NDA’s Rs 62,000 Cr poll bonanza blunts Opposition's ‘vote chori’ plank

Nothing quite loosens the government’s purse strings like an impending election, especially one that is widely touted to be a close contest. Repeatedly shunned over its long-standing demand for a special economic package despite its ‘double-engine’ NDA government, poll-bound Bihar is now rolling in a largesse which, to steal that famous Pepsi tagline of nearly two decades ago, has ‘something for everyone’; except, of course, the state’s Opposition.

On Saturday (October 4), Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a smorgasbord of schemes, collectively worth over Rs 62,000 crore, for the country’s youth. What was inescapable was the prominence – both in rhetoric and targeted schemes – that poll-bound Bihar received.

Modi offers ‘something for everyone’

From the revamped Mukhyamantri Nishchay Svyam Sahayata Bhatta Yojana, promising an estimated five lakh Bihari youth a monthly allowance of Rs 1,000 each for two years, to a credit card scheme providing interest-free education loans of up to Rs 4 lakh and from the inauguration of Karpoori Thakur Skill University to the promise of new ITIs and Kendriya Vidyalayas in the state, Saturday’s event brought yet another windfall gain for the eastern state where elections are due in just over a month.

Modi’s latest round of ‘revdi’ distribution comes days after he and chief minister Nitish Kumar “gave away” Rs 10,000 each to nearly 75 lakh women in Bihar as the first tranche of Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana.

Modi’s latest round of ‘revdi’ (freebies) distribution – or should it be ‘anarsa’ distribution, considering it’s a pre-Diwali bonanza for Bihar – comes days after he and chief minister Nitish Kumar “gave away” Rs 10,000 each to nearly 75 lakh women in Bihar as the first tranche of the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana.

These sops were in addition to the wide range of “welfare measures” – increased pensions for senior citizens, differently-abled and widows, a larger reservation pie for women in government jobs, subsidised electricity, et al – that Nitish unveiled at periodic intervals over the past four months as accoutrements of the NDA’s pre-poll campaign.

Also read: Why is Nitish, known for no-tolerance policy, mum on graft charges against Bihar ministers

RJD, the usual punching bag

While Saturday’s event was to launch the centrally-sponsored PM-SETU (Pradhan Mantri Skilling and Employability Transformation through Upgraded ITIs), which would have a national footprint, it was Bihar that dominated the show. With the Election Commission (EC) expected to announce the schedule for the Bihar Assembly polls early next week, Modi expectedly turned the event into a poll campaign, hitting out at Lalu Yadav’s RJD and the Congress party – key constituents of the Opposition’s multi-party Grand Alliance.

Claiming that the state’s NDA government under Nitish had, over the past 20 years of its reign, put Bihar’s “broken (education) system back on track”, the prime minister placed the entire blame for the state’s crisis of out-migration and lack of education infrastructure on the “RJD’s misgovernance” between 1990 and 2005.

For the Grand Alliance, Modi’s predictable tirade was on expected lines. Harking back to the RJD’s still controversial though long past 15-year-rule to gloss over failures of the NDA’s two decades in power has been a constant fixture of both Modi and Nitish’s poll campaigns.

Tough fight in ‘revdi politics’

What troubles the Opposition, instead, is that the considerable financial doles and schemes Modi and Nitish have been dishing out seek to systematically win over different blocs of voters that the Grand Alliance has been assiduously reaching out to in their hope of an electoral triumph.

If RJD’s Tejaswhi Yadav had hoped that his promise of a monthly financial assistance of Rs 2,500 under the Mai Behan Maan Yojana would endear women voters to the Grand Alliance, Modi and Nitish stormed in with an ‘advance payment’ of Rs 10,000 under the Mahila Rozgar Yojana along with the promise of another Rs 1.90 lakh to be disbursed to beneficiaries after six months.

Also read: Bihar polls: Modi's Rs 10,000 cash dole rattles Grand Alliance's momentum

When the Grand Alliance promised increased pensions to win over the elderly, the widowed, and the differently-abled, Nitish blunted it by offering the same pre-election. Now, the latest round of bounty seeks to curry for the ruling NDA coalition support of the youth, a segment Tejashwi and his allies have been courting with promises of jobs, increased reservation for those of Bihari domicile to curb out-migration, and sundry other promises.

Even more important, though unstated, is that a bulk of the beneficiaries of Modi and Nitish’s “gifts” are expected to be, by their sheer percentage in Bihar’s population, the Dalits, those burdened by poverty, and the crucial electoral bloc of extremely backward classes (EBCs). The Grand Alliance’s hopes of a poll victory are riding on each of these segments.

Why NDA has the edge

But then, the Grand Alliance, henpecked by limitations of sitting in the opposition, can only offer promises. The NDA, on the other hand, is armed with the twin advantage of being in power and an EC overlooking what clearly is a pre-poll allurement by means hardly kosher. As such, what the Grand Alliance can only propose, the ruling NDA can deliver post haste.

