gain traction? This is why Thiruvananthapuram’s is a must-watch contest, which has broad significance beyond just its own Parliament seat

Napier Museum, Thiruvananthapuram. Courtesy keralatourism.travel

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at this link.

In an earlier essay on the topic of the Lok Sabha tussle in Thiruvananthapuram, I talked about my personal dilemma in choosing between Shashi Tharoor and Rajeev Chandrasekhar. In thinking about this further, I have come to the conclusion that this is indeed a seat that could be a bellwether or indicator of things to come, more than the immediate matter of whether Congress retains its seat or BJP manages to ring up a win here. 

It seems there are two distinct metaphors in play here about the future of India. One is the Left-Congress “Idea of India” that Sunil Khilnani wrote about some years ago. The other is the more culturally-rooted yet forward-looking “Idea of India: Bharat as a Civilization” that Subhash Kak wrote last year. 

The question is twofold: which of these appeals to the voter? And which of these is actually better for India and its populace?

Now that the manifestos of both the Congress and the BJP are available, it is possible to make some comparisons. 

The Congress-Left approach appear to be a close fit with its Thiruvananthapuram campaign:

1. Internationalist

2. Zero-sum game with caste/religious divides fueling vote bank politics

3. Redistributive justice with the ‘rich’ having their assets nationalized

4. Freebies such as the promise of Rs. 1 lakh to every poor woman

Internationalism. Nehru himself was the epitome of the ‘internationalist’ view of how India should be governed. He cared deeply about what white people thought about him (as an example he ran to the UN when the Indian Army was on the verge of defeating and pushing out Pakistani raiders from Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-48). To prove to whites that he was somebody, Nehru invented himself as the chief of the Non-Aligned Movement, and proceeded to dispense largesse: Kachchatheevu to Sri Lanka, UN Security Council seat to China, Coco Islands to Burma. 

The combination of what appears to have been an inferiority complex (imagine being a little brown boy in a school full of racist, and homosexual, white boys) and therefore almost naturally, a grandiose vision of himself as Emperor Ashoka returned, bringing “world peace” via Panchasila, was a terrible setback for India throughout the Nehruvian Stalinist era of 70 years.

I am not saying this is what Shashi Tharoor stands for, but there is a tendency in the Congress to absurdly obsess on white people’s problems and solutions (eg. why is student-loan forgiveness an issue in their manifesto, when it is an American problem, not an Indian problem?): a pointless vanity about being internationalist, not nationalist. 

Zero-sum economic game. Enough has been said about how India’s economy stagnated under the Nehruvians, and how India’s per capita GDP kept declining as a percentage of US per capita GDP in that era (this kept happening until the 1991 liberalization turned things around). The quixotic statements by Raghuram Rajan these days showcase how they disdained manufacturing, which is demonstrably the best way for a nation to bootstrap itself: see Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China. 

Since there was no economic growth, it became a zero-sum game, and every group, whether religious or caste, realized the best thing to do was to become in effect a trade union, using collective bargaining to gain a larger share of the (non-growing) pie than their fair share. This created, and exacerbated, social fissures, and demands for special handouts, as well as the rush to get reservations, most-backward status, etc. 

This works brilliantly if your political model is to create vote-banks and perpetually play them off against each other, with occasional distribution of crumbs to them. The vote-banks will remain loyal to you because they are dependent on you for the hand-outs, because you have carefully avoided doing anything to grow the economy and create a rising tide to lift all boats.

Radical redistribution as ‘progress’. The third plank of this approach is redistribution. This has been a total ‘success’ in Kerala. The agricultural output (black pepper, other spices, and rice) that had made Kerala wealthy over millennia has now been decimated. There is zero industry. There is nothing to distribute now, other than poverty. There is no industry, no employment, and Kerala survives on exporting laborers to West Asia and nurses to rich countries: a form of human trafficking. 

This is the easily predictable result of Stalinist policies. We have seen this in action in, for instance, Venezuela, Cuba, Cambodia, China, the former Soviet Union, and other socialist paradises, which ruthlessly suppressed individual initiative. The net result is that they have grown steadily poorer (note: Mao’s China, not Deng’s). Pol Pot’s Cambodia ended up with genocide, too. 

Kerala falls into the same category. The intrusion of the State into everything is most visible in agriculture, where wages were fixed at such a high level that it became unprofitable to do farming. 

In my own lifetime, I remember times when rice cultivation was reasonably lucrative. Then you ended up having to subsidize paddy cultivation with other income. Naturally, farmers stopped farming, with disastrous results. Some of the best-watered and most fertile paddy lands in the world have been paved over and, irretrievably,  turned into real-estate. Ironically, the agricultural laborers whose livelihoods were supposedly the point of the wage hike, totally lost their jobs.

