Indian Political Discussion

Lok Sabha Polls: Regardless of the results, Rahul Gandhi's transformation as a strong leader is complete

Updated : May 09, 2019 11:50 AM IST

The Gandhi name that was, until 2014, a fairly strong brand in elections, seemed to be on the wane.
The 2019 election, Rahul Gandhi has come into his own. Rahul Gandhi’s big challenge is that he faces one of the most popular prime ministers in decades.

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Harini Calamur

The world’s largest election is entering its final phase. In just two weeks, we would know who will form the next government. No matter what the outcome is, this would be seen as the election where Rahul Gandhi finally came of age as a political leader.

At the end of the 2014 elections, when the 'Modi wave' shook the political landscape, and transformed it, the Indian National Congress (INC) was reduced to 44 seats. Rahul Gandhi was pretty much written off as a political leader. The jokes and memes that followed Rahul Gandhi around, grew in intensity, and the name “Pappu” became synonymous with him.

The Congress party was in disarray, many defecting from the ranks of the Grand Old Party to the new improved BJP that was welcoming of new leadership. The Congress leadership seemed old, jaded, and out of touch with the new India that was emerging. The Gandhi name that was, until 2014, a fairly strong brand in elections, seemed to be on the wane. Rahul Gandhi’s ‘reluctant leader’ mode did not find too much favour even with those who voted for his party. Also, there was something terribly chaffing about the very idea of only a member of a dynasty being able to lead the Congress. May 2014 was a different place.

In the 5 years between then and now, a lot has changed. There is something about the 2014 election result that snapped Rahul Gandhi and the Congress out of their noblesse oblige mode and got them to rebuild the party ground up. A devastated cadre had to be reassembled to take the party forward. While it was easy to find people, who would represent them in the studios across India, elections aren’t won in the studios, they are won by feet on the ground. Without dedicated cadres, parties can’t win. Rebuilding the cadres became the goal for Gandhi and his party. For the first time since he entered politics over a decade earlier, he began talking like a leader who was there because he was hungry for the top spot and not as one who was forced to take on the mantle.

The 2019 election, Rahul Gandhi has come into his own. A leader in his own right. His embrace of a softer, kinder Hinduism helps counter the BJP’s anti-Hindu charge against the Congress. It also brought back supporters who drifted away from the party, because they saw it as ‘anti-Hindu’. The embrace of technology allowed the party to adopt the tactics that worked so well for the BJP. And, then they began winning seats in elections, and then states in elections.

For the last 24 months or so, Rahul Gandhi has been setting the agenda to which the government has been reacting. Be it his “suit boot ki sarkar’ jibe, or his “Gabbar Singh Tax”, his barbs have hit home and have had the entire cabinet coming out to refute him and defending the government’s record. His continuous barbs of “chowkidar chor hai” have bothered the BJP so much that not only reacted with ill thought through “main bhi chowkidar” campaign but compounded it by adding a suffix of 'chowkidar' to various BJP Twitter handles. When that didn’t work, the prime minister lashed out at Rahul Gandhi’s father Rajiv Gandhi’s record, saying “Your father was termed ‘Mr Clean’ by his courtiers, but his life ended as ‘bhrashtachari No. 1'". For those who don’t know, Rajiv Gandhi’s life ended when a suicide bomber blew him up.

But it is not just the political joust that Rahul Gandhi has learned, his manifesto seems to stamp his vision on the party. At the core is his belief in a variation of a minimum income guarantee programme NYAY. The socialism of the Congress seems to be making way for the social welfarism of Rahul Gandhi. A focus on decentralisation and devolving more power is in stark contrast to the traditional Congress mode of centralisation and concentrating all power in a few hands.

Rahul Gandhi’s big challenge is that he faces one of the most popular prime ministers in decades. Narendra Modi’s personal goodwill amongst the voter is high. Even if there are murmurs against his policies or his party, there is no denying that voters look up to Modi. However, Rahul Gandhi’s constant emphasis on jobs and the 'chowkidar' jibe have been heard by the great Indian public. Whether it makes any difference to the way they vote, is a different story.

Harini Calamur writes on politics, gender and her areas of interest are the intersection of technology, media, and audiences.

Lok Sabha Polls: Regardless of the results, Rahul Gandhi's transformation as a strong leader is complete
 
Modi Cut India’s Red Tape. Now He Hopes to Win Votes for His Work.

Taxes are simpler, and bureaucracy has been trimmed. Prime Minister Modi wants a second term to prove that India is open for business.
open for business.

