In Patidar bastion Surat, PM Modi sets tone for BJP with eye on Gujarat state polls

On his first visit to his home state Gujarat after a stunning victory in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, a grand welcome for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Surat by the BJP set the tone for the crucial assembly elections to be held later this year.

Through the 12km long roadshow – also seen as a show of strength – in the city that has emerged as the nerve centre for the Patidar agitation for OBC quota, the BJP tried to assert its position in the state. For the BJP, which has already set its eyes on the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, holding on to its bastion for the sixth consecutive term will be another stepping stone after conquering Uttar Pradesh.

With the Congress making hardly any visible effort to resurrect after winning countryside in the 2015 local body elections, the Hardik Patel-led disgruntled Patidars, a crucial vote bank for the BJP, have emerged as the biggest challenge for the BJP in its 22nd year of rule.

Picking Surat for the roadshow is significant in more way than one for BJP. While it is the main centre of south Gujarat, reaching out to a large number of diamond polishers who have migrated from Saurashtra will also have ripple effects in this politically most important region of the state.

Opting to inaugurate the Kiran Multispeciality Hospital – built by the Surat Municipal Corporation with help from a trust financed by Patidar businessmen – will send out a loud and clear message that the community is with the BJP. Besides, Modi will also inaugurate a diamond factory where Patidars from Saurashtra form a major chunk of the workforce.

In a way, the roadshow was also seen as an answer to the embarrassment that the party faced after BJP president Amit Shah was forced to cut short his speech in September 2016 when Hardik’s supporters created ruckus at his rally venue.

The stretch from the city airport to the Circuit House witnessed a Diwali-like atmosphere, with a sea of people queuing up on either side of illuminated streets to catch a glimpse of the PM who kept waving at the crowd through the sunroof of his SUV. The lighting arrangement along the route was done to project the Tricolur.

Earlier, chief minister Vijay Rupani welcomed Modi at the airport. Muslim women in significant numbers were seen outside the airport, also waiting to welcome him. A kit held by them in their hands read, ’Bandh ho ye anyay, PM hai hamari aas’. It was seen as a reference to the issue of triple talaq against which the NDA government has taken a firm stand.

Known as the textile city that produces sarees, the route near the airport was decorated with sarees with development schemes and projects printed on it. A 20-foot statue and cutouts of Modi dotted the route.

Eye on Muslim women vote, Narendra Modi gets combative on triple talaq

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was combative, and certainly not defensive, when he spoke at the BJP conclave in Bhubaneswar about a ban on the Islamic marriage practice of triple talaq. He tried to achieve twin objectives: Touch a chord with Muslim women and drill into the head of BJP leaders that they don’t need to be defensive on this issue.

Modi asked BJP leaders to stand by every Muslim woman who fights for her rights and oppose the practice. Under Muslim personal law based on the Sharia, a Muslim man can divorce his wife by pronouncing talaq thrice. Muslim men are also allowed to have four wives.

BJP leaders have been given assignments to hold conferences, travel across the country and resort to other means to spread awareness about Modi government’s position on this centuries-old practice.

The Modi government’s position on triple talaq and the Prime Minister reaffirming that position at the party conclaves serves two purposes for the BJP.

It helps India’s ruling party to reach out to a large section of Muslim women who have been opposing the practice. Largely, Muslims in India vote against the BJP and a section within the ruling party expect Modi’s stand on triple talaq to win over a large section of Muslim women, at least in the future if not immediately.

Also, it helps the BJP drive home a point among Hindus that Modi, as their leader, was trying reform within Muslim community, which has perhaps not allowed equal opportunity and status to its women. Any aggressive posturing on the issue of triple talaq, BJP sources said, will be received well within the party’s core support base.

Gender equality is part of the basic structure of the Constitution and non-negotiable, the Centre told the Supreme Court in October last year while opposing the practices of triple talaq and polygamy in the Muslim community.

This was the first time the Indian government officially took a stand to oppose the contentious custom that has divided the community, with women’s groups and individuals advocating sweeping reforms in Muslim personal law that is tilted against women.

India has separate sets of personal laws for each religion governing marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance. While Hindu law overhaul began in the 1950s and continues, activists have long argued that Muslim personal law has remained mostly unchanged. 

