Droupadi Murmu took oath on July 25, as the 15th President of India. Her salary: INR 5 lakh per month, plus perks. But why talk of the President’s salary? That is because there’s a big gap between what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s picks for high office earn and what the electorate that elected him to the office makes. Also, after eight years in office, Modi is taking issue with Opposition parties, grudging the ‘revadis’ (lollipops) ladled out to the poor by these parties to win elections. The Gujarat elections are on Modi’s mind. The BJP is nervous that Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP might do a Punjab on Gujarat and divest Modi’s home-state from Modi’s 30-year grip. Imagine Modi losing Gujarat to freebies after enriching the richest Gujaratis with eight years of the ‘Gujarat Model’. Modi is the Harbinger of the freebie culture in north Indian politics. Hark back to 2012-13 and Modi was promising ‘ache din’ and “INR 15 lakh in every Indian’s bank account”. It was an incentive to vote for ‘abki baar Modi sarkar’. It worked and Modi took the oath.
In 2019, Modi got a replica of 2014, and on March 22 this year came news that India had beaten Nigeria for most numbers of the extremely poor! The World Poverty Clock tracks poverty worldwide. And the ‘extremely poor’ it clocked are people living on less than USD 2 a day. The biggest Independence Day takeaway from eight years of Modi rule is that the WPC is clocking more extremely poor Indians than the exchequer is running up dollars for rupees. India had 73 million extremely poor against Nigeria’s 87 million in 2018. Four years on, the numbers favor Nigeria, 70 million against 83 million. In 2020, 80 million Nigerians were living on one dollar a day. Modi’s Nigerian counterpart was setting the example, and not the world’s ‘Vishwaguru’. India’s slavering electronic media laughed it off, asking what’s 83 million against the projected 1.40 billion population, a drop in the Indian Ocean! The fact is, the World Poverty Clock counts only the extremely poor. What about the ‘very poor’, the ‘poor’ and the ‘emerging poor’?
Why even the lower middle class and the so-called middle class are not in a happy position to celebrate August 15 this year? Prices are on the rooftop, and fuel prices are rocketing. On top of that, now there’s GST even on packaging. There’s a blanket of misleading information enveloping India’s poverty status. The Modi government is not questioned enough. Instead, the media trots out every billion-shift in the wealth of Ambani and Adani. The crumbs or the lack of crumbs on the poor man’s plate does not make it to page 1 unless it’s Modi addressing a ‘garib’ rally in a poll-bound state. Modi’s emerging superpower India is a chimera. The disparity in incomes and wealth is a global phenomenon, but India displays this disparity with callous disregard for the poor man’s lot. The reality is Modi’s poverty alleviation schemes are more one-time trophies than lasting remedies. The free LPG cylinders, for instance, is a joke played on unsuspecting housewives who have to beg, borrow and steal to pay for the refills month after month, now costing INR 1053 per cylinder.
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