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Workers at Mehta Creation, a jeans maker in Mumbai, India.Credit : Atul Loke for The New York Times

By Keith Bradsher
May 14, 2019

MUMBAI, India — A jeans maker saw his delivery costs cut by half when the highway police stopped asking for bribes. An aluminum wire factory faced only three inspectors rather than 12 to keep its licenses. Big companies like Corning, the American fiber-optic cable business, found they could wield a new bankruptcy law to demand that customers pay overdue bills.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised nearly five years ago to open India for business. Fitfully and sometimes painfully, his government has streamlined regulations, winnowed a famously antiquated bureaucracy and tackled corruption and tax evasion.

But cutting red tape has yet to translate into broad growth for this emerging economy, or spark much outside investment. Small and medium-size businesses have struggled to keep up with the pace of the overhaul. Some, which seldom paid taxes before, went bankrupt. Civil servants stumbled repeatedly in efforts to turn Mr. Modi’s abruptly issued policies into simple-to-follow standards.

Now, as 900 million Indians go to the polls, Mr. Modi has to persuade voters to stay the course and convince them that his reforms — unconventional to many — are taking root. As the campaign between his Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress Party heats up, Mr. Modi faces an opponent, Rahul Gandhi, who contends that the prime minister has disrupted a functioning economy and caused job losses.

“The economy is actually in tatters,” a Congress Party spokesman, Randeep Singh Surjewala, said.

Mr. Modi’s team argues that if his party wins the national vote, which ends Sunday, growth will follow. “The first two years after key reforms, growth tends to slow,” said Amitabh Kant, who heads Mr. Modi’s economic policy commission. “Then the acceleration happens.”

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Supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party holding pictures of him at a rally last month in Kolkata, India.CreditAtul Loke/Getty Images

Key statistics on growth and unemployment have been delayed or disputed in recent months, leading to a torrent of economic bickering. Yet India has actually done more over the past four years to make it easy to do business than any country except tiny Djibouti and even tinier Brunei, a review of World Bank data shows. Researchers assessed the ease of obtaining construction permits, connecting electricity, drafting contracts and other variables.

Still Lagging, but a Little Less So

India’s share of the world’s manufacturing has been rising slightly faster than its growing share of the global population.
(very interesting graph here, couldn't be copied, check the article)

Business leaders, interviewed last month, consistently explained that they had seen corruption pared and bureaucracy reined in. Tax demands have been simplified, and many businesses now can go online to file for government permits and licenses.

Mr. Modi is counting on India’s business class, a key constituency, and he has led in the polls. Detractors say that advantage has come at a cost. Mr. Modi has retained the political support to keep economic reforms moving in part by fanning sectarian tensions between the country’s Hindu majority and its Muslim minority.

A factory district in Mumbai, a metropolis that is India’s most populous, shows how his program of change has started to crack a patronage system where everyone took a little but the national economy lost a lot. Mr. Modi’s idea to minimize graft has been worthwhile, business owners said, even if the execution at times was bungled.

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Rahul Gandhi of the opposition Congress Party last month in Wayanad, India. He contends that Mr. Modi has disrupted a functioning economy and caused job losses.CreditAtul Loke/Getty Images

Mehta Creation, a jeans maker in a dilapidated concrete building in the northern outskirts, paid a welter of taxes until two years ago. That included the dreaded octroi, a British import from medieval times that allowed states and some cities to collect taxes whenever goods crossed a boundary.

Mehta Creation’s budget was contorted by corruption. To avoid the octroi, which could triple the cost of a delivery and add delays, Mehta paid drivers about $5 for each parcel of jeans and then reimbursed them up to $6 per parcel to bribe the local police at every border, said Dhiren Sharma, the company’s chief operating officer.

Mehta’s costs dropped after the government abolished 17 taxes, including the octroi, two years ago and established instead a national value-added tax on most business activity.

Then Mehta had a zipper problem. The single tax was fine for companies, like Mehta, that had been reporting income. But smaller businesses — like the zipper company it depended on — largely worked on cash payments and had seldom paid taxes.

Under the new law, Mehta had to pay a tax of 5 to 12 percent on each pair of jeans sold to retailers. Its suppliers too were obligated to pay a similar tax, and, in this supply chain, Mehta was supposed to earn a credit for the taxes its suppliers paid.

But the zipper supplier and half of Mehta’s fabric vendors initially ignored the tax, Mr. Sharma said. Mehta was forced to pay the missing money. Mehta wrangled with its vendors to pay. So the Modi program energized a sort of accountability, from vendor to vendor, that was effective, if chaotic, in generating tax revenue.

“In the last two years, everything has changed,” Mr. Sharma said. The national sales tax “is very good, but it could have been implemented in a better way.”

