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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Phantom Promises

The unravelling of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana was always a matter of when, not if. Announced with theatrical flourish ahead of the 2024 Assembly election by the ruling Mahayuti coalition, the scheme promised Rs. 1,500 a month to women across the state. It became the Mahayuti government’s showpiece welfare programme and, by all accounts, a decisive political instrument that helped propel the ruling alliance to a comfortable victory. Less than two years later, the curtain has now...

Phantom Promises

The unravelling of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana was always a matter of when, not if. Announced with theatrical flourish ahead of the 2024 Assembly election by the ruling Mahayuti coalition, the scheme promised Rs. 1,500 a month to women across the state. It became the Mahayuti government’s showpiece welfare programme and, by all accounts, a decisive political instrument that helped propel the ruling alliance to a comfortable victory. Less than two years later, the curtain has now fallen. Nearly 92 lakh beneficiaries – a whopping 38 percent of those initially enrolled – are now being shown the door as the scheme becomes economically untenable. If such a staggering proportion of beneficiaries never qualified in the first place, what exactly was the government doing when it rolled out the scheme with such urgency? The scheme is a classic case of welfare as a cold election strategy rather than a governance policy. The scheme’s benefits flowed generously just before the election. The scrutiny that has now arrived has exposed it for what it was: a fiscal white elephant. The Comptroller and Auditor General has now compounded the Mahayuti’s embarrassment with its report, which questions expenditure of more than Rs. 3,541 crore under the scheme. Such spending places an unsustainable burden on Maharashtra’s finances. The CAG’s report is an indictment of a style of governance that treats the public exchequer as an extension of the campaign war chest. Across India, governments of every political persuasion have perfected the art of competitive populism. Cash transfers, freebies and subsidies are unveiled with increasing frequency, often without credible fiscal planning or robust verification mechanisms. Welfare has become less about empowering citizens than about cultivating dependable vote banks. Schemes designed primarily for electoral dividends inevitably collapse under their own contradictions, leaving beneficiaries disillusioned and public finances weakened. The greatest injustice is borne not by politicians but by ordinary citizens. Honest taxpayers finance these extravagant promises. Genuine beneficiaries build their household budgets around them. When governments later discover that millions were ‘ineligible,’ it is ordinary families, and not the politicians or their families, who suffer the consequences. If money has indeed been squandered because of political haste, accountability cannot stop with bureaucrats or clerks processing applications. Those who conceived, announced and relentlessly campaigned on the scheme must also bear responsibility. The leaders of the three ruling Mahayuti partners – the BJP, the NCP and the Shiv Sena - who converted public money into political capital should be prepared to answer financially as well as politically. Democracy cannot become an auction where elections are won with taxpayers’ wallets. It is time to end the politics of fiscal bribery masquerading as welfare. Maharashtra deserves governments that create opportunity, not dependency, and policies that survive beyond polling day.

Still Storming the Bastille

Amid shelves crowded with sophisticated histories on the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle’s classic remains the one book that makes history feel gloriously, terrifyingly alive like no other.


Every Bastille Day, I find myself reaching for the same battered volume. It is not the newest history of the French Revolution. It is not the most balanced, the most archival or even the most reliable in the way modern historians would define ‘reliability.’ But for me, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: a History, first published in 1837, and rendered in scintillating, breathtakingly eccentric prose, remains the history I return to most often.


Nearly two centuries later, after generations of scholarship have transformed our understanding of revolutionary France, Carlyle still wins the day for me on the subject. The austere Scotsman captured the Revolution’s terror, exhilaration and chaos with an almost primeval force that no one before him or since has managed to do so.


Carlyle was one of the great prose stylists of the Victorian age. His book has one of the great origin stories in English letters. Having completed the manuscript of the first volume of The French Revolution in 1835, Carlyle lent it to the philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose household maid accidentally consigned most of it to the fire, mistaking the pages for waste paper. Undeterred, Carlyle painstakingly reconstructed the volume largely from memory, producing not a diminished substitute but one of the most electrifying works of historical prose ever written. Few masterpieces have literally risen from the ashes.


Carlyle’s gift for portraiture comes alive in his masterwork. His dramatis personae refuse to remain names in a chronology. His Robespierre is “the sea-green Incorruptible” - a phrase so haunting that it has eclipsed countless more scholarly descriptions. The revolutionary crowds swell into what Carlyle calls a “living flood.” One reads Carlyle not just to learn what happened but to encounter personalities so vividly drawn that they continue to inhabit the imagination long after the dates have faded.


Small wonder that Carlyle’s masterwork made such an indelible impression on Charles Dickens, whose A Tale of Two Cities bears the Carlylean imprint on almost every page. The charged atmosphere of Paris and even some of the novel’s memorable scenes owe a clear debt to Carlyle’s pages. And while Dickens transformed history into fiction, Carlyle had already made history read like a great literary novel.


Since Carlyle wrote, the French Revolution has been interpreted and reinterpreted almost beyond recognition. Jules Michelet transformed it into the epic awakening of the French nation, while Albert Soboul saw class struggle at its heart. François Furet challenged Marxist orthodoxy and recast the Terror as an outgrowth of revolutionary political culture. Later writers from Simon Schama to William Doyle, and a host of others have enriched the subject with extraordinary scholarship. Every decade seems to produce another ‘definitive’ account of this seminal event.


Yet none has displaced Carlyle from my bookshelf. Carlyle’s masterpiece sucks the reader in with a prose that surges, recoils and erupts like the Revolution itself. Paris is not a backdrop but a feverish protagonist. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, Robespierre and Mirabeau appear not as carefully calibrated historical actors but as figures caught in a drama whose ending they cannot foresee.


Reading Carlyle can be exhausting. His sentences leap from irony to prophecy. Exclamation marks proliferate. Metaphors pile upon metaphors. He interrupts himself, apostrophises the reader and occasionally seems to abandon grammar in pursuit of momentum. By contemporary standards, it is ‘undisciplined’ writing. For this reader, it is also unforgettable.


The 21st century has already supplied its own catalogue of populist upheavals and political polarisation. One need not equate modern democracies with revolutionary France to recognise familiar patterns of institutional distrust and public anger. Carlyle’s enduring power lies not in offering direct parallels but in reminding readers that history is ultimately driven by human passions rather than abstract theories.


There is something oddly refreshing about revisiting a 19th century historian who wrote before every sentence had to satisfy peer review. Carlyle believed history should not merely instruct but overwhelm. He wanted readers to hear the roar of the Parisian crowd, smell the smoke above the Bastille and feel the dreadful inevitability of the tumbrils rumbling towards the guillotine. He was a writer who understood that revolutions are not only events to be explained, but storms to be felt. Perhaps that is why, every July 14, I return to those pages.


(The writer is a Technology VP in an investment bank. Views personal.)

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