A WELFARIST TURN?

In the recent state elections, political parties went all out to woo voters with welfare schemes. The verdicts, however, prove that populist policies sans good governance won't necessarily bring electoral dividends

- Abhik Bhattacharya

TWO days prior to the declaration of the recent Assembly election results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a video interaction with labharthis—the beneficiaries of various welfare schemes. As part of the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra—launched to reach out to the last-mile beneficiaries—the address was loaded with references to the schemes launched by the central government. Incidentally, it was these beneficiaries who were credited with the BJP getting an overwhelming majority in the 2019 General Elections. The government has tried to woo them in the subsequent elections.

This brings up the question—are these labharthis ‘beneficiaries’ or the ‘rightful claimants’ of government schemes? Since independence, welfare benefits have mostly been perceived as ‘rights’ of the citizens. However, from the 1980s, the discourse started changing. Earlier, what used to be the Left’s domain has now been appropriated by the far-right parties.  This change of narrative is seen not just in India, but also across the world.

In Denmark, for instance, in the 1990s, far-right parties like the Danish People’s Party managed to garner overwhelming support through their well-crafted image as the “true defenders of the Danish welfare state”. This narrative was propagated in different countries across Europe, but it gradually changed. Prior to the 2015 elections, Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the far-right political party, asked people to choose between ‘mass immigration and welfare’.