Underwhelmed by one year of BJP’s government

It has been over a year since BJP formed its first full majority government.  And if one were to step back to look into this one year, one is underwhelmed by the performance of the government.  Now before I am branded as another die-hard critic who sees only the nefarious and amoral in all that the new government has done. Let me clarify one thing, I am and continue to be one of the biggest supporter of Narendra Modi. As founding member of an organization that played a vital part in ensuring Narendra Modi’s victory, I along with others have toiled hard to convince people to support Narendra Modi. Infact, it gives me pride to say that, we started campaigning for Modi in June 2013, when even the BJP had not even appointed him as the campaign chief in the Goa conference and where the established opinion was that the likelihood of Narendra Modi becoming PM candidate was as unlikely as India winning the next Football world cup. Further even though we spent our time and money in galvanizing across 2 states, hundreds of towns and thousands of villages, we at the culmination of our goal dissolved the very organization and got back to our normal lives. Hence it is the voice of someone who has staked a lot on Narendra Modi that I claim that I am underwhelmed.

Also neither I am those who had unrealistic expectations from this government. I understand how economics work and Rome was never built in a day. I am not demanding my Bullet trains today as I know that it take’s years to build one nor am I asking India to become a developed nation in the next five years. I clearly understand that things take time and effort to succeed. Therefore the question arises is why do I feel underwhelmed by the government’s performance. Given that it is a true fact that government has minimized and eradicated corruption at the highest levels, has given rigour to foreign ministry languishing since the days of Indira Gandhi. The government has done many things right from modernization and importance given to defence sector to socio-economic policies like the insurance schemes and others. The Swach Bharat Abhinayan is truly commendable and if it succeeds it would be truly transformational.

No, it is not because that I don’t see the positive developments in the last one year nor is it because that I doubt their intentions that I feel underwhelmed. No, not at all. The main reason, I feel underwhelmed is the progress made on the economic and development front. I see clear lack of rigour and drive towards development, economic reform and rejuvenation. My main grouse, when Narendra Modi set us a target of 272+, the so called “intellectual” opinion of this country sniggered at our unrealistic and quixotic goal. Even the staunchest of Narendra Modi’s supporter never believed we will win more than 272 seats to become the first non congress party to win majority on its own. We succeeded in achieving the same precisely because we set ourselves hard and brutal targets and strove with determination, single-minded focus on achieving it and nothing distracted us on our path to victory. Today, I see a lack of similar sentiment in the way government is approaching matters, from GST to land ordinance bill, from Labour reforms to relegating useless laws and regulations.

What the government has done in the last one years on the reform and development agenda has not be unique or special. It did not a Narendra Modi to do it and any sensible government could have done the same. If BJP had in its wisdom chosen Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley or any other so called secularly acceptable PM candidate, BJP would still have likely formed the next government in a coalition of myriad partners. This coalition government of Arun Jaitley would have easily achieved what this government has achieved in the last one year. Then the question arises is why has the government till now done what any mediocre Arun Jaitley government could have done with coalition government. Why did hundreds of thousands of youth organize themselves spend time and money in electing Narendra Modi has prime minister with a full majority if all that could have been achieved would have been achieved without us doing so. When I look back, I remember the volunteers with whom I interacted who were ready to spend even their meagre earnings to campaign for Narendra Modi and I feel disheartened that all their efforts have not mattered as we ended up appointing a Jaitley government rather than Narendra Modi led one.

Hence I urge our Prime Minister to relook at the last one year critically and understand the tremendous effort of the volunteers who are all looking for the same single minded determination, focus towards achieving unrealistic goals. To display drive and rigour in achieving necessary actions to reform and deregulate the mess created by the 65 years of misrule and set us up for double digit growth for the next two decades. Enough of testing waters solutions, half-hearted attempts, misaligned thrusts and working on “consensus solutions”. I would like to end my case by saying

 “Bas Karo Jaitley Sarkar ab Chahiye Modi Sarkar “

How NREGA won UPA its Second Term

Now ever since UPA won the 2009 elections, A lot of political commentators have speculated on the possible reasons that would have persuaded the electorate to vote them back to power. Everything from Rahul’s new paradigm in politics to matured leadership of Manmohan Singh was perceived to be the main factor behind UPA’s re-election in 2009.But one of the major contributing factor for congress victory that most political observers agreed was NREGA scheme.

