The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Friday 8 February 2013

UPA’S POPULIST SCHEMES, THE ELECTORAL MINDSET AND A 2013 GENERAL ELECTION

As is evident from statements of Rahul Gandhi and other party leaders, the Congress party is going to bet heavily on the direct cash transfer of subsidy and the food security bill.

Though opposed to the wisdom of economists like Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the whole UPA machinery is busy in swelling the coffers of the government by increasing prices and cutting subsidies (and labeling them as reforms), to fund these multibillion dollar populist dole-outs before the upcoming general elections.

This is certainly based on the windfall returns that the Congress party had after launching the farm debt waiver scheme in 2008 that preceded the UPA victory in 2009 general elections.

In a half-baked democracy like India with majority still poor and ill-informed, elements of perception still play a major role in electoral outcomes. India is an agrarian economy with small peasants forming the major chunk. The Congress party sees them as the conventional vote bank. It believes the chunk is large enough to swing the poll outcomes.


The Congress party played on that and exploited the benefits in 2009. It is too early and too remote for the vote bank to react and make an opinion on the scam that the farm debt waiver scheme was.

Scam reporting on the issue is only in initial stages and the election time is already here with majority of political indicators saying the 2014 is going to be in 2013.

Before people realize the populist con of the Congress party, they would be perceivably inundated with the direct cash subsidy and a promised food security.

Now in a country where malnutrition is still a major problem and where hunger is still a relevant issue, masses go for the immediate measures providing them instant relief.

The Congress party is banking on this impulsive mindset of its target vote bank. It believes these two populist schemes can pull its voter to the booth to vote for it.

The history tells the Congress party has valid reasons to think so. And if that is so, the grand old party of India would work to have the general elections in the second half of the year to reap the ‘perceived’ benefits of its two mega windfall offerings.

Is the political opposition in India reading this?

Is the Congress party reading too much into this? 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/