New Delhi: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders accuse the Congress of promising in its manifesto that it will redistribute resources in the country and give them to Muslims, specifically mentioning land, gold and women’s mangalsutras, the Congress has accused the saffron party of distracting and communalising voters.
In an interview with The Wire, Amitabh Dubey, a member of the Congress’s manifesto committee, said that the document does not talk about redistribution.
“We are very clear about what we mean. The prime minister’s false claims are, in our mind, the ravings of a panicky mind who has seen the inevitable, which is an election defeat, and is trying to throw distraction bombs everywhere,” he said.
“But we are very clear. [The] first thing the manifesto talks about is that inequality is a huge problem in the country. It is a global problem, but in India, it is particularly acute.
“As the data shows, as Thomas Piketty and his co-authors have shown this empirically, the top 1% has 40% of the wealth of the country. The level of inequality has soared to higher levels than the British Raj, which is quite an indictment of the Modi government and its policies.”
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Dubey said that the Congress manifesto lists a set of proposals to address inequality, including providing Rs 1 lakh per year to poor women, Rs 400 in wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, apprenticeship programmes, filling 30 lakh Union government vacancies, providing a legal guarantee for minimum support prices as well as a socio-economic caste census.
“So this is a package to address the inequalities that have gone up to record levels under the Modi government. All these proposals are for all segments of society and are not aimed at minorities or SC/ST/OBCs specifically, but to all poor people,” he said.
Dubey said the proposals also seek to address caste discrimination but do not talk about the redistribution of property.
“There is no redistribution of property. It is about where the resources go, and government land is a part of that. We are not taking land away from anyone,” he said, adding that government land has been distributed to the underprivileged in the past.
“It is not about redistribution of anyone’s property, it is about how government money is spent and how these groups are represented,” he said.
While the BJP has spun a communal narrative by referring to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s 2006 speech at the national defence council, where he spoke about minorities and particularly Muslims having the first claim to India’s resources, Dubey said that the speech is available for everyone to see and read.
“Mr Modi’s policies have been an attack on everyone. He is bringing in the religious aspect [and] he is trying to divide the poor on religious grounds,” Dubey said, adding that the poor “understand … that they are all being discriminated against, [that] the OBCs are the largest section of the poor, [and] that his policies are against SCs/STs/OBCs, economically weaker sections and minorities.”
“Which brings me to the point that Dr Manmohan Singh had made. It is very clear, everyone can watch the speech or read the transcript, where he said that the first claim of resources should go to the disadvantaged, which is the SCs/STs/OBCs [and] minorities. This is clearly a distortion,” he said.
Dubey said that the BJP’s attempt to equate the manifesto’s promises by alleging that the Congress wants to run the government by “Sharia law” and allow the slaughter of cows, and equating the document to that of the Muslim League, shows that the Modi government is “desperate” to cling to power.
“There are clearly two things that are going on. One is, our feedback, the feedback of many parties, and I am sure the feedback for the BJP, is that all of their gambits in the last few months have failed to convert into votes,” he said.
“Their vote share is dropping and they will go below 180 seats and the opposition will come up. So they are trying to distract from inflation and unemployment, which have come up in the elections as the two main issues that voters care about.
“And the other thing that has happened is that the turnout has dropped sharply. So what is probably happening in our view is that their base is not voting.
“So perhaps to whip up their base and convince them to think about religious issues and not economic issues, they are engaging in this rhetoric. It has clearly not worked in the first two rounds, we don’t expect it to work in the coming rounds.
This government is on its way out and these are the last desperate attempts on its way out to cling to power,” he said.
