Karnataka: BJP Manifesto Offers Rs 2.4 Lakh Crore Sops

A bunch of Karnataka BJP leaders along with a Union minister from New Delhi released the BJP manifesto in Bengaluru for the upcoming Assembly elections to be held on 12 May. Following a hackneyed model, the manifesto called “Our Promise for Our Karnataka”, offers Rs.2.386 lakh crore worth of gifts to the state’s voters. That’s only the monetised declarations. Besides these, there are as many if not more unmonetized promises ranging from 3 g gold thali and Rs.25,000 for all BPL brides to free sanitary napkins, industrial corridors to new townships, film city and memorials to various eminent personalities (of different castes – its elections after all!), loans to all and sundry, and so on. Its impossible to calculate the value of this rain shower of goodies but it will run into lakhs of crores.

Just for perspective, this year’s budget for Karnataka was worth Rs.2.1 lakh crore. Last year’s gross state domestic product was some Rs.12 lakh crore. In one election campaign, BJP is throwing promises that compete with these sums. How this kind of funds will be raised is anybody’s guess because the BJP is silent about it.

It appears that Amit Shah and co. have standardised a model for fighting elections. Promise everything under the sun, play communal politics and prop up the prime minister for the vote gathering. Currently, PM Modi is on his usual tour of electioneering, so much so that even the Supreme Court was told yesterday that the govt. can’t pay attention to the Cauvery waters dispute as he and his Cabinet colleagues are busy in Karnataka. Such is the hubris afflicting BJP’s top tier.

But, leaving aside the transparent – and insulting – attempt to win votes by promising money, what substantive thing does the manifesto offer? Let’s take a quick tour.

The most emphasised and first section of the manifesto is understandably on farmers. It repeats the same promise made by Modi in 2014 – ensure that farmers receive 1.5 times the cost of production as Minimum Support Price. It is another sign of BJP hubris – or their indifference to people – that they can with a straight face repeat a promise that has remained unfulfilled for four years. Perhaps knowing that this will again not be fulfilled, the BJP has unabashedly doled out a slew of sops – crop loan waiver up to Rs.1 lakh, straight transfer of Rs.10,000 to 20 lakh dryland small and marginal farmers, Rs.3000 crore each for horticulture and dairy development, etc. Just in case all this doesn’t impress the hapless Karnataka raitha, there is a promise to ban cow slaughter which is just optics and signalling.

In other words, Karnataka farmers’ key issues like irrigation, remunerative prices, indebtedness and low wages for landless workers are all sought to be brushed under the carpet.

Industrial workers of the state, ranging from the top end IT workers to the desperately poor artisanal workers get short shrift in the BJP’s promise list. Again with the same aplomb seen earlier, BJP promises ease of doing business through single window clearance, easing of regulatory framework by implementation of the 2016 Shops and Establishments model law which deprives workers of many rights and intensifies exploitation, and promises to give MSMEs various tax benefits even after they “become large scale enterprises”!

It might be argued that encouraging industrial units in not a bad thing. But seen in the context of deafening silence on minimum wages for workers, implementation of labour laws and provision of social security, such promises to industrialists show the BJP’s innate cosiness with the lobby. This of course bears no saying given that three robber barons from the mining sector have been given BJP tickets in the elections even though they are accused of huge scams.

Another burning issue on which the BJP continues its silence is that of jobs. Look at what it has to say – “Ensure availability of quality work opportunities for everyone through skill development, self-employment and job creation”! That means – ensure work through jobs! This is all that the BJP has to offer for Karnataka. It is not much different from what Modi Sarkar has been doing all along even as joblessness has grown by leaps and bounds in the past four years of their misrule.

What is striking in 64 pages of promises is that there is a total lack of any meaningful policy to combat or relieve the people of the distress they are facing. Everything is pegged on handouts and sops.

What is smuggled in to the manifesto is BJP’s own poisonous vision of marginalising minorities and SC/ST communities, playing up the Hindutva agenda by promising funds for temples and assuring that only Hindus will be kept in managing bodies, building memorials to various saints, ‘banning’ cow slaughter and calling all this ‘sabka sath, sabka vikas’.