By any yardstick, the consecration of the idol of Sri Rama with which Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi personally inaugurated the temple at Ayodhya has been a political triumph for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). PM Modi made sure that it would be a day to remember by virtually closing down the entire country so that its people would be able to sit at home or cluster in tea shops, bazaars, and shopping arcades to see him do so.
And by performing the ritual in the garbhagriha, an area of every temple that has been the preserve of the highest of high Brahmins in the past, he has struck a body blow against the caste system that no one has dared to strike before. But beyond that, his speech, and in fact the entire function, was all "sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Where are the Jobs?
In his speech after the consecration, PM Modi declared 22 January to be the beginning of a new Kaal Chakra, a new astrological period in the life of the nation, which would be marked by peace, prosperity, and well-being. But on how he would make the new Chakra start spinning, he maintained his now famous, enigmatic silence because, as was demonstrated by his failure to fulfil the key promises he had made when he first came to power in 2014, he did not have an answer.
In 2014, the Indian economy had suffered three years of sharp decline after almost two decades of rapid growth. The growth of non-agricultural employment, which had averaged more than 7 million a year from 2003-04, had dropped very sharply. PM Modi promised to create 20 million jobs a year and the youth chose to believe him and voted him to power. But his government was unable to stem the decline and by March 2020, on the eve of COVID, the Indian economy's situation had become miserable.
The worst affected were the youth. Three examples will suffice to show how bleak their future had become.
In 2018, the Indian Railways announced that it would fill 63,000 vacancies in various menial categories of employment. 19.1 million young people applied for those jobs of which large numbers had college degrees and diplomas.
A year later, when the Personnel and Training Department announced 12,000 vacancies, more than 12 million youth again applied.
And when the government announced its Agniveer scheme for giving four years of military training to selected youth before inducting a quarter of them into the armed forces, the disappointment among those who had failed to get selected in the first lot of applicants was so intense that one desperate applicant committed suicide, and others set fire to a train at Danapur station in Bihar.
The Desperate Condition of the Indian Economy
Despite PM Modi’s failure to meet his promises, the BJP got re-elected in 2019 but still had no solutions to offer for the unemployment crisis. By 2019-20, GDP growth had fallen to 4.2 per cent, a level unseen since the beginning of this millennium.
A McKinsey report published in August 2020 summed up the challenge the country faced: India's GDP will need to grow 8 to 8.5 per cent annually over the next decade, nearly double the 4.2 per cent growth rate registered in the financial year 2019-20, to create 90 million new non-farm jobs between 2023 and 2030. Of these 60 million will be new workers who will enter the workforce.
They will enter the workforce but will there be jobs for them to take up? The answer was provided by Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Governance. An exceptionally harsh and short-sighted response to the COVID pandemic forced millions of migrant workers to return to their states of origin.
When COVID ended, there were no jobs for most of them to return to. As a result, the study found, 60 million workers were added to the agricultural workforce between April 2020 and June 2023.
The government’s own Periodic Labour Force Studies revealed that, between 2011 and 2021, 70 million persons between the ages of 16 and 60 had given up looking for work and dropped out of the labour force. And worse, in the preceding decade, India had experienced an extraordinary reversal. The more educated a young man or woman was, the lesser were his or her chances of securing a job. This was not only because fewer jobs were being created, but because of a simultaneous, calamitous drop in the quality of higher education.
In the previous two decades, private colleges affiliated with recognised universities had mushroomed. Against the number of 10,000 two decades earlier, there are 42,000 private colleges today. But all they had dished out was false hope, and that too at an ever-rising cost to the already hard-pressed families of the students who were attending them.
These Hard Realities Will Reassert Themselves
Everything PM Modi has been doing in the past two years has been geared towards somehow getting re-elected in 2024. The consecration ceremony at Ayodhya, its timing and the elaborate, nationwide coverage organised for it, were designed by experts to stupefy the voters into believing that if Modi is not the eleventh avatar of Vishnu, he is the closest thing to one that they are likely to see.
But as the saffron flags are taken down, and the posters and billboards displaying the prime minister and the new temple begin to fade in the harsh Indian sunlight, the euphoria generated by the consecration ceremony will subside and these hard realities will reassert themselves.
PM Modi may have anticipated this — in which case we will soon hear that the election has been advanced.
But even if that does not happen, the inertia of the Congress, its failure to enunciate even a principle for the allocation of seats within the INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc seven months after it was formed, let alone formulate a common programme and media strategy, and its inability to rise to the defence of its allies against the Modi government’s relentless attacks on their leaders, has ensured the return of the BJP to power later this year.
After that, it will only be a matter of months before the flickering flame of India’s short-lived democracy is snuffed out.
(Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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