Has Indian policy focus shifted from the have-nots to the haves? Seema Mustafa, in the Asian age feels so, calling it The Two faces of India. Says Mustafa, there was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development.
In a heartfelt and impassioned piece, she pleads the cause of the poor who she feels have become a large faceless entity. She warns of dire consequences, along the lines of a revolution, if the pressure bursts some day.
I have a question for Ms. Mustafa here. In these fifty plus years of independence, where popular social and political discourse revolved around the concept of socialism, encapsulating the bottoms-up approach, how much have the poor become less poor? Do we have any basis for saying that poor-oriented policy works better? Or even works at all?
Read in one of the year-end magazine issues on how good 2003 has been for India, what two thousand years of history has not been able to do for India, twelve years of an open economy have managed, viz. find respect in the eyes of the world.
Given this, why such rhetoric? No doubt the rich get richer, but if the poor also get richer in the process, then what is the harm?
Think carefully about the idea of tricklenomics. Based on the old belief that “if the horse has better hay to eat, the birds will eat better” (it being understood that birds eat manure). In other words, if the rich do well, the benefits will trickle down to the rest. Which is what the current Indian economy is all about.
And this I think, while being politically incorrect, is not such a bad thing after all…..