One Year of Modi Sarkar : Saal Ek, Sawaal Anek

Chanchal Chauhan

 

My dear Modi ji

            This is an open letter from a common citizen of India. Your BJP is past master in coining attractive slogans to hoodwink people that you call ‘Janata Janardan’. The ground reality is that the one year of your rule has done nothing to alleviate poverty or for ‘sab ka vikas’. Even your own MP from Balia has said that not even one kilometre road has been built in one year. Almost all the MPs including Rajnath Singh and MLAs of your Party in the BJP ruled states and UP have failed to utilise the funds allocation as shown on the Rajya Sabha TV programme. We all know that no foundation of even one new smart city has been laid in any part of our country, only castles in the air. Do you think that you will create 300 smart cities in one go just by slogans and rhetoric? Not 300 smart cities, can you build even 3 smart cities as capital cities for states born out of bifurcation of their mother states such as Telangana, Haryana, and Punjab.

            The appropriate slogan for your one year should be ‘ Saal Ek, behaal Anek’ people who commit suicide under the burden of indebtedness in rural India. Similarly the urban  poor  have seen no ‘achhe din so far in their lives. They have seen no new work being done for their housing, water and electricity and cheap food grain etc. anywhere in India. Some state governments are doing better than your zero work. Yes, your Sarkar has worked rapidly so far for the benefits to the corporate houses, reduced for them the rates of income tax from 30% to 25 % but no relief has been given to the other classes including the middle class people who have been a support base of the B JP for long. You have increased service tax to 14% on TDS for those who have deposited their lifelong earnings in the banks after retirement. So they will be paying 44% income tax while the corporate houses will enjoy the relief at their cost. To make the rich corporate houses amass more wealth, you have drastically cut budgetary allocations to all the welfare schemes such as MNREGA, Anganwadi and reduced budgetary allocation even to the education. Have you taken a single step to provide employment to the jobless, Nokia retrenched more than 8000 workers from its Chennai factory, there may be thousands elsewhere that remained unreported by the media. So in stead of providing employment to the jobless, your one year rule has encouraged retrenchment and thus created joblessness. Your so called ‘labour reforms’ dictated by the World Bank and IMF bosses will create unprecedented loss of jobs for the young skilled and non-skilled workers. Even the trade union under your Party rejects your ‘labour reforms’ because they know that your steps are anti-labour.  Mr. Jan Sewak, how will you face their ire in the coming years, in case, they revolt against this system that is being nurtured by both the main stream Parties at the Centre alternately, i.e. the Congress and the BJP.

            First you increased rail fares, freight and then Tatkal fares and now AC fares in the same manner as the Congress did more than often, and similarly, you increased petrol, diesel and gas prices even when the international markets were selling crude oil at all time low rates. While earlier reducing the prices, you increased excise duty so as to rob the  common people who voted you to power. The net result is that prices of pulses, food grains, vegetables and all items of daily consumption have become costlier since you took over power at the centre. The prices of medicines have increased manifold and some of them have become unaffordable for a poor family. With all the concessions to the industrial houses the GDP has gone down since the last year.

            The vast masses consist of working class and farmers and the middle class whose problems have been aggravated by the pro-corporate direction that the Congress government since 1991 and later your governments has taken under the pressure from the World Bank and the IMF who rule the capitalist world today. A ‘trinity’ of  ex-economists of the World Bank and IMF such as Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh, and Raghuram Rajan was imposed on the Indian economy by the Congress to serve the interests of their mentors. You have retained Raghuram Rajan and replaced two of them by Arvind Subramanian and Arvind Panagariya, both of them are the ex-economists of the World Bank and the IMF. So with the change of the masks, the ‘trinity’ is very much in place to serve the interests of the international finance capital.

            You do not tell people that India’s foreign debt has increased in your tenure too. According to your own Finance Ministry data the following is the position :

Government and Non-Government External Debt (US$ million)

                 at    end-March                             end-June    end Sept.   end-Dec.          

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  2009    2010    2011    2012     2013   2014        2014 PR    2014 PR      2014 QE                   224,498   260,935  317,891  360,766  409,464  446,484     453,422     457,609         461,943

            More foreign debt is being sought and thus will surely raise the quantum further by the end of the second year of your rule.So whatever rhetoric and dramatics you may indulge in on the national political stage, behind the curtains, it is the same model of governance decided and dictated by the international finance capital that led to the development of a system in which the richest gained all benefits at the cost of the labour of the poor who are committing suicides or facing joblessness and poverty. The change of government is just the change of the CMD.  It is their pressure that the land of poor farmers will have to be grabbed for the benefit of the corporate houses under the slogan of ‘PPP’ and that is why you insist on scrapping the clause of ‘social impact’ and ‘consent of the farmers’. What sort of  ‘Jan Sewak’ are you, as you call yourself?  You are in a hurry to please the imperialist bosses so that they may take over India again as they did in the era of the East India Company; and on the land of the poor they may ‘Make in India’ war-planes, rockets, missiles, submarines and tanks to destroy the same poor as they destroyed Red Indians in America. Do you know that the poor in the whole country now feel threatened by your land acquisition Ordinance that is being imposed again and again? Do you know that 15000 lac acres of land acquired earlier on the pretext of many schemes such as SEZ is still lying unused. The farmers including those under your Party’s Kisan Union rightly feel that your government is anti-farmer and no logic by your slogan-mongering can convince them. If you are not pro-corporate, can you show your guts to acquire vacant land already under possession of big corporate houses whose mills have been closed, demolished such as Birla Mill, DCM Mills and many more in Delhi itself that you can see with your own open eyes? Do you have guts to acquire land of all farmhouses that produce nothing and will you build houses for the poor on that land? Do you have the data of all the closed mills, if so, why not to acquire that space and utilise the same for all the projects that you use as pretext to grab the land of the poor? Why not to give the vast tracks of land in the Chambal ravines to the corporate houses as suggested by Mulayam Singh in the Rajya Sabha and make your smart cities there? Why are you in a hurry to grab the multi-crop land of the poor peasants whose lives depend on that land and who feed the nation too by extra-produce of cash crops? What is the motive behind this move of creating  a large army of poor people displaced and robbed of their livelihood?

