Opinion: Focus on jobs, not Sengol

There is still no sign that the Modi govt has any comprehensive idea about job creation

By Amitava Mukherjee

Commentaries should depict the sensibilities of commentators. Perhaps India did not have a commentator of the genre of Walter Lippmann but we had people like Nikhil Chakravartty, KR Sundar Rajan, BG Verghese and TVR Shenoy who always tried to rise to the occasion. Their worldview might not have been the same but their columns spoke for reason and sensible judgements.

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So, there is every reason to raise our eyebrows when we read in a mass-circulated English daily an attempt to equate Jawaharlal Nehru with what happened recently in the newly constructed Parliament house. The context is the installation of Sengol, representation of a Chola-era emblem, in the new Parliament house. The attempt of the article is to posit an argument that Nehru had also participated in Hindu religious rites at the dawn of independence although he championed the secular character of the newly independent country. But the article completely fails to understand what the first Prime Minister of India was at his heart.

Colonial Domination?

History is replete with evidence that the Congress had a powerful Hindu conservative lobby and Nehru had all along fought a tussle with it to implement his own progressive secular ideals and programmes. To him, real temples were the steel plants, power stations and multipurpose river valley projects which were coming up under the Five Year Plans. Trying to equate Nehru with Narendra Modi’s grateful acceptance of the Sengol is outlandish.

What was the necessity to construct a new Parliament building at an astronomical cost? We do not know the reasons yet. The old Parliament building stands intact. Is there any evidence that parts of the building are falling off? No. Has it become structurally weak? The building was delivered by the British to our country in 1927. Concrete structures tend to become weak at a faster rate only in monsoon-dominated areas. Now Delhi is not such an area. So issuing of certificates, if there is any, by some ‘experts’ that the building has become structurally weak should be viewed with reservation.

Does Narendra Modi want to break free from symbols of colonial domination? Well, there are many other avenues for it – the two most important of them being independent foreign and economic policies. The old Parliament house has 543 accommodations for the Lok Sabha and 250 for the Rajya Sabha. The new one will have 770 for the Lok Sabha and 530 for the Rajya Sabha. Does the BJP government want to increase the number of MPs in both the Houses? What will be its use except wasting more money through various allowances to an increased number of MPs? What is the quality of debates in our Parliament?

Pressing Need

So, what does the country need at this crucial juncture? It is employment for our unemployed youth. It is an area where the situation is threatening. Threatening for the social stability of our country. Why? Because we have now become the most populated country on the earth. Population experts, economists and politicians, most of them unrealistic, are crowing over India’s ‘population assets’. They are going ga-ga over the virility of India’s working-age population, in comparison with China where the population is ageing. But these experts miss a vital point – the type of economy that China and India have chosen respectively.

Danger Signals

Now let us consider the danger signals. People under the age of 25 constitute more than 40 per cent of the total population of India. But nearly 45 per cent of them are without any employment. In this respect, the opinion of Kaushik Basu, a Professor of Economics at Cornell University and formerly chief economic adviser to the Government of India, is revealing. In an interview with CNN, Basu thinks that the rate of growth of youth unemployment in India was slowly rising for a long time, say 15 years, but over the past seven or eight years it has been experiencing a sharp climb. Now which government is in power for the past seven or eight years? It is the BJP government.

The unemployment rate is nearly 8 per cent with urban unemployment often reaching a higher scale. IMF projection is that the Indian economy will grow by 6 per cent this year. Even if it comes about, the country will not benefit. We may witness a further concentration of wealth in only a few hands. It would be wrong to hold only Narendra Modi and the BJP responsible for it. The process was first started by the Congress under PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh together. Can the present-day Congress claim that its economic policy is different from that of the BJP to any significant extent?

Given the type of economy that India is following under the BJP dispensation, it will be impossible to rein in the growth of unemployment. There is still no sign that the Narendra Modi-led government has any comprehensive idea about job creation. One aspect is certainly healthy – the focus is still on domestic markets rather than export promotion. But it demands an increase in domestic purchasing power. And to carry it to a successful finale, contributions of the manufacturing and the agricultural sectors to the gross domestic product will have to be vastly expanded because it is here that jobs are created.

But India is now dominated by the service sector. It creates only white-collar jobs bringing in its wake many unhealthy social and familial developments. For creating more employment in the manufacturing and agriculture, stability in society is necessary. But has India a stable society now?

Politicians have a responsibility to answer this question.