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The BJP’s expansion plans cover the minorities and eastern states

Not every meeting of the BJP national executive sends important political messages. Some are routine, and used for nothing more than rallying the faithful and taking account of recent events. In that sense, the past week’s national executive in Bhubaneswar was different. The very fact that Orissa and not Gujarat – where assembly elections are due in November and which was expected to play host – was selected as venue was suggestive of the party’s new ambition.

In the early 2020s, it will be the east – Orissa and neighbouring Bengal – that the BJP hopes will be its sunrise states. As quickly as the 2019 Lok Sabha election, they could start yielding seats, at least an increment from the two in Bengal and one in Orissa that the party won in 2014. That is why the choice of Orissa, where the party did spectacularly in the recent panchayat elections and is now poised to replace the Congress as the challenger to the ruling (and still very strong) Biju Janata Dal, told a story.

At the national executive itself, the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah-led BJP’s aspiration to expand its constituency became apparent in other ways too. Orissa (like Assam, Manipur and perhaps someday Bengal and Kerala) represents a geographical expansion. Yet, the nub of Prime Minister Modi’s interventions was on social expansion.

First, despite the Uttar Pradesh verdict and the widespread hysteria about Hindutva and religious issues becoming paramount, Modi stuck to the sober – for critics, boring – theme of development and poverty elimination. Determinedly, since 2014, Modi has anchored his party and government in the concerns of underprivileged Indians. He has not lost sight of that imperative, whether as a moral compass for his administration or as a political necessity for his party. Indeed, the party has carried forward that message on behalf of the government.

As a result of this close coordination between government and party – and of course due to Modi’s popularity simply soaring – incumbency, far from becoming a drag, has been a tonic for the BJP. Not surprisingly then this positioning of the government, as rooted in social and political realities, was iterated by Modi in Bhubaneswar.

Second, the BJP is gradually beginning its conversation with Muslims. As India’s largest party, it needs to do this, irrespective of how many Muslims may or may not vote for it. Even so, rather than reward a few token Muslim leaders with key posts and pretend that is “empowerment”, Modi has opted to dive deeper.

He has offered political backing to gender rights, seeing the triple talaq issue as crucial in this regard. He has also reached out to socially and economically backward (or OBC) Muslims, by singling them out for mention. Of course, he has been careful and correct to seek for them the same opportunities that are available to their Hindu peers – no more and no less. There was no question of any single group having a “first claim on resources”, to use the UPA government’s ungainly phrase.

The triple talaq case is in the courts, but the political, legal and public debate on it has been in full swing. It has put conservative, patriarchal elements in the Muslim clergy – who defend the practice of triple talaq even as many Muslim-majority countries have abandoned it – on the defensive. Can a combination of a court order and backing for it by the Modi government lead to the abolition of triple talaq?

As a social and political construct, this will reverse a trend going back to the Rajiv Gandhi government’s use of parliamentary legislation to nullify the Shah Bano judgement of 1985. What will be its political impact? That was one of the tantalising takeaways from Modi’s speech in Bhubaneswar.

Govt to introduce land consolidation act to check migration from hills

To check migration from the hills, the government will soon introduce a law legalising both partial and voluntary consolidation of scattered landholdings by farmers for giving a fillip to farm produce, agriculture minister Subodh Uniyal said.

“As it is, we have small terraced landholdings dotting the hills. On top of it, theselandholdings are scattered, which has made hill farming labour intensive and un-remunerative forcing farmers to migrate,” Uniyal told HT. “To ensure that hill farming becomes lucrative, we’ll either amend the Land Consolidation Act or introduce a new law, which will legalise voluntary and partial consolidation of land by farmers.”

Introducing such a law means that even if 20% of farmers in a village mutually “agree for consolidation of their landholdings”, their efforts will have a legal stamp owing to the provisions of the proposed law.

“In that case, not only will such a partial consolidation of scattered landholdings be legally permissible but their land records will be also changed in keeping with the provisions of the proposed law,” Uniyal said. According to him, once consolidation of landholdings is complete, even if partially, hill farming will cease to be labour intensive and will fetch good returns helping to check migration.

