Democracy being strangled but India will emerge stronger, says Rahul Gandhi

In an online conversation with economist Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics at Cornell University and former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi addressed a range of issues this week.

India, he said, had to bite the ‘manufacturing bullet’ to ensure livelihood for 1.3 billion people. Such a large country cannot be sustained by just services industry. India must recognize that whatever was done between 1990 and 2012 was no longer working and ‘more of the same’ would not work.

Agriculture needed reforms, he said, and has the potential to generate large scale employment. But agriculture should not first be destroyed before it is rebuilt, he added and urged the government to be compassionate while dealing with agriculture.

Super powers, he quipped, liked to collide but outside their own territory. With China emerging as a super power and India being next to China and close to the US, there is apprehension that India may become the battleground as China and the US sort out their rivalry. But while China appears to have a clear, global vision, both the US and India appear too inward looking, looking at the rearview mirror and lack a global vision.

Democracy in India, he declared, is not being muzzled but strangled. He also stated:

• Before 2014, we were fighting for power. The game has changed now. What is India? It is a negotiation. We agreed on a free and fair fight for power. There is no free and fair fight now.

• But this is the best opportunity that India could have ever got to learn, to understand its weaknesses, to emerge stronger. India has to go through the fire to transform itself. There is going to be a cost. We will bear the cost. We will emerge nicer, wiser, more compassionate.

• Beyond the bluster, what the RSS is doing is reinforce the concept of caste in India. It is reorganising society to show people their places — that the Dalit has this place, the Sikhs this place, women have this place.

Edited highlights of parts of the conversation that lasted over an hour are published here:

Kaushik Basu: There is global concern about receding democracy, erosion of democracy… space for media, public debates and speech getting cramped, voices being muzzled. How do you see this?

Rahul Gandhi: It is much deeper than muzzling public debates. Democracies are sustained by institutional balance and by independent institutions. But in India today there is only one mother institution, the RSS, which has penetrated all other institutions—the judiciary, the press, the Election Commission…have all been filled up by people with a particular ideology. As a politician I can do my job if I get the protection of institutions. But take debates in Parliament, where the microphone is shut off when opposition members try to speak; the courts do not protect you…businesses are told they cannot support the opposition and the ruling party has a huge financial advantage of 10 to 1 or even 20 to 1… I always wondered how Hosni Mubarak could win with 97% of the votes polled. I understood when I was invited to Egypt to attend a political conference and found judges sitting next to me. Why were these judges attending a political conference? I understood then. In India there is today only one institution, that is the RSS—others are ‘pretend’ institutions. Yesterday, some MPs from Manipur came to see me and they were telling me that the Governor there was not doing her job and there was nothing they could do about it. In Puducherry, the lady who was there completely subverted the functioning of the government and would not allow even Bills passed…

KB: India as you know is doing very poorly as far as the economy is concerned. India which was among the top three to five countries in terms of growth for several years, is currently ranked 164th. From 2016 onwards growth has been tumbling down and in each successive years the growth has been less than the previous year—this has never happened before for four successive years.

What is of even greater concern is the malnutrition data which has been released. They show that in 13 of the 22 states covered by the study, stunting among children has grown. This increase in stunting is shocking because malnutrition tends to get reduced every year. That it has grown over a four-year period between 2015 and 2019 is terrible. Growth numbers fluctuate, go up and come down and then go up again. But malnutrition going up and it affects not the middle class or even the lower middle class but the very poor—sets you back and shows that the ‘present’ is being neglected. Why do you think this is happening?

RG: It is because of enormous concentration of wealth and capital in the hands of a few, which is bound to create tension and social problems…there will be other kinds of cost that will have to be paid later. Demonetisation and the GST were designed to destroy the small businesses. The Prime Minister shares the vision of a handful of capitalists owning all the wealth. When I speak to small shopkeepers, they tell me ‘RaastaSaaf Ho Raha Hai’ (they are clearing the obstacles). What the PM does not seem to understand is that small businesses and Agriculture generate jobs for millions.

India’s economic woes are because of a lack of demand. But the Government sees it as a supply side problem. Fine but then bolster millions of small businesses and not just the same 10 people. When millions of migrant workers hit the street after the lockdown, the Government refused to pay even for their bus fare but handed over Rs 1.5 lakh Crore, well, to the same 10 people.

I would say this has been an old idea in India that if you are poor, you are worthless. In reality they are our assets and have great potential to add to our output, which is why we must invest in them…

KB: You spoke of Agriculture. When I first read about the farm laws, I thought they were in the right direction. But I was alerted by the farmers’ protest and I decided to go back and study the laws. It was then that I understood that while the laws looked right, they would be devastating. I have taken a public position in opposing the farm laws. What is your view?

RG: To put it simply, there are three laws. The first destroys the farmers’ market. The second allows big business unlimited storage of grains and cereals and dictate prices—one of them already stores 40 per cent of the cereals produced—and the third law says that if farmers want to contest the price, they cannot go to court.

The Prime Minister wants agriculture to be more efficient. What he doesn’t understand is that the inefficient agriculture that we have still provides protection to millions of people— it works as a shock absorber to people. When migrant workers lost their livelihood after the pandemic, why did they walk back home? Because that is where they felt protected, where they would be able to eat and survive.

The trouble is that the Government is not thinking it through. Unlike earlier governments, they don’t want to negotiate. Take GST. We realized the complexities and that is why the discussions were so long-drawn. We understood that we had to be cautious and we were being warned to be careful. If we had implemented the GST it would have been a long drawn out affair but at the end of it, small businessmen would not have said, oh, my god, I cannot fill up this form.

People tell me that the idea behind GST was good but the implementation was bad. My rejoinder is what is an idea without the implementation factored in it? An idea is good only if you know how to implement it