Looting the vote bank

JOBS, unfortunately, are flexible. In a perfect world I would take just one year off and be a farmer on the eve of a P.C. Chidambaram election budget -- after having taken good care to avoid committing suicide the moment I became a son of the soil. We poor farmers can never quite escape the cycle of famine and flood, can we? After years of drought, it never rains but pours.
Never mind that Finance Minister Chidambaram has not clarified how precisely he is going to find the money to pay for the waiver of Rs. 60,000 in what are mostly bad debts; he wants us to leave it to his intelligence, and he is undoubtedly an intelligent man.
We humble farmers are grateful for whatever comes our way. Never mind that the last finance minister to try something like this, V.P.Singh, who did this on a much smaller scale, left the banking industry in disarray. Who cares? Failed banks will only hurt the rich man's economy.
The Congress formula for a victory in a general election is rather clever. The first ploy is to create the conditions for a plague and take credit for a miracle cure. The second line of private thought is even more cynical. If this ruse works, then the Congress can laugh all the way to the vote bank in October and tax us all next February till our pips squeak. And if the ruse does not work, it will be some other government's headache.
In the 19th century, American hustlers used to peddle "snake oil" at fairs to gullible fellow countrymen. This Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh-Chidambaram loan waiver is the biggest snake-oil sale in the history of finance.
Loan waivers have been tried before, but they were comparatively modest. This one is a circus of magnificent proportions. It is not the audacity of hope, but the audacity of recklessness. Only when you are certain that you have nothing to lose do you gamble everything on an IOU. Duryodhana tried it in the Mahabharata. The results were not particularly happy.
Make no mistake about it; you and I and every Indian is going to pay for this waiver, unless the government chooses to print money and further encourage inflation. Inflation is heating now and it could be a raging fever in six months.
This column has been arguing for some time that a general election will be held this year. This budget is confirmation that the date will be around October. The government might have wanted to cash in quickly, and hold a May election, but that is not feasible for logistical reasons. The Election Commission needs time. Summer heat and monsoon rains make elections untenable till October.
To stretch the timetable beyond October would be foolish. Already, prices of essential goods are leaping up. A person I met this week in Jamshedpur put the matter simply. A hundred rupees used to fill much of a plastic bag with vegetables a year ago; today half the bag is empty.
Inflation, spurred by rising oil prices and disappearing food stocks, is hitting people around the globe. America is talking of the four-dollar gas price. Prices are rising at 15% in the Middle East. Food surplus countries are curbing exports.
The Congress has begun to wind down the election clock. PCC posts have been filled in Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. Rahul Gandhi has made a PR call on the prime minister, "demanding" jobs for the rural poor; when Rahul Gandhi makes a "demand" can elections be far behind?
He is starting a nationwide tour that will begin in Orissa. Rahul Gandhi will not waste his time running around the country unless this is the first salvo of an election campaign.
Congressmen, and women, will know whom to salute if they do well in October. If they don't do well, they can always blame the weather.
The second slogan of the party will be electricity to every village -- through the famous nuclear deal with the United States. They will go ahead with the deal by April, and the Left can go hang itself by that time.
The real allies of the Congress outside government are no longer the MPs of the Left, but the Senators of America and the bureaucrats of the Bush administration. They will pass the deal by July, and the Great Electricity Con will begin, with Doordarshan naturally blaring the trumpets loudest.
The government will make every effort to hide the truth, that electricity has actually very little to do with the deal. After spending more than a hundred billion dollars at a minimum, there will be a maximum of four percent growth in energy output by 2020 -- that is another thirteen years later.
No one will mention that this electricity will be at twice the price of other forms of power. Why disturb the voter with facts?
The inconvenient truth is that the finance minister is not taking money for the loan waiver from his personal pocket. He is doing so from the public pocket, which the Congress has decided to pick. India's banks have been handed over to the Vote Bank.
A populist budget is no substitute for good governance.

M.J. Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.