All industry has been driven out of the state by agitating unions. It is literally impossible to run a small-scale industry without going bankrupt due to labor strife, strikes, nokku-kooli, vandalism.

Freebies as hardcore election strategy. Then finally there is the freebie plank. Granted, gullible voters love freebies, and thus it is a good electoral tactic. AAP memorably won in Delhi on the promise of free electricity. Congress won in Karnataka promising free bus rides to women. But there is a second-order effect to all these handouts: you have to rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. For instance, Karnataka is now running a lot fewer buses because the transport corporation’s revenues have plummeted. 

The most absurd promise in the Congress manifesto is that they will give every poor woman 1 lakh rupees every year. If this were put into practice, it would cost an amount greater than the entire budget of the Government of India, and so clearly it is a joke. But it sounds good, right? 

In Kerala, the standard question that the CPI(M) zealot asks is: “But you got the kit, right?”. This means a kit of groceries in a bag bearing the likeness of the CPI(M) Chief Minister. Yes, I got the kit, but where’s my low-income pension? Just today I was stopped on the street by a small businessman, a cobbler, whom I know. He wanted a loan of Rs. 300/- because his low-income pension hadn’t arrived. My maid complains about the same. So where is the pension?

And where’s the salary? This month the CPI(M) Kerala government, for the first time ever, did not release salaries on the first day of the month. The state is facing an acute financial crisis because it has very little tax revenue (there is no production in the state) apart from its dubious sources such as lotteries and alcohol sales. Plus it has mismanaged masala bonds it floated. Instead of capital expenditure, Kerala used the money for operating expenditure, and will end up in technical default when the bonds come due. (Uncle Modi will have to bail them out).

This is the situation the Congress has clearly indicated it intends to bring to the entire country: live beyond your means, and use the new opiate of the masses: freebies. Someone should inform the Congress of that hoary American bit of wisdom: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Oh yes, you will pay, somehow.

I read recently that Rwanda (yes, that Rwanda with the horrendous genocide of Tutsis thirty years ago) has managed to maintain a GDP growth of 8.8% during that period. The horror in Rwanda was almost on par with the Partition-related killings in India. Yet look at how that country, and its President Paul Kagame, managed, and how India didn’t. Troubled Rwanda was able to manage itself, while Nehruvian India wasn’t. See my 20-year-old column on this topic of a Nehruvian Penalty.

Similarly, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador is being feted for reducing crime drastically in his country. I recall how Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore did the same thing: he brought law and order to the island city-state, and, eventually, immense prosperity, instead of moaning that he had to deal with Chinese, Malays and Indians. He did not go in for that absurd slogan of proportional everything that the Congress is mouthing these days in the incomprehensible Jitni Abadi Utna Haq: a surefire recipe for ongoing communal tension.

Development On the other hand, the BJP in Thiruvananthapuram is running on a single plank: development. It is talking about infrastructure (logistics as an outflow from the strategic deep-water port at Vizhinjam), about electronics and technology (using the existing ISRO, Technopark and the new IIST center for semiconductors technology). Infrastructure, in other words. That makes sense. 

It may be a bit of a broad comparison, but let us remember that Silicon Valley grew out of the presence of NASA’s Ames Research Center and Moffett Field airbase and the presence of two major universities, Stanford and Berkeley. Similarly, Bangalore grew from the base of its aerospace industry and IISc. 

The presence of ISRO’s large facilities at both Thumba and Valiyamala, and the nearby presence of Mahendragiri in Tamil Nadu, and the new launchpad for private sector efforts focusing on LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites, suggests that Thiruvananthapuram can follow in the path of both Silicon Valley and Bangalore, especially if it can upgrade the very good College of Engineering Trivandrum, long a leader in the state. 

It is true that the BJP manifesto talks about some other things that seem overly populist:

1. Free rations to the poor for the next five years (but this can be justified as having worked to prevent a Covid-era collapse in food intake, plus there are massive stocks in FDIC godowns from all that MSP)

2. Free and quality health care to the poor (this cannot scale up without a lot of investment)

3. Free health care to all over 70s (again, potentially large investment needed)

4. Zero electricity bill to poor families (free is never a good idea; co-payment is).

So on average, the BJP poll planks seem more believable, doable, and less liable to do harm than the INC poll posture. In some sense, it feels like the INC does not even believe it can win, and so is just flying kites to see what might stick. 

Apart from the individual candidates, Shashi Tharoor and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, both stars, it would be very interesting to see which of these metaphors actually gains traction. This is why Thiruvananthapuram’s is a must-watch contest, which has broad significance beyond just its own Parliament seat. 

1750 words, 14 April 2024 updated 15 April 2024

Errata: Rwanda’s President is Paul Kagame. The name Robert Mugabe (former President of Zimbabwe) was used inadvertently.