‘Tughlaqi’ whim called Samajwadi Party manifesto!

In the 14th century, India saw one of the crankiest rulers of all times - Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq. In his 26-year rule, he shifted capitals, changed coins, and did a host of other actions, which brought down his empire. So legendary was his short-sightedness and stupidity, it led to the invention of the word 'Tughlaqi' - often used in North India to denote ideas which are brain dead. Six centuries later, what the Samajwadi Party (SP) has doled out as its election promises, is, well almost, 'Tughlaqi'.

All SP's promises seem to have been flocked randomly from air without any ground work for implementation. For once, the party promises a ban on computers in an economy, where a fifth of the GDP comes from IT and telecom industry and almost two-fifths of growth in previous few years directly originates from IT-Telecom industry.

If this is not a typographical error, SP would be the death knell for everything we are so proud of - Chandrayan, our missile program, BPO, IT industry, and all the governance improvement schemes.  In fact, without IT, BPO, and telecom industry, India will soon be back to the 1970s era of growth rates at 3-3.5 per cent.

The argument of SP is to promote employment of manual labour. With this promise implemented, we will soon be back to the medieval ages of astrology and our military would soon be back to catapults and arrows - surely that would generate huge employment! The direct employment in the modern service sector is close to a quarter of the working population and the rate of increase has been approximately 18% over previous few years.

With such promises, we wonder if even the most illiterate and rustic of the electorates can be impressed. SP makes it clear that we "don't need English!" All work should be done in vernacular languages, which in effect means creating at least 15 different communication media across India without any common language.

Confusion? 'Samajwad' doesn't care! So you better embrace for a rough landing, if your child studies in some English medium school, for Uncle Samajwadi won't let you spoil the cultural roots of your offspring. However appreciable is the concern for the vernacular language, the bigger question is - is our culture so weak that it cannot absorb English language?

Next on the crosshair - the stock exchange. We will let statistics do the speaking here. In 2007-08, NSE alone raised Rs124 billion for Indian companies, which is roughly four times the entire budgetary allocation for the education sector! This in turn would lead to the employment of Indian youth, an aspect SP seems to have overlooked.

In terms of employment, SP dishes out a unique recipe to the Indian youth - first clip the wings, by banning computer, English and bringing down stock exchanges and then encourage a free flight! And of course, if you can't fly and remain unemployed given your limited skills and opportunities, then SP will feed you peanuts for free - 500 rupees a month as unemployment allowance!

While SP is staunchly against the 'mall culture', it seems to have learnt the most important election tune from malls only - freebies. So without the slightest hint of where and how they will ever manage the funds for, SP makes a blanket promise for free rice, wage, education, loan, electricity... and many more.

Very little has been said about the pertinent issue of terror and corruption - SP has simply left a black hole when it comes to such critical discussions. A mere promise to get to the roots of terror is only rhetorical - India needs more from its political machinery.

The only silver lining in this storm of big words and little action is the fact that SP has identified the interests of agricultural sector as paramount and tried to address the concerns of farmers through a variety of schemes.

SP seems to have learnt something from Barack Obama too - regulate CEO salaries. Perhaps even before SP starts with its drive to regulate the pay checks, it needs to introspect. We just came across this startling fact from a recent release by Election Watch - the average asset of SP candidates stands at over Rs1 crore! Samajwad just got expensive.