An Election Placebo

Promises are free, and those made in the heat of electioneering best not taken at face value.

- Amarnath K. Menon

The October 22 announcement of Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, offering a free Covid vaccine to all residents of poll-bound Bihar, is one such promise. In any case, the ‘free vaccine’ jumla, which even finds a place in the BJP’s manifesto for the Bihar elections, needn’t have any cost implications for the central exchequer—health is a state subject, and the Centre, at best, underwrites a portion of the expenses. Which makes the promise that much more facile.

Sitharaman’s announcement has had a domino effect, nevertheless. It’s festival season, after all—the season of giving and receiving gifts. On cue from the Union finance minister, the chief ministers of at least three BJP-ruled states, at last count—Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Assam—and one NDA ally (E.K. Palaniswami of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu) grabbed the opportunity to make similar offers. It didn’t seem to matter that a vaccine is nowhere in sight yet, that nobody really knows when it may be ready and available, whether there will be adequate stocks— and how much it might cost.

Another Union minister, Pratap Sarangi, travelling in his home state Odisha, went a step further, claiming preparations were in full swing to provide the Covid vaccine free of cost to all Indians across the country. The Telangana health minister Eatala Rajender was a little more circumspect, declaring that the KCR government, too, would give free vaccines, but only to the poor and to doctors and frontline health workers.