Encourage humanities to restore Gujarat's pride
The resounding victory of BJP and hindutva hardliner Narendra Modi in the Gujarat state legislative elections which concluded on December 24, reflects poorly on the value premises and judgement of the people of this western seaboard state (pop.50 million), which it is difficult to believe gave birth to and nurtured Mahatma Gandhi, the first and original champion of Muslims and other minorities. Since then the people of Gujarat have travelled a long way down the road to perdition and self-destruction by voting- in incumbent chief minister Narendra Modi — an individual who by common consensus has the blood of an estimated 2,500 Muslim minority citizens massacred in the pogroms of 2002 in the state — on his hands. Democratic convention and propriety demand that the verdict of the electorate is respected. Yet there’s nothing improper in ruing the verdict of a misguided and gullible electorate, which given its rich political legacy should have known better than to vote-in a rank and unrepentant communalist who seems determined to polarise Gujarati society along caste and religious lines which is likely to attract the attention of at least some of the ubiquitous Muslim terrorist organisations across the country. This could result in a huge setback to Gujarat’s much-lauded rates of economic and industrial growth.
Many arguments have been advanced in the media and academia to explain why the ‘moditva’ brand of politics — a combination of economic development rhetoric and regressive Hindu chauvinism — swept the electorate off its feet. Among them: the failure of the Congress to nominate a chief ministerial candidate in an obviously presidential style election; the Congress leadership’s subscription to ‘soft hindutva’ and induction of communally tainted BJP rebels which diluted its secular credentials, and its neglect of economic development issues.
Yet perhaps the prime cause of the coarsening of the traditionally refined and moderate Gujarat electorate is the decline of the state’s education system, and in particular the general neglect of the humanities. Overweening emphasis on vulgar commerce and narrow technical education has produced a greedy new generation aggressively ignorant of concepts such as equity, justice and respect for minority cultures. This is an educational blindspot which needs urgent correction to put this state of civil and enterprising people back on the rails.
Meanwhile having committed a massive electoral blunder, the onus is now not only on the opposition Congress party but on the entire electorate, to ensure that the new government of Gujarat adheres to the rule of law. Because of continuous neglect of humanities education, perhaps the people of the state have forgotten that an electoral victory doesn’t legitimise criminal and unconstitutional governance. Having committed the error of succumbing to the divisive bigotry of Narendra Modi, they need to be strictly vigilant to ensure that the proud liberal legacy of Mahatma Gandhi which has been gravely damaged during the past five years, is not cremated during the next five.
The case for slashing transport fuel prices
With the price of crude oil hovering near the $100 per barrel mark for the past three months and showing no signs of falling in the near future, conventional wisdom dictates that further increases in energy prices are inevitable.
However with petrol and diesel prices at the pump ruling at Rs.52 and Rs.35.26 in Bangalore and thereabouts across the country — the highest worldwide if related to national income per capita — it’s high time conventional wisdom relating to pricing of petroleum products is challenged. As any economist worth his salt will confirm, indirect, non-discriminatory taxes such as excise duties and sales tax (including value added tax) on essential commodities are regressive, as their burden falls most heavily upon the poorest and most economically vulnerable members of society by way of general price inflation.
Although government statistical factories continuously churn out data to reassure the gullible public that inflation within the Indian economy is well under control, the plain truth is that because of sky-high petrol and diesel prices, prevailing costs of personal and goods transportation — particularly of agricultural produce — are a crushing burden upon the great majority of the population. In the absence of any worthwhile research on the subject of persistently widespread poverty in rural India despite the economy racheting up unprecedented 9 percent per year rates of GDP growth, it is eminently plausible that vertiginous transport costs are a major factor behind galloping rural indebtedness, and the farmer suicide pandemic sweeping India’s neglected rural hinterland.
In this context it is pertinent to note that the price of petrol/diesel in the United States (annual per capita income: $41,890 ppp cf. India’s $3,452) is the equivalent of Rs.26.34 per litre. The plain, unpublicised truth is that the Central and state governments derive a massive annual revenue of Rs.135,000 crore by way of regressive ad valorem taxation of motor fuels. Nor is it a secret that most of the tax revenue thus collected through regressive taxation of transportation fuels is misspent by government on heavy establishment expenses, with the Central and most state governments running huge revenue deficits.
Quite clearly the more rational option would be to slash excise, customs and sales tax imposts to reduce the retail price of petrol to below Rs.40 and diesel to Rs.25. Although this would reduce the petroleum fuels revenue of the Central and state governments by 20 percent — a sacrifice of Rs.27,000 crore per year — most of the revenue loss can be recovered by way of larger direct tax receipts as peoples’ incomes rise, and also by way of higher indirect tax collections from higher retail offtake countrywide. In short, what government would lose on the swings it can recover on the roundabouts.
But although progressive and equitable, this is the hard way to raise resources. Much easier to collect taxes directly from the handful of crude oil importers, refineries and retailers — the impact of administrative convenience upon the poor at the bottom of the country’s social pyramid be damned.