It's the politics, stupid

This is a vote against reforms that benefited only “India” and not “Bharat”, is perhaps the most common refrain nowadays of not just “expert” TV anchors, but of gleeful Left/secular columnists who’ve made a grand comeback after being put to pasture over the last five years.

While that sounds appealing, the reality’s different, and a lot more complex. Bihar, to cite one instance, has the country’s lowest per capita income and just a tenth of its citizens have electricity at home, but continues to vote for Laloo.

And, data from the NCAER’s household surveys (MISH surveys poll over 300,000 households across the country, right from 1986 onwards) show that, between 1999-00 and 2001-02, rural incomes in Andhra Pradesh rose over 32 per cent — while that’s lower than urban Andhra’s 40 per cent, surely this isn’t large enough to explain why rural Andhra decimated Chandrababu Naidu?

Maybe it’s the concentration of the benefits in the cities, as opposed to the villages, that’s the answer. Sadly, for the experts, this doesn’t wash either.

Hyderabad, the NCAER’s work on where the country’s rich households are located shows, accounted for around 30 per cent of Andhra’s rich in 1995-96, and this is up to around 40 or so today.

But, before you shout “we-told-you-so”, it is worth noting two things. One, urban Andhra, including Hyderabad, also voted against Naidu. Second, as far as concentration of wealth in the cities is concerned, Kolkata is far worse since over 80 per cent of West Bengal’s rich live here.

Yet, the communists not only got five more seats here in the last polls, they even got 3 per cent more votes than the last time around. It can’t be the ratio of urban to rural incomes either — at 2.7 for West Bengal versus 1.7 for Andhra (see NCAER’s “India Market Demographics Report”, 2002), it’s clear the Bharatiyas that live in Bengal have a much rawer deal than those who live in Andhra.

Okay, okay, but what about employment? Surely it is the poor employment outlook created by the NDA’s economic policies that did it in. We’ll return to this later, but a quick point.

Andhra is certainly one of the states which had the decade’s lowest employment growth, but Orissa actually had a negative growth, and yet Navin Patnaik managed to retain his hold on the state. This despite the fact that there was a 3 per cent swing in vote share against him, and over five in the case of his BJP allies.

Welcome to the grand old world of Indian politics, where nothing matters more than the politics, the alliances you cobble up, the social empowerment you promise — all this, of course, is well known, but yet most commentators choose to look for the grand message from the voter.

That’s why, while the BJP’s 2 per cent fall in voteshare led to a decline of 42 Lok Sabha seats, a similar decline for the Congress still resulted in a 31-seat addition to its tally.

In Tamil Nadu, for all the talk of how L K Advani’s alliance with Jayalalithaa cost his party the election, the AIADMK actually saw a 4 per cent hike in its voteshare while it got completely wiped out — the DMK, by contrast, gained 4 seats with its 1.5 per cent vote increase.

(None of this, by the way, means the BJP’s policies were all good. They weren’t. I’ve been a firm critic of the manner in which the telecom policy was turned on its head to suit one particular company, but it’s worth pointing out that the Congress party never took up the issue. The national highways programme, apart from the quality issues that are now cropping up in segments like the Delhi-Jaipur one, has always looked too expensive, but I don’t remember any serious Congress protest on this either.)

So does this mean development is dead, that it doesn’t matter? Though I must add the statutory warning that I’m no political expert, I’d like to think Sheila Dikshit’s development “work” helped her win the state in the assembly elections and played a role in the Lok Sabha ones as well — I put work in quotes because I think her talk of increased water from Sonia Vihar has been just so much hot air so far and the DVB privatisation hasn’t significantly reduced power cuts either, indeed they began again the day voting was over.

And for all his social empowerment, Digvijay Singh paid the price for non-development in Madhya Pradesh.

Doing development, however, is easier said than done. Greater emphasis on irrigation, it is true, will not only help farmers, it will also dramatically increase jobs, but it is a state subject, and there is nothing the Centre can do.

Let’s assume the NDA was a city-slickers’ coalition, and didn’t want to help the farmers — well, in the first five decades of non-NDA rule, just 40 per cent of the total land under foodgrains got irrigated (it was 25 for oilseeds and 35 for cotton).

While the growth of major and medium irrigation works (under the Centre’s power) has not changed (around 0.5 million hectares have been added each year during the 8th and 9th Plans), there has been a dramatic fall in minor irrigation (the state’s job) from around 1.6 million hectares a year during the 7th Plan to 1.1 in the 8th and 0.1 in the 9th Plan.

The reason for this, anyone familiar with state finances will tell you, is the huge hike in government salaries thanks to the 5th Pay Commission which left little for anything else — it’s interesting, that barring the Congress, the dramatis personae of that farce have top billing in the new government as well! It is this, and not the arrogance of FII investors, that is the main reason for why the markets crashed the day after the election results.