The two major National parties of our Country rolled out their manifestos last week. “Manifesto” is a document summarizing the key promises, ideas, opinions, views or plan of action of a political party to the people.
The parties create a document that summarizes their key promises, ideas, opinions, views or plan of action to the people. Manifestos are the windows to the shop; akin to the mannequins outside a designer store or the OPD of a Hospital. Your experience (positive or negative) is mostly formed by the time you skim through it. The fanfare of “Manifestos” has reduced drastically in recent times. The golden age of Manifestos was the pre-mobile/social media/digitization of the Country: When the Manifesto would be printed out and hand outs of it were given during the door to door canvassing. I avidly remember time Manifestos were the norm: the 2005 Assembly Elections in Haryana during my Father’s campaign for the former constituency of Halka Hassangarh where he had secured the ticket after much internal tussle and fanfare and had to (on a budget & financial crunch!) decide on how to divide the funds: a major cost head was the Manifesto pamphlets which were received from the then State President Mr. Bhajan Lal’s and the to be Chief Minister Mr. Bhupender Singh Hooda’s offices (for the State guarantees) and also drafted on a personal level (for the Constituency) by the family.
In today’s times, the manifesto is a document released as a mere formality with the casual voter completely unaware of its release and merely skim through it weeks or months later if received on a family or friends group on Whatsapp or while scrolling through Twitter. Though, I request the voters to pay special attention to at least go through a summary of the Manifestos for this Lok Sabha Election. I argue that this Lok Sabha elections’ Manifestos are a brilliant zeitgeist of our current society: be it their ideas or aspirations (of the poor or the unemployed; for that is their only source of hope to cling to) and majorly the biases (of those that have the luxury to afford it).
I have a political affiliation, so I will steer clear of discussing my party’s manifesto.
I will discuss the latter: The Bhartiya Janta Party’s or as it says on the cover page (with a bigger font): “Modi ki Guarantee ”. To save you the time to go through the 76 page document (that has 43 half page photographs of the Prime Minister) I hereby give a non-partisan statement of a few guarantees: Free ration, gas connection & “PM Sun House” for effectively a zero electricity bill*, coverage for the elderly in Ayushman Bharat, strict penalization and regulations to avoid examination paper leaks, National Education Policy, India’s proposal to host Olympics 2036 & the Uniform Civil Code. The Manifesto makes no direct provision or guarantee (and only implies via intangibly worded sentences) to avoid inflation, unemployment or corruption. All of these guarantees are to secure India’s Vision for 2047 also known as Vikshit Bharat formerly known as New India. The beauty (and the spin) of these ideas lies in their intangibility and subjectivity. Herein lies the zeitgeist: The voters that have decided to vote for the “guarantees” will not read it. They are ready to keep drinking the kool-aid with or without the manifesto. In previous instances, the Prime Minister discusses a vague and metaphorical idea of how he envisions Artificial Intelligence and his followers hail his “progressive vision of the future” and tech-savviness. He promised “Achche din” by 2019 in 2014; he has moved the goal post again to another brass ring we are supposed to chase but cannot quantify: “Viksit Bharat by 2047”. Apropos since this is the same philosophy that faith in religion clings on and consists of the only homogeneous demographic that he targets to get votes: The poor that have no dreams left and the rich that have the luxury to afford them that will believe no matter what; the former out faith to finally get to the promised land; the latter out of fear on losing out on the train of opportunity.
The reality is that there is no goal post. The proverbial football field is not only uneven but has a low visibility due to a curated fog. The citizens of the Country are not allowed into the Stadium. They are receiving the play by play from the Media with special passes as spectators in the skyboxes via the binoculars procured from the business company A as a quid pro quo in the stadium that belongs to another company with the same initial of A. The ball is drifting through the field and the second the star player decides to shoot the ball into oblivion, the media will scream goal and those that believe will continue to believe it.
I depart for now with a whisper as heard within the BJP headquarters by senior leaders in hushed and scared voices : The Manifesto as released by Indian National Congress is so impressive that all they have to do is take printouts of it in the regional languages and do a door-to-door campaign to secure a comfortable victory. Alas, those times seem a thing of the past but being a hopeless optimist I hope the voters at least skim through it and the other National Party at least goes through the pain to go into the people.
Himanshu Chakravarty Sharma / मंच 