“We will try and include provisions legalising partial or voluntary consolidation oflandholdings in the rules of the Land Consolidation Act, which are yet to be formulated,” Uniyal said. “If such a move doesn’t work we will bring in a new law, which will legally permit partial and voluntary consolidation of landholdings.”

Uniyal asserted that partial and voluntary land consolidations didn’t work in the past as they lacked the legal backing of the Land Consolidation Act enacted by the previous Congress government. “The law owing to its lacunae failed to work despite the previous regime’s announcement of an incentive of Rs 1 crore each for villages, if farmers opted for land consolidation.”

The proposed law will be flexible because even if 20% of residents of a village mutually agree for land consolidation. “Such an initiative will have a chain reaction as it will inspire other villagers to opt for land consolidation.”

Uniyal suggested that the proposed law would help allay fears farmers about land consolidation due to ignorance. “Not being educated enough, most hill farmers feel they will lose their scattered lands during consolidation,” he said, adding that the land consolidation law would remove that misconception.

Along with its political goals, BJP must also have a plan to stimulate job creation

The two-day meeting of the BJP’s national executive ended on Sunday on a high note. A new level of confidence among the party’s rank and file marked the conclave that came close on the heels of the its emphatic victory in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and its success in retaining Goa and wresting Manipur from rival Congress.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, sought to raise the bar, urging party leaders to aim big and expand — ideologically, geographically and socially. He set new targets: Winning in states that go to polls between now and the next Lok Sabha elections in 2019; winning in those 120 Lok Sabha seats that the BJP has never won; and winning the support of those communities that have shunned the party in the past.

It is to serve these goals that Mr Modi gave a new gloss to the BJP’s OBC outreach. The political resolution adopted at the weekend conclave in Bhubaneswar, therefore, highlighted the government’s recent move to accord the National Commission for Backward Classes a constitutional status.

The OBCs account for nearly 52% of India’s population whose support can make or break a party. These social groups gradually aligned themselves with regional players as the Congress grew weaker. The rout of Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh gives the BJP a hope that the OBCs were mobilising behind the party. Mr Modi’s plan also includes reaching out to backward Muslims. He reiterated the BJP’s stand on banning triple talaq, a move largely aimed at winning over women from the minority community. The OBC and Muslims outreach is also aimed at weakening the regional players, particularly in northern and eastern India, who thrive on these vote-banks.

The two resolutions passed at the BJP conclave touched upon the pro-poor initiatives of the Modi government, but stopped short of commenting on many issues like slow job creation. These issues will come to haunt the BJP, if a change is not brought about in the current situation. Mr Modi has always spoken of India’s demographic dividend and its nearly 65% population that is below 35. A sluggish economy and the slow pace of job creation hurts them. Needless to say, Brand Modi counts the most on the support of this demographic section and its aspirations.

A progressive framework for macro-economic policy,

Government spending is the art of fine balance. Too little and the state will fail in some of its responsibilities, especially those towards the poor and underprivileged. Too much could result in a macroeconomic crisis.

India moved away from a discretionary approach to fiscal management with the passage of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act in 2003. The law was passed by a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, but, rarely for an Indian legislation, had bipartisan support. Now, 14 years later, another NDA government has received a report from a committee headed by veteran bureaucrat N.K. Singh on “a debt and fiscal framework for 21st century India” (as the document is subtitled).

The report, titled ‘Responsible Growth,” is based on sound fiscal economics. It was always clear, even before states embarked on a rash of farm loan waivers, that state finances were not getting the importance, and the scrutiny they deserved. Imprudent spending by the states could derail the central government’s own efforts at fiscal moderation. The report addresses this by makes public debt (of the Centre and the states) the focus, moving away from the traditional target of the fiscal deficit, although it retains the latter as an objective of the yearly government budget.

What of so-called black swan events – a global macroeconomic crisis or a severe drought? The new fiscal regime recommended by the Singh committee has a degree of flexibility, and allows the government an escape clause in case of external or internal shocks to the system. The report adds that the decision on whether a shock is severe enough to trigger the escape clause will be made by a new body, the fiscal council, which will also monitor government policy to measure the medium-term impact on finances.