In this short post, I try to rationally analyze whether NREGA indeed help UPA in the pro-incumbency wave seen in the election. 2009 national elections was in-fact not a single issue based election and multiple issues interplayed at both regional and local level to effect the outcome of the election. Hence it is very difficult to single out an issue and extract the impact of that issue on the final voting preference of the electorate. Hence it would be very difficult to analyze the impact of NREGA scheme on 2009 elections at India level analytically. Therefore I have tried to take a sample state which ideally would be bereft of any local or regional issue during the 2009 elections.  

Starting from the 28 states in India, we can easily rule out the smaller states of Goa, North East, since electorally they are relatively insignificant. Ideally we would want a state which is a bipolar contest between BJP and Congress (the two national parties, since these would relatively have lesser prominence to local issues). Among the states where there is a straight contest between BJP and congress, Madhya Pradesh stands out. In 2008 assembly elections BJP had just won a 2^nd term to rule the state with near 2/3 majority 143 out of 230 seats.^[1] So BJP was expected to win a majority of the parliamentary seats in 2009.^[2] Most opinion and exit polls predicted a BJP sweep of around 20-25 seats out of the 29 seats in total. But surprisingly Congress managed to win 12 seats with BJP winning 16 seats and BSP the remaining seat.^[3] This was surprising and almost a matched performance by the Congress especially with the fact that the same party had got a thrashing in the assembly elections held just 6 months back.^[1] In the case of the other states where elections were held along with that of Madhya Pradesh in 2008, the results in 2009 parliamentary elections broadly followed the assembly elections results. In Delhi and Rajasthan Congress swept the states with 7/7 and 20/25 seats respectively and in Chhattisgarh BJP won resoundingly 10/11 seats in the state^[4]. Hence when all these states are considered, Madhya Pradesh clearly stands out.

So how was Congress able to win so many seats in Madhya Pradesh? In 2009 elections there were not many dominant local issues that dominated the discussion. Hence it is safe to assume that National issues with local bearings had major role to play. Now the question arises, which ones? Was it the matured leadership of the PM that enabled to the voters to trust Congress or was it Rahul’s magic?.

So when we deep dive into the 2009 results, we can clearly see a pattern that when taken in context explains the underlying factor behind congress better than expected performance.  I was able to procure assembly level voting shares for each of the party in 2009 elections from the election commissioner website. ^[5] I correlated this with the no of blocks in each of the assembly segments designated as Rural or urban by the election commission. By broadly using the share of polling booths classified as Rural vs. Urban and with an assumption that each of the polling booth would cater to nearly equal number of voting population. I was able to approximate the share of Rural and Urban electoral population in each of the assembly segment. Refer the link below for reference.

When the assembly seat population characteristics are correlated with the voting pattern in 2009 elections, a clear trend emerges. Rural segments have voted fairly evenly between Congress and BJP while the urban segments have in majority of the cases voted decisively for the BJP.

The below table illustrates the voting pattern that emerges

Rural Share	INC	BJP	Total Votes cast	Weights	No of assembly segments	BJP	INC	BSP
95-100%	40.1%	39.7%	5551853	29%	63	27	32	4
90-95%	40.4%	41.9%	4303994	22%	52	27	23	2
80-90%	39.8%	43.9%	3891963	20%	47	25	21	1
70-80%	36.8%	46.4%	1624213	8%	20	11	9	0
50-70%	42.7%	47.8%	1378412	7%	16	9	7	0
25-50%	43.3%	43.6%	924128	5%	11	8	3	0
0-25%	40.1%	51.9%	1796309	9%	21	16	5	0
Total	40.2%	43.5%	19470872	100%	230	123	100	7