Tejashwi has dared NDA to explain to Bihar’s electorate how it plans to roll out all its promised schemes after the elections, considering that, per his estimation, “the schemes collectively would require an allocation of Rs 7 lakh crore while the state can’t even meet its current requirement of Rs 1 lakh crore”.

It is unsurprising then that the Opposition has been crying foul over being denied a level-playing field; and accusing the double-engine government of “bribing” voters while the EC turns a Nelson’s Eye. Tejashwi has dared the NDA leadership to explain to Bihar’s electorate how it plans to roll out all its promised schemes after the elections, considering that, per his estimation, “the schemes collectively would require an allocation of Rs 7 lakh crore while the state can’t even meet its current requirement of Rs 1 lakh crore”.

Tejashwi’s question may be justified, but then the same could be asked of him and the Grand Alliance, given that they too have made promises which would require Bihar’s treasury to shell out way more than its depleted coffers can afford.

Also read: Nitish Kumar’s ‘Dus Hazaar’ cash transfer frenzy sweeps Bihar ahead of elections

The Congress’s demand to the EC, expressed in a letter dispatched by the party’s state leadership to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar within hours of Modi’s Saturday event, is that “direct benefit transfers (DBT) should be suspended during the election period”. This, however, cuts no ice as the ruling NDA’s pre-poll bonanza already carries the caveat that the remainder of the bounty would be disbursed after polls, provided voters give the coalition another term in power. More importantly, it’s a pitch the Congress can’t quite cry hoarse about as doing so would be met with the NDA’s obvious riposte about the Grand Alliance opposing welfare measures for Bihar.

Oppn falls back on ‘vote chori’ plank

The pickle that the Opposition finds itself in then nudges it back to its other key poll plank – ‘vote chori’ (vote theft) through the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls, the ‘final’ version of which was uploaded by the EC on September 30.

The final electoral rolls have been pruned down from a pre-SIR voter count of 7.89 crore to a post-SIR number of 7.42 crore. These figures, however, are hardly as straightforward as they may seem. The EC is yet to clarify whether the final rolls published by it have reinstated any (and if yes, then how many) of the 65 lakh voters who were initially deleted from the draft rolls published on August 1. There is also no clarity on why the EC had to declare over 3.66 lakh voters who were found eligible under the draft rolls as “ineligible” in the final rolls.

Also read: SIR: 'Final' Bihar voter roll still a mystery, leaves Grand Alliance baffled

Furthermore, Grand Alliance leaders allege “vast discrepancies and irregularities” in the total figure of 21.53 lakh “new” voters included in the final rolls. Opposition leaders such as the Congress’s Shakeel Ahmed Khan, the RJD’s Sanjay Yadav, and the CPI-MLL’s Dipankar Bhattacharya have all alleged that their respective parties have discovered during their preliminary scrutiny of the final rolls a large number of dubious voters.

NDA freebies weaken Oppn legwork

In their October 4 letter to the EC, Khan and Congress’s Bihar unit chief Rajesh Ram have noted that “transparency in additions and deletions (to the final voter list) is still very limited”. They have demanded that the poll panel “must publish booth-wise, reasoned lists of voters added and deleted” while identifying “booths with high deletions, especially where women and marginalised communities have been disproportionately removed”.

The Grand Alliance believes that the SIR continues to be a hugely emotive issue in Bihar. However, sources concede that the alliance’s hope that this emotional appeal would yield incremental votes for its constituents is waning just as their fear of the NDA reaping electoral benefits from Modi and Nitish’s pre-poll largesse is waxing. Though the Opposition is still hopeful that the October 7 hearing in the Supreme Court on petitions challenging the SIR would bring some relief, sources say it is “highly unlikely” that the bulk of deletions, many of whom the alliance claims are its voters, would be reinstated.

A Grand Alliance leader told The Federal, “What purpose would it serve if the SIR is an emotive issue or not when lakhs of those who we had hoped would vote for us have been removed from the electoral rolls”.

Read/watch: Why EBC Nyay could be central to Grand Alliance’s Bihar strategy | Capital Beat

‘Sinister conspiracy’

A senior Congress lawmaker from the state alleged an even more “sinister conspiracy” is at play. “In Haryana, the difference between total votes polled by the BJP and by the Congress was only 22,000 votes, but see how the BJP swept the state. Now imagine what lakhs of deletions in Bihar could mean.”

He added, “The bigger fraud, though, is all these revdis (freebies) that Modi and Nitish are distributing on the eve of the elections because it provides the NDA the perfect cover to mask an election fraud... if they win, every political commentator will claim that Modi and Nitish beat anti-incumbency and anger against the SIR through these so-called welfare measures”.