FOCUS POLITICS Harish Gupta
In a land teeming with people of dubious literacy rate, being dubbed anti-farmer is naturally an emotive issue
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It seems Rahul’s advisers have misguided him on two counts: first, they’ve blinded him to the cosy nexus that existed between the corporate sector and the UPA. Besides, Rahul is being misled on the true objective of the proposed Land Act amendment
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In one of Winston Churchill’s oft-cited quotes about the state of the war in 1942, he said it was neither the end of the war nor even the beginning of the end, but it could be the “end of the beginning”. The epithet can well fit the progress of the Narendra Modi government, since May 26 last, when the Prime Minister was sworn in amid great pomp.
The Opposition parties are trying to gang up against him– the least powerful of them like Lalu Prasad Yadav of the RJD being the most active. Even Modi’s NDA partners like SAD and Shiv Sena are restless with the ‘big brother’ for their own reasons. There are voices of dissent even from within the BJP, with someone of the stature of Arun Shourie, disinvestment minister in the Vajpayee cabinet, accusing Modi, finance minister Arun Jaitley and party chief Amit Shah of being the trimurti who have grabbed all the powers. Confidence of investors, particularly of the foreign institutional ones in the stock market, is at its lowest ebb. So is that of the common man who expected Modi to achieve a miracle at the drop of a hat.
This scenario is putting the media in two minds about retaining Modi on the front page or prime time. Since there aren’t too many faces in the Opposition to choose from, the spotlight is naturally shifting to Rahul Gandhi, the 44-year-old vice president of the Congress party who will probably become its leader sometime this year. Rahul, sensing something in the air, is bubbling with smart one-liners. He has called the Modi government suit boot ka sarkar and is unfazed by Jaitley reminding him of his deficit of sooj boojh. Instead, he tends to get personal with the Prime Minister, taunting him for his frequent foreign tours. Rahul thinks he has already aced Modi on the government’s proposed amendment to the UPA’s 2013 Land Acquisition Act –scuttling which is now the main mission of the Congress and some die-hard anti-Modi elements in the Opposition.
It seems Rahul’s advisers have misguided him on two counts: first, they’ve blinded him to the cosy nexus that existed between the corporate sector and the UPA. Besides, Rahul is being misled on the true objective of the proposed Land Act amendment.
In a land teeming with people of dubious literacy rate, being dubbed anti-farmer is naturally an emotive issue. But Modi’s amendments are in fact pro-farmer if one has the patience to read the fine print — for instance, in the ‘consent clause’. The UPA law set a 70 per cent consent threshold for PPP projects and 80 per cent for projects in the private sector. But it sparked off huge problems in practically every state-sponsored development work, like rural infrastructure (road and electrification) and affected projects related to national security, like building strategic roads and airports.
It seems, in retrospect, that the UPA was too much in a hurry to genuinely understand that “consent”, in the context of land acquisition, meant the landowner becoming a pawn in the hand of the land shark who could grab the land in advance and then push up the price of his “consent” to a point that makes the project least cost-effective. Modi spoke about these problems in his monthly radio speech, Man ki Baat, and also in his Lok Sabha speech in February following the Motion of Thanks to the President for his address. They fell on deaf ears.
In its amendment, the NDA government has removed the provision for consent for projects concerning national security, rural infrastructure, affordable housing for the poor, industrial corridors, and social infrastructure like schools and hospitals. There is no need for consent also for PPP projects on land owned by government. Besides, there are 13 different utilities, ranging from Railways to nuclear power plants, for which land can be acquired without landowners’ consent, as the UPA law also provided for. But the big difference is that the amended Land Act promises as much as four times the market rate as compensation in such cases. It is a compensation which is not only just; hardly any landowner will prefer holding on to his plot in preference to a bounty of this size.
A line of thinking is that it would do well for Rahul Gandhi to take a closer look at the real problem of India’s agriculture. It is not about farmers losing their land but their utter failure to put it to use. At 60.3 per cent of total land under cultivation, India has in no way got its farmland more squeezed up than countries like Indonesia (31.2 per cent) or Vietnam (35 per cent). But India’s agriculture is partially pre-modern. Farm mechanization that is now gathering pace in India is creating armies of jobless “stakeholders” who are hardly employable in non-farm sectors.
They are also the pivot of Opposition politics on land acquisition. It is because of their unproductive, and unreasonable, continuance in the agrarian economy that India’s per worker value addition (constant 2005 US dollar) is a lowly 688, against 49,723 in Australia and 5,564 in Brazil. In most of the past 67 years since Independence, the governments of the day failed to make agriculture even as productive as that of Bangladesh, which grows 4,357kg of cereals per hectare, against India’s 2,962kg. The “collapse of agriculture”, about which some Opposition MPs are making a lot of noise, should also note that the collapse began ages ago, by not providing skills and education to farmers for transition to industry, and by keeping the terms of trade negative for the cultivator.
Going by the record of his first year in office, Modi does not appear to be the type to lose his marbles in the middle of the innings — after the “end of the beginning”. He is committed to bring about systemic changes, like the amended Land Act and the proposed GST. If Rahul wants to replace him in 2019, he should begin by grappling with more fundamental issues, like creating an exit route for farmers much like China did in the 80’s and 90’s. Instead, he’s practising the art of jibes and pulling out of his family armoury some of the rusty 20th Century weapons of populism.