Jairam Ramesh@Jairam_Ramesh
The Prime Minister is going around the country proclaiming the virtues of his 'guarantees.' Since he has already been in power for the last decade, let us do a status update of 10 guarantees he has given in the last 10 years
1. Guarantee: Prime Minister Modi promised to create 2 crore jobs for India’s youth every year
Ghotala: Unemployment reached a 45-year peak in India under Modi’s Anyay-kaal. Since 2014, the number of unemployed persons has gone from 1 crore to 4 crore. To cover up its failures, unpaid domestic work and pakora-sales have been labelled as “jobs” by this government.
2. Guarantee: On February 28, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double farmers’ income’ by 2022.
Ghotala: Farmers real income increased by just 2% per year, nowhere close to the 12% per year required for doubling by 2022. Instead, widespread agrarian distress due to inadequate MSP and rising input costs has caused farmer indebtedness to increase by 60%. In these circumstances, about 1 lakh farmers have died by suicide since 2014.
3. Guarantee: 15 lakh in black money will be deposited in every Indian’s bank account
Ghotala: This ‘guarantee’ was admitted to be a jumla by Amit Shah on Feb 5, 2015. In fact, the Modi Sarkar has totally failed to curb black money. 99.3% of the cash in circulation returned to the RBI after the failure of demonetisation. In the meantime, fraudsters like Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi have scammed India out of thousands of crores and gotten away scot-free with their black money.
4. Guarantee: Modi will show ‘laal aankh’ to China as the Prime Minister
Ghotala: China is currently occupying 2,000 sq km of Indian soil. The Prime Minister, in his statement at the all-party meeting on June 19th, 2020, gave China a clean chit and said “Na koi hamari seema mein ghus aaya hai, na hi koi ghusa hua hai”. By giving China a public clean chit, Modi has refused to acknowledge the truth and take appropriate action, even as India has lost access to 26 out of 65 patrolling points on the LAC.
5. Guarantee: PM Modi claimed that “nobody can touch” reservations while he is in power
Ghotala: The University Grants Commission issued draft guidelines to de-reserve teaching posts for SC, ST, and OBC candidates in January 2024. The BJP has been removing reservations through the back door by privatising Public Sector Enterprises and contractualising jobs, cutting 2.7 lakh jobs in the remaining PSEs, and leaving 5 lakh reserved government posts vacant.
6. Guarantee: Modi Sarkar promised that ‘Make in India’ would deliver 10 crore manufacturing jobs by 2020, and increase the share of manufacturing to 25% of GDP.
Ghotala: For the first time since 2004, workers are moving from manufacturing jobs back to farm jobs in the Anyay-kaal. 2.4 crore manufacturing jobs have been lost in the chaos of demonetisation, GST, and the unplanned COVID-19 lockdown. The share of manufacturing in GDP has actually decreased from 16.5% under Dr. Manmohan Singh to just 14.5% under Modi.
7. Guarantee: ‘Na khaunga, na khaane dunga’
Ghotala: The Modi years have seen the most open corruption in India’s history. The entire economy has been handed over to a few chosen crony capitalists. Everything from six airports, power plants, gas pipelines, weapons contracts, and now Dharavi in Mumbai, has been handed over to the corrupt Adani group. Adani’s net worth has grown by 17 times since 2014. Meanwhile, the BJP received Rs 6,500 crore in anonymous funds through the legal corruption of electoral bonds - which even the Supreme Court has now declared unconstitutional.
8. Guarantee: Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao
Ghotala: 78.9% of the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme’s budget between 2016 and 2019 was spent on advertisements. The BJP and RSS have a fundamentally anti-woman worldview - as embodied by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s statement that women are “not capable of being free or independent.” In the Anyay-kaal, crimes against women increased to 4.5 lakh per year in 2022, up 34% since 2014. BJP leaders, including Kuldeep Sengar and Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, are not just themselves guilty of some grievous crimes against women, but have also defended rapists like those in the Bilkis Bano, Kathua, Unnao, and Hathras cases.
9. Guarantee: Since 2014, PM Modi has promised repeatedly to clean the Ganga by 2019. In the 2014 manifesto, the BJP committed to “ensure the cleanliness, purity, and uninterrupted flow of the Ganga on priority”.
Ghotala: The holy Ganga river is dirtier than ever before. 6,000 million litres of untreated sewage enters the water each day. 900 untreated drains from Uttar Pradesh flow into the river. 71% of pollution monitoring stations show unacceptable levels of contamination. Even the Allahabad HC declared that the thousands of crores spent on Namami Gange have had “hardly any result.”
10. Guarantee: In June 2014, PM Modi promised to develop 100 cities as ‘smart cities.’
Ghotala: In the years since, the Modi Sarkar has been unable to meaningfully define a ‘smart city.’ Even amidst the vagueness of this scheme, only one of the 110 cities - Madurai - has actually completed all the projects it embarked upon under this scheme. As of December 2023, 400 projects across the country were still incomplete. The scheme is so clearly unsuccessful that even the BJP’s 2019 manifesto did not mention it.
The Prime Minister’s relentless campaign on ‘Modi ki Guarantee’ can’t change the truth of the matter: that he is, at heart, a jumla-jeevi who will say whatever he needs to in order to win an election.
Modi ki guarantee nahi,
Modi ka warranty khatam hain!