As we can see from the above table, Congress has in fact performed better than BJP in predominantly rural seats (95-100% share of rural polling booths) with a total vote share of 40.1% against 39.7% of the BJP. In terms of assembly segments, Congress had leads in 32 out of a total of 63 seats with predominance of rural population as against 27 for the BJP. As we go further into urbanized assembly segments we find BJP’s vote share difference vis a vis Congress improving and eventually dominating. At a broad level the Voting share of Congress and BJP in seats with more than 70% rural population stands at ~40% and ~42% respectively. At an assembly seat level this translates into 85 and 90 seats in which the respective parties had leads out of 182 seats in this category. In seats with significant urban population (30-50% of Urban polling booth share), we can clearly see BJP having a significant advantage with ~48% vote share as against ~43% of the Congress. In terms of assembly segments BJP lead in 16 seats as against 9 seats by the Congress out of a total of 25 seats. And finally in Urban majority seats, BJP is the clear winner with whopping 8% lead in vote share with ~49% as against voter share of ~41% for the congress. BJP had leads in 24 of the 32 assembly segments vis a vis 8 for the congress.

Clearly the major reason for the better than expected of the Congress is due to its on par performance in the rural segments of the Madhya Pradesh state. It is here that NREGA comes into picture. NREGA has been reported to have been successfully implemented in Madhya Pradesh. NREGA is rural focused scheme and benefits only the rural population by guaranteeing 100 days of work for eligible adults. The successful implementation would have resulted in the creation of enormous goodwill among its beneficiaries which could have resulted in proportionate impact on the voting trends of the beneficiaries in 2009 elections. We can clearly state that NREGA indeed had a positive impact on the electoral prospect of the UPA government. The on par performance of UPA in rural segments can only be attributed to the NREGA scheme and nothing else, since there existed no anti incumbency against the state government; there were no regional parties and also no significant regional issues that were course of the discussion. And significantly Congress performed equally well across the state with wins coming from both East, West, South and Northern parts of Madhya Pradesh and hence negating the possibility of local cluster level issues or performance linked to pockets of influence of leaders. With the elimination of most of the issues that could have had a broad level impact across the state, clearly NREGA is the only factor left and hence NREGA is the winning factor by elimination.

What will be the implication of this analysis on 2013/14 elections. Rural voters are still significant even if there is a growing clout of urban neo middle class. So even though after the recent protests in Delhi, everyone seems to talking about these new segments, the rural population cannot be ignored. Therefore the politics of handouts and giveaways will still compete in the near future. Also significantly Congress and the UPA have an edge over this segment which always has been the traditional vote constituency of the congress. Even though the electoral impact of the Direct cash scheme is questionable as I have argued in the previous post. Still, the many other schemes of the present regime will create favorable dispensation. But there is also the drought that has affected India in 2012 coupled with stagnation in the Market prices for farmers and the growing input costs of labor and other farm inputs could create adverse opinion. And finally for the BJP and especially Narendra Modi, they have to come up with a credible idea that would entice this voting segment. Development and Industrialization cannot be easily sold to this segment unlike the technology savvy neo middle class. Also for Modi especially communicating his vision to this segment will be the most challenging prospect if he were to promote himself as the PM candidate from the BJP. The way the vision is articulated and communicated is crucial. But the growing reach of Television and Mobile phone connectivity with nearly 25-35% (33.4% at all India level) of the rural population across the states with access to TV and 50-60% (55% at all India level) with access to Telephone network can be the critical enablers for the above communication.

Therefore the analysis clearly indicates the importance of this important electoral segment which no party or PM candidate can ignore or take it for granted and the key to winning 2014 would crucially lie with the party or candidate who can gain significant share of this huge electoral pie. But the crucial challenge will remain in connecting and communicating one’s vision to this key segment.

PS -
For the detailed Data and analysis
Please refer to
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvxmEFR9ZNZKdEdSUDZvNzIwTWlDYXRtZTdPci04anc#gid=1