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ShareThe Samajwadi Party, it seems, has jumped into a time machine to the middle of the last century to search for voters.
Who else would come up with a manifesto which tries to slow down computerisation and promise to reduce the impact of English education?
Although it is desperately trying to dissemble and reassemble, it seems clear that the party appears out of touch with the times.
The naiveté is easy to see as well. The party wants to say, we feel for all you people whose jobs have gone to computers and to all you people who do not know English and therefore feel inadequate.
And for all you farmers, who have only a plough when your neighbour has a combine harvester. For you, therefore, we will cut down on computers, combine harvesters and English.
Because there is no way that we can possibly bring you up to speed with the 21st century. That would mean hard work and effort.
Of course, we, your leaders, will not go back there ourselves. We have the wherewithal; we are happy to be where we are. But we truly feel for those of you who do not have our advantages.
Therefore, we will stop everyone else from getting there either. All you frogs, whom we love dearly make no mistake, can stay happily in your ancient little wells.
Anyone who was around in the middle of the last century is familiar with this kind of political thought. For years, our leaders resisted progress because they felt the pain of the have-nots.
The haves -- to which they belonged, some with shame others unashamedly -- were to be ignored or tolerated at best, but not to be approved of. This is fine: which society manages to worship the wealthy and get away with it?
But any society worth its salt, tries to lift the have-nots so that they can at least hope to be haves. The path, since the very late 1980s, early 90s, has been to try to provide opportunity to as many as possible.
Life has changed substantially for the better across Indian small towns and middle India has got hope and more. BPO growth has been almost like a revolution, where young people have jobs and money such as they could have only dreamed of.
Of course, with at least 270 million people living at subsistence levels, there is a lot of work yet to be done. The worst indicators sadly are in the Samajwadi Party's home state of Uttar Pradesh -- education, health, infant mortality, female mortality.
Diseases like polio and cholera are re-emerging, much to the horror of the rest of the world. India's social indicators when it comes to malnutrition and mortality are worse than those of sub-Saharan Africa and it is states like UP which lag behind the most.
Therefore, it would be fair to hope, that a socially aware party like the Samajwadi would release a manifesto which promised more computer institutes, English education for all, access to farm machinery for all.
A manifesto which would give hope to all people that they too can dare to dream of a better life. Not a manifesto, which is regressive, economically unsound and certainly impractical.
When the Left came to power in West Bengal in the 1970s, one of the first things they did was to cut down on English education.
Fifteen years later all those students entered the job market and discovered that the world had moved on. A state which prides itself on its intellectual ability found that when it came to jobs in engineering, computer technology, management, government, Bengalis were out of the running. It was a harsh, bitter lesson.
A cabbie I use regularly was singing the praises of computerisation recently. In his 70s, he often sends money home to his village outside of Allahabad.
In the pre-Internet past, the bank to bank transfer could take almost a month. Now it takes minutes. Like the mobile phone, the internet, he truly believes, has changed his life. He lives in the 21st century.
About time the Samajwadi Party got there too.
