A political journey of two and a half decades from the rights-centric politics of the welfare state to delivery or beneficiary politics.
The twenty-first century began with an ominous apprehension. Y2K (ie year two thousand) may now come to mind for many people after straining their brains a lot. Generations known as Millennials, Gen Z or similar names may be surprised to hear this. It seemed like fiction to them, but the fear was real. The computing algorithm used to record only the last two digits of the year (for example, 99 of 1999), in such a case, if the next year was recorded as 00, everything would have gone wrong, the previous one would have been lost. Recovered with great difficulty. Four digits of the year were entered from the beginning, but as the first quarter of the twenty-first century passed, technology changed at such a fast pace that it seems to be from the times of Baba Adam. Smartphones, social media and now we are faced with the issue of pros and cons, dangers and risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Stephen Hawking, the great scientist of his time, has been deeply warned that AI can destroy human civilization. The leap of technology is having a deep impact on our life, ethos, lifestyle, culture, business, profession, politics, economy.
The almost complete dominance of big corporates over technology is giving rise to a new type of system. It is becoming such a means of capturing politics and power across the world that the meaning of democracy is also changing. Recently, Labor leader Bernie Sanders, associated with the Democrat Party in America, said, today in my opinion, oligarchy or crony capitalism or crony capitalism is the biggest issue in America and around the world. A very small group of billionaires controls the global economy. They are rapidly taking over administration and politics. Five billion people have become poor worldwide since 2020, while the wealth of the world’s five biggest billionaires more than doubled at the rate of $14 billion per hour. The wealth of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has increased by $ 120 billion only after the results of the US elections. The wealth of Jeff Bezos, the second richest person, increased by $ 67 billion in a month. They spend heavily in elections to protect their property. Elon Musk alone spent $277 million in the election of Donald Trump. This is no longer democracy. This is the rule of a small group, oligarchy.
Kejriwal with Anna
The beginning of this century in our country and the political events in its background are witness to how the dominance of corporates increased in politics and the game of money power increased in parliamentary politics. In fact, in 1991 when Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, on the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), decided to turn the country’s economy towards market-oriented and privatization, even before that, during the Rajiv Gandhi era, his first Finance Minister V.P. Singh had laid the foundation of the new economic policy. Possibly, it was the wind of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the mid-eighties that led to the abandonment of the welfare state in the West. However, the first major step to get rid of the welfare state system here was taken in 1999 during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government by constituting the Ambani-Birla Committee under the leadership of Kumar Mangalam Birla for the privatization of education. This was the first committee in the world formed for so-called education reform in which there was not a single educationist.
In fact, initially the BJP and the Sangh Parivar along with the Left parties and other opposition groups were also opposed to the market-oriented economy, of which the Swadeshi Jagran Manch was the most vocal. But in 1996, when the 13-day-long government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee fell, a strategy was prepared to postpone its original agenda for alliance with other parties and to get the support of big companies. It was said that our government will take rapid steps towards economic reforms. To facilitate privatization, a Ministry of Disinvestment was even created. But in 2004, the UPA government tried to strike a balance, but the importance of money power continued to increase in parliamentary politics. Almost all parties, even the Left parties, had accepted that there was no alternative to foreign and private investment.
Under this economic philosophy of lack of options, Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s Left Front government in West Bengal got stuck in acquiring land for Tata family’s Nano car in Singur and for foreign investment in Nandigram. Such a movement arose there that in 2012, not only did the Left Front lose its 34-year rule, but its support base continued to erode. It is noteworthy that as soon as the Tata family moved out of Singur, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi offered land in Anand almost free of cost. In this way the noise of Gujarat model started increasing. On the other hand, during the second term of the UPA government at the Centre, due to the delay in approval of private sector projects due to the Land Acquisition Amendment and the new Forest Act, the narrative began to develop that the Central Government is suffering from policy paralysis. Then, many stories of corruption started making headlines.
On the other hand, many movements were also giving a different edge to politics. In the 1980s, there were movements in different parts of the country against big polluting projects and displacement caused by big dams, while some new movements were opened against the acquisition of land and forest areas. Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh and Niyamgiri Mountain Bachao Andolan in Odisha were prominent. The agitation in Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh was for land acquisition and fair compensation for Mayawati’s Yamuna Expressway. The movement in the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha was of tribals against Vedanta’s bauxite mining. Similar movements were taking place in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu with different demands and forms. These may have had an impact on the policies of the UPA government.
Among these movements, Anna’s movement against corruption and for Janlokpal had the widest impact. These movements were an indication that the stream of economic policy could not be one that would expand without accountability to stray capital. Apart from a brief pause, these movements did not make much difference to the mainstream of politics. The Aam Aadmi Party, which emerged from the Anna movement, also started saying that it had no ideology. He considered delivery politics to be the most important. It developed a different version of the rights-based welfare policies of the UPA government.
In the later period, in the last decade, this perhaps gave birth to beneficiary politics, which as a rule uses welfare schemes not as a right of the people but as a benefit for its own power. Obviously, in such a situation, the current parliamentary politics is moving towards oligarchy or dominance of a handful of people here too. In this political change, we can see 25 of the changes in technology and social media that have played an important role in changing our thinking along with our lives. It remains to be seen where the next year and the next 25 years will take our politics and power system.