 

            Your actions in one year have clearly proved that you are not a ‘Jan sewak’ but still a Pracharak of the RSS, a pro-imperialist right-wing organisation that indulged in anti-India activities since its inception in 1925 and sabotaged all efforts of patriotic forces engaged in the heroic freedom struggle. Your Guru Golwalkar treated the German fascism as the most suitable philosophy for India, a philosophy that was against humanity and against the Indian culture that has deep rooted unity in diversity. His RSS followers sided with the British and feudal lords in that era and thus created a communal divide for their benefit. Your RSS is still busy in its efforts to convert secular and democratic India into a Hindu Rashtra dictated by ‘Manusmriti’, an outdated treatise that upholds inequality based on the caste system and robs women of their freedom. The RSS, thus, works against our modern Constitution that ensures equality, liberty and fraternity to its entire people who are backbone of its development. You know well that the RSS supported the British rule in India in 1942 and still supports the rule of imperialists through the entry of foreign multinationals, the forces of 1991 economic trajectory that may pose a danger to the freedom and sovereignty of our country. You are going from one country to another with Ambani and Adani and India inc. along with you and invite openly ‘the modern East India Companies’ of all hues to come to India and capture India’s productive forces under the slogan of ‘Make in India’. You do not tell them what they should make because all items of consumer goods and engineering goods from locomotives to lipsticks, soaps, creams and sanitary towels are already available in abundance in India. Where is the demand for any product? The investors know this ground reality, and that is why FDI did not rush in to 'make in India' in any manufacturing sector, it flew in and flew out of the share market with earning profits in short term, they took away more than what they brought for short term gains under your rule of one year.

            The manufacturers whether national or multinational first gauge the demand, they are not fools to be carried away by a hollow slogan of ‘Make in India’. In one year all exports have declined, so where will the new entrants sell their products? The dollar has become stronger, the rupee weaker under your administration. You do not tell us this truth, and that is why no new entrepreneur has come to Make in India. Only hollow slogans are in the air. Many MOUs for billion dollars are reported to have been signed, but not a single dollar has reached in India to make any thing in India during this year under the effect of your slogan. No new factory has been established under this slogan. The demand is sluggish all over the world under the neo-liberal regime of the international finance capital that has created more joblessness and poverty. Workers are rendered jobless on the closure of their plants as the demand for several products has come to an end. So who will purchase the products of those of your invitees who are supposed to rush in to ‘Make in India’?

            The markets and warehouses in all the countries are already flooded with every product but majority of people have no purchasing power. They are like ‘Chaiwala boys’ of your boyhood days. What have you done for those boys during this one year so that they could purchase new underwear to look smarter in a future smart city. Your one year Sarkar has reduced budget allocation for the schemes for the benefit of the rural poor such as partial employment scheme MNREGA, Anganwadi programme, education and medicines and several pro-poor welfare schemes. The crops have been damaged by unseasonal rains, so their earnings have further gone down. Whatever grain they could salvage is lying on the roads as in Punjab and Haryana where government agencies are not purchasing it, farmers are sitting on the road with their produce. The bitter reality is that your one year rule is reducing them into people with zero purchasing power. Farmers are agitating every where, your tours abroad in fine suits and safaris and election speeches in foreign lands are not going to give relief to these suffering millions. You return empty handed, pro-corporate TV channels (mostly owned by them) hardly show the reality of the sons of Bharat Mata and patting your back keep you self-opinionated. Every now and then the prices of petrol, diesel and other petro-products are hiked, railway fares hiked, freight charges hiked, all these steps resulted in the price rise of all essential commodities including vegetables in the market. You perhaps do not know that even the seasonal vegetables are selling at the price beyond the reach of any family of a ‘chaiwala boy’.

            People judged your performance of nine months rule and punished your Party at Delhi elections where a viable pro-people alternative was available. If today in any part of the country, a pro-people alternative can be available, your Party, even though it boasts of being now the largest Party in the world, will be wiped out as happened in Delhi, that you yourself called at an election rally, ‘Mini India.’ Sir jee, stop fooling yourself and look at the ground reality. If you sow the same that the Congress did, so will you reap as the Congress did.

With best wishes

Yours truly,

a common voter.