It has been nearly three months since the Congress party posted an impressive victory in Karnataka. However, ironically, it has not had a single happy headline during this period. The Siddaramaiah government has already faced charges of corruption and nepotism. Public utterances of leaders would also push one to believe that there is dissidence brewing in the party’s ranks. The government has not just witnessed a stormy budget session but also experienced an unusually angry legislature party meeting recently.
All of this may be dismissed as routine politics. Some of it may have been created by an aggressive Opposition and an unfriendly press, but not all problems of the government fall under this cynical umbrella. The worries about its financial commitments are very real, and some feel these may drift into something dangerous.
Raising money to fund the guarantees (five in all) that Congress announced rather unthinkingly during the Assembly poll campaign has become a burdensome task. In the government’s own estimation, it needs over ₹52,000 crore annually to fulfil the guarantees, but the budget has offered few clues as to how this would be generated. The state’s finance audit report for the year ending March 2022 further pushes us to believe that it is the gloomy resource situation that has wiped the smile off a new government, which would have otherwise gone around like an exuberant groom.
The government’s fellow travellers may try to convince us through their opinion pieces that welfare measures initially cause resource hiccups but eventually settle down well. But the more basic question is: Are these guarantees really “welfare” in the classical sense? At least four of the five schemes cover a flat, universal beneficiary audience and do not employ the idea of positive discrimination. The schemes promise bus travel for all women; free units of electricity for all households; unemployment doles for all, and a kind of inflation allowance for all women. In other words, they do not target the disadvantaged specifically, but are meant for everybody no matter what their social and economic status really is. The additional worry is these are not a one-time dispersal but a recurring expense.
The idea of social justice or welfare is typically meant to resolve socio-economic and educational imbalances and historical injustices, but here they may have been reduced to a poll trick. When two groups at opposite ends of the economic and social spectrum are given equal advantages, the idea of social justice or welfare gets truncated. Technically, the weaker sections are enabled, but theoretically, a status quo persists as disparity is perpetuated.
Further, the welfare idea gets trampled when the government cuts budgetary allocations to sectors like education, health, water resources, agriculture and rural development to fund the five guarantees. If funds to these basic sectors that take care of a larger common good and fulfil the not-so-visible needs are cut, what will the short- and long-term impacts be? Has the concept of guarantees now managed to subvert our very idea of welfare, social justice and development?
Sample this: In its desperation to raise money for the guarantees, the state government has set a staggering new target for the excise department—to generate ₹6000 crore of additional revenue in the current financial year. To achieve this new target, people should consume more liquor, not just pay extra for what they consume. While the government puts more money in the hands of individuals, it also indirectly encourages the consumption of liquor. What would this contradiction amount to in welfare terms? What is the moral imperative of a government?
Similarly, free bus rides to all women under the Shakti scheme has resulted in them undertaking more pilgrimages across the state, according to multiple reports. If revenues of temples controlled by private trusts go up, will that be shared with the government to take up more development works? Forget what religious tourism does to the ideological intent of an avowedly secular government. That is anyway too speculative an assessment. But for the record, Veerendra Heggade, the Dharamadikari of Dharmastala, recently wrote to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to tell him how happy the women arriving in Dharmastala were about the free bus travel scheme. Heggade was nominated to the Rajya Sabha a year ago by the BJP government. Is aiding religious tourism, consciously or unconsciously, part of the welfare imagination?
Meanwhile, the government postponed by two years a proposal to upgrade 361 high schools to composite pre-university colleges for lack of funds. In another circular, it cut spending on school uniforms by saying it will provide the cloth, while tailoring charges have to be borne by beneficiary parents. In another context, it said if children need quality shoes, donors have to be identified. These may look like petty, silly examples, but they nevertheless hold a mirror to a welfare state quietly washing its hands of its core duties, only to fund unreasonable poll promises.
Even if one wishes to consider a larger picture, then read this with regard to the dole of ₹2,000 every month to the women heads of families under the Gruha Lakshmi guarantee scheme. The finance department wrote in June 2023: “Taking up the scheme will create huge recurring liability and will entail significantly large reductions in existing budgetary provisions across all the heads of accounts and departments, both under revenue and capital heads. Further the state would be pushed towards a huge revenue deficit thereby violating the Karnataka Fiscal Responsibility Act.” It also said that if the scheme was extended to just BPL families, the annual expense would still be ₹31,423 crore and it was not possible to provide such enormous funds each financial year.
This observation of the finance department raises a question mark over the longevity of these schemes. In another gloomy forecast for welfare, it was openly declared that there were no development funds to be offered to legislators because the poll guarantees had to be met. Therefore, the question remains: Can guarantees ever be equated with welfare? Or are they Congress’ populist response to the Hindutva populism of the BJP? Interestingly, a gram panchayat member has petitioned the Karnataka High Court, calling guarantees as bribes offered to voters. In an election setting, there can of course be both economic and emotional bribes offered in the guise of euphemistic coinages.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior Journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi