The worst thing about being an incumbent is that you are no longer the challenger, the ‘know it all’ who is feted and cheered when you take pot shots at the object of your derision, telling the world that if you were given the chance, you would have done it so much better than the ‘git’ sitting in the seat you believe you should rightfully occupy.
Once you’ve dislodged your opponent and you’re sitting pretty, where he once sat, it’s a whole new worldview isn’t it. King of the heap! Except, there’s no-one tittering with you in the aisles anymore. More likely, they’re sniggering at you. The jeers that singe! Uncomfortable!
That’s why I wouldn’t like to be in Mr Arun Jaitley’s shoes right now. He may have his head and his heart in the right place, and his much awaited budget labelled with the vote-grabbing tag of pro-farmer. The big addendum, the healthcare scheme that is to be rolled out, say the budget’s proponents, also comes with the pro-poor tag. Given the fact that it is the Modi government’s last hurrah, it does amplify to the world that the will of this government to transform India’s appalling support systems - healthcare for the poor and underprivileged being just one symptom of the greater malaise – is a given.
The poor are vulnerable, sadly, more and more, to non-communicable diseases, to indifferent and badly run hospices in both the major cities and villages. In fact rather than borrowing from Obamacare, this Modicare avatar would do well to prioritise the complete overhaul of all government hospitals. And, instead of focusing on building only toilets – and please, please don’t stop with that - how about adding well-equipped, properly manned clinics and health centres for the rural as well as the urban poor.
Most of the time, just like government schools – too few and too spread out which has seen a rise in school dropouts - that are ramshackle buildings with no teachers and no students, these health centres have no doctors. In most cases, it is the non-medical staff that dole out the meds. No wonder the quacks rule!
The same must not hold good for the sops to the farmer. From budget to budget, through the years, there’s always been a huge gap between promises, pronouncements and actual delivery. The BJP’s political willingness to bring about change has never been in question but can you really change India from the bottom up? No offense, but if the prime minister hasn’t been able to transform his own constituency… the riverine filth and sludge that passes for the Ganga in the holiest of holies across Uttar Pradesh is not swacch by any stretch of the imagination. Four years after a certain Namami Gangai was tasked to clean up the water from the heavens, the stench of putrefying sewage and refuse defiles the nostrils.
And that holds good across the country, and as we all saw last week, for the IT capital’s ever exploding lakes! Bellandur self-combusting again, and no-one, neither the BDA nor the BBMP pays a price, no official is ever held to account, no heads roll.
Shouldn’t a commission of inquiry be set up to go through the records and see whose signature is on the clearance certificate that allowed the realty mafia that is in cahoots with government to encroach on the lake-beds, build multi-storey apartments and homes and sloth-spewing factories and turn a blind eye to the requirement for sewage treatment and drains that take human refuse right into the waterbody ?
Now, we all know that’s NOT going to happen! Not now, in poll-bound Karnataka!
That’s my beef with Mr Jaitley’s budget. Mr. Chandrababu Naidu may be miffed, but we, in Karnataka, with polls barely three months away have been given one suburban railway that every railway minister has announced in some form or another!
We have 17 BJP MPs in Parliament! Surely one of them should have been consulted, or gathered up the courage and told the Prime Minister that his supposed largesse to Bengaluru, the Rs 17,000 crore allocation for a suburban railway that will decongest our fast exploding, crowded city, lure us off the street, out of our bikes and cars and into the metros has been trotted out so many times – just the day before by the Chief Minister of the state - that nobody is impressed. We’ve heard all this before in some form or the other, haven’t we?
And the other beef? Long time rail budget watchers, have said they fail to understand the logic behind scrapping the rail budget presentation. It is the lower rungs who actually take the overnight trains back to their homes, as well as the young techies who gravitate to the big cities and they aren’t happy at the manner in which the rail budget was done away with.
At the very least, Mr. Jaitley in his swansong has given the poll-obsessed ruling party, a stirring new slogan – yes, yes, a jumla – to take to the people when the party cadres fan out across the country, canvassing for votes. It can safely claim that the BJP is pro-farmer, that it understands agrarian distress like no party or government before it, and that farm to market, if not farm to fork will soon become a reality.
Even if everyone knows it doesn’t, the promise of a better life is what we all vote for! And the man who can deliver that…well, he’s the sure-fire winner!
Now, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, up against the BJP’s determined bid to polarise votes (do they really want to claim a ganja peddler as one of their men) has one card he hasn’t played so far. He’s got the road-rollers fixing the bumps on the roads, the Congress MLAs getting the largesse. (Unfortunately I’m in a non-Congress pocket so have to live with cratered roads and a greedy garbage and tree-cutting mafia).
But Mr.Siddaramaiah’s budget, due February 16, could go one better than Mr. Jaitley’s middle-class unfriendly ‘kisan budget’. If, he goes ahead and waives the farmers’ loans – all Rs. 50,000 crores of it. He won’t even need a Vatal Nagaraj after that to play this futile politics of the bandh.