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Workers at Shakti Industries in Mumbai, which uses aluminum cords to make wire for sale to jewelry manufacturers.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times

Next door to Mehta, seven employees of Shakti Industries work beneath a large hook holding a huge roll of aluminum cord. Daily, they thin the cord into wire and flex it around spools to sell to jewelry makers. Before Mr. Modi was elected, the tiny shop was visited by regulators from a dozen government agencies, with many demanding bribes, said Vipul S. Kamani, the owner.

Now, just three agencies are involved, he said. Licenses can be issued mostly online. A government computer generates a random inspection cycle, making it harder for inspectors to demand regular bribes. Mr. Kamani said he was saving money and “saving a lot of time, too.”

Changes seem to have touched most businesses no matter the industry or service. A restaurateur described how, six years ago, he needed 32 regulators to sign off on a new eatery. Even a signboard had to be licensed. Each approval required a bribe, the restaurant owner said. He calculated that he would need to pay $1,200 per seat in bribes, a fortune in a neighborhood where meals usually cost $6.

The restaurateur waited until last year to open and paid far lower bribes — about $450 per seat — because the number of regulators had dropped to 14. Next year, he expects the number of regulators, and bribes, to fall sharply again. He asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation by the authorities.

Foreign companies have long complained about red tape. Foreign direct investment jumped sharply in Mr. Modi’s first two years in office, but has slipped since 2016. Investors say red tape has plunged; the problem now is demand within India.

Many economists and business people blame the dip in investment on the unexpected national campaign in November 2016 to recall large-denomination rupee notes.

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Queuing outside a bank to deposit and exchange 500 and 1,000 rupee notes in Uttar Pradesh State in 2016.CreditSanjay Kanojia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The so-called demonetization program was meant to curb the black market and shift the economy from cash. Digital payments, the government figured, could better track revenue and lead to efficient tax collection for money to pay for roads, subways and ports.

But the program was rolled out so quickly that businesses and households scrambled for paper money. People tried to rely on credit cards and electronic banking, but many businesses were not equipped to accept them. The cash crunch hit small businesses hardest, said Pronab Sen, the country’s recently retired top statistician.

Through 2018, Mr. Modi shifted toward populist measures. He introduced restrictions that crimped Walmart and Amazon expansions and foreign internet services, and he demanded that Visa, MasterCard and American Express move more operations to India. He made all politics — and economics — local. He kept steep tariffs on imports despite Trump administration complaints and after India lost zero-tariff access to the American market for many goods.

He has won grass-roots support from many Hindus while pushing economic changes advocated by business leaders. He has been mostly silent on sectarian violence, including the lynching of Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. The political swing states of India lie mainly in the north, where Hindu nationalism runs deep, and Mr. Modi seems to have retained support there.

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Construction work in Chakan, in Pune, an industrial Indian hub. CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times

Corning has a factory north of Pune, an industrial hub, and it has witnessed visible improvements — although some began under the Congress Party, before Mr. Modi took office. The road outside the factory once had huge potholes. It has been paved. Electricity blackouts occurred weekly; now electricity fails once a month. Importantly for cash flow, Corning can better force errant clients, because of a new law, to pay their bills.

When it comes to red tape, India “certainly seems to be heading in the right direction,” said Amit Bansal, Corning’s managing director for India.

Gaurav Dalmia, the chairman of a family-controlled conglomerate that makes cement as well as heat-resistant tiles for steel furnaces, said big business was making a calculation in these last days of voting.

“If the Modi government is re-elected, as it is likely to be, you will get economic reform as well as social challenges,” he said. “It’s a package deal, whether you like it or not.”

“On a net basis,” Mr. Dalmia said, “many like me would buy that package.”

Ayesha Venkataraman contributed reporting.

Modi Cut India’s Red Tape. Now He Hopes to Win Votes for His Work.
 
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Gautam said:
Be it his “suit boot ki sarkar’ jibe, or his “Gabbar Singh Tax”, his barbs have hit home
Click to expand...
Yeah sure, Gabbar Singh Tax is probably the most dumb and dull slogan I have heard from a political party, even smaller parties are much better in coining way better slogans.

Article is worst kind of boot licking, these JNU types will end congress before Rahul can.
 
BlackOpsIndia said:
News was saying Ghadwali attire.
Click to expand...
You know politics aside, I am always amazed by the sheer diversity of traditional attire in our country. All of them look magnificent, all of them tell a story. It will take me a lifetime to truly see all there is in this country.
This and of course the wide variety of local cuisine, never fails to amaze me.
 
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