Shadow Warrior | Why Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat matters: It’s a classic clash of metaphors

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 the 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.

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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 appears to be a close fit with its Thiruvananthapuram campaign:

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, the UN Security Council to China, and the and the 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 (e.g., 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.

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 liberalisation 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, and China.

Since there was no economic growth, it became a zero-sum game, and every group, whether religious or caste, realised 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 handouts because you have carefully avoided doing anything to grow the economy and create a rising tide to lift all boats.

The third plank of this approach is redistribution. This has been a total ‘success’ in Kerala. The agricultural wealth (black pepper 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 labourers to West Asia and nurses to rich countries.

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). 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 had to subsidise 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 labourers, 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 labour strife, strikes, nokku-kooli, and vandalism.

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. 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 the 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 only 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.

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 opium 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.

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), electronics, and technology (using the existing ISRO, Technopark, and the new IIST centre for semiconductor technology). 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 Centre 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, the nearby presence of Mahendragiri in Tamil Nadu, and the new launchpad for private sector efforts focusing on LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites suggest 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:

So on average, the BJP poll planks seem more believable, doable, and less likely 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 it 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 is a must-watch contest that has broad significance beyond just its own Parliament seat.

The writer has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.