There are minor definitional and operational quibbles with some of the recommendations of the committee and also the major, and possibly political, challenge of assigning public debt targets to states, but if the finance ministry accepts the report, India will have a working, pragmatic, reformist, and model fiscal regime.

Interestingly, the idea of a fiscal council has been proposed at a time when the country has created a monetary policy council to decide the policy rate and a GST council to administer the new unified Goods and Services tax regime that will come into effect later this year. India is clearly moving to a new and progressive framework for macroeconomic policy.

Vision of pro-people, proactive, good governance or P-2, G-2.

• Mr. Modi also appreciated party President Amit Shah for his work in Uttar Pradesh and other states, helping the party win. He appreciated the BJP, saying no other party would have suffered and digested so many electoral losses. But BJP continued working hard, and achieved the target, which shows the determinatin of grass root party workers. He also said, the party should move forward with the formula of New India at faster pace. He gave the vision of P2-G2, pro people, proactive, and good governance.
  Earlier in the day, in BJP's national executive meet, two resolutions were passed. A resolution was passed thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the commission on OBC. Another resolution also condemned the manner in which Congress and other parties are playing politics in this connection and stalling the bill.

Mere good governance is not enough; it has to be pro-people and pro-active. Good governance is putting people at the center of development process.” Narendra Modi

For decades, Indian politicians have built their careers in the name of caste, creed or religion or through populist measures. If there is one man, who has broken this stereotype of what an Indian politician stands for, it is undoubtedly Narendra Modi.

It is due to Narendra Modi that Governance has become the talking point all over the country; from the conversations teenagers have over a cup of coffee to heated debated in newsrooms. The rise of Narendra Modi in the political arena has also marked a paradigm shift in the discourse in India, where Governance had become a side issue. He heralded an era where politicians try and present figures for GDP Growth & other such development indicators in their speeches instead of making tall promises.

State Governments are often seen competing with each other on Governance indicators, which was not the case a decade ago. This shift in the political class coupled with an increased awareness and use of technology can create a win-win situation for the people of our country.

It has been Narendra Modi’s firm conviction that good governance alone is not enough; it has to be pro-people and pro-active. He believes there should be a tangible impact in the lives of the people through Good Governance. Narendra Modi has taken several initiatives, which have drastically improved the quality of people’s lives.

Transparency & Accountability are two very important features of a Citizen Friendly Government. In addition to these features, Narendra Modi’s track record shows that he has delivered results also by getting existing systems and processes to work. An example of this is his ‘One Day Governance’ Model in Gujarat.

While ‘The Rights of Citizens for Time-Bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their Grievances Bill’ was approved by the Gujarat Cabinet only in 2011, Narendra Modi thought well ahead of time and implemented the model of ‘One Day Governance’ in Gujarat in 2003 to deliver key services to citizens in a single day.

This model focused on providing time boundservices to the citizens by leveraging e-governance infrastructure. The main objective ofthis was to provide all Government-to-citizen services covered under the Citizens’ Charter. It mainly covered citizen-centric services such as revenue, panchayat, health, education and agriculture as well as maintaining records.Over 173 types of public services like essential certificates, affidavits, land, civil supplies were offeredthrough this model.

The services were divided into 3 types:

• Tatkal: 20 per cent of the applications were included in this type which took 20 minutes to 2 hours for processing.

• One day governance: Those applications that needed a single day for processing fell under this category. Within a duration of 12 hours, documents such as birth, death and caste certificates were delivered. 40 per cent of applications fall under this category.

• Non-one day governance: The applications under this category were processed in a stipulated period of time e.g. No Objection Certificates (NOC) from Police, Roads and Buildings, hotel licenses, land allotment for non-agricultural purposes etc.

The centreswere operational in all districts with a PPP model and had yielded outstanding results through quick, convenient, transparent and efficient functioning.

Read more about the One Day Governance Model Here

Narendra Modi believes that the real test of good governance is its grievance redressal system. The foundation of any democratic system is that people should be able to voice their problems freely and get their problems solved quickly.

On these lines Narendra Modi implemented the successful initiative called SWAGAT. It stands for State Wide Attention on Public Grievances by Application of Technology. SWAGAT- functional from 2003 is an innovative initiative in Gujarat that enables direct communication between the citizens and the Chief Minister.