India Political Blog

Sometimes, Governments get feedback from the citizens in ways that they cannot anticipate. One example was seen in the recent issue about the VAT rates on diesel, implemented by the Delhi Government. The Commonwealth Games to be hosted by Delhi in October is sucking in more money that anticipated, and with delays, especially for the various infrastructural work that has been getting delayed, the cost over-runs can be fairly large. All this needs more money, and to some extent, the central Government wants the Delhi Government to generate some of the enhanced revenues needed. And it is quite clear how the esteemed chief minister of Delhi, Mrs. Shiela Dixit, feels. She has expressed an opinion earlier that the citizens of Delhi can afford to pay more for services such as electricity, and can also be used to generate more revenue by increasing the rate of tax on even essential items.
And so, the Delhi Government increased the VAT rate on diesel to be 20%, leading to an immediate increase in the rate of diesel. Such a move shocked people in Delhi, but the Government would have thought that they could even get away with something like this. After all, if the citizens of Delhi do not even protest at the huge amounts of money spent on maintenance of roads that do not even last one rainy season, or that the MCD has a huge number of fake employees on its rolls, so as to steal more money in terms of salaries for these fake employees; then the Government would seem to be justified in increasing such a rate.
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For some time now, India has been plagued by the case of more and more intolerance in society, especially when it comes to a clash between the desires of the younger generation and the apparent social mores of the generation. For many years, Indians used to read about honour killings happening in Islamic countries, and wonder at how a society could do something like this, after all, Indian society was more tolerant and adjusting. Well, now no one ever makes such a claim. There have been a huge number of cases in the recent past where young people have been oppressed just because they dared to take steps that were not liked by a section of society. People have been classified as outcasts by the village, have been ordered to be punished because they married either somebody whom society considered to be someone whom they could not touch (for example, a girl of the same village is deemed a sister; marriage between different castes is a definite no-no, and so on). People have been tortured to death, have been hung, beaten to death, thrown in canals, and so on.
This is mostly a North Indian concept, with its concentration in the villages of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, but cases have been seen even in Delhi (where the brothers of a girl killed her and her husband), and in other states as well (as well as in Indians settled abroad). And a lot of these cases have been spear-headed by gatherings of community elders (all male), who call themselves khap panchayats, and sanction such punishments as part of their version of justice. Now, as per the Indian law, none of this should exist. No system outside the judiciary can give punishments, policemen are supposed to protect people (even from village elders), and yet the reverse keeps on happening. In many cases, police either did not give protection or played a part in protecting the perpetrators.
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Even a couple of months back, who would have visualized that the situation in Andhra Pradesh would come to this. In the Congress, the High Command (leading upto the Gandhi family in New Delhi) is the supreme, and there is absolutely no chance for anyone to oppose their decisions (or even hint at defiance of their diktats). So, for somebody to explicitly go against the Congress High Command means that either the person has a huge amount of political power themselves, or is going to be on the way out fairly soon. In the case of the late YSR’s son, Jagan, it seems more likely that the first option is more likely.
Jagan’s father, the late YSR, was the undisputed leader of the Congress in Andhra Pradesh, and was able to ensure that there was no question of his supremacy in the state unit, delivering the critically important state to the Congress in both state and national elections. At the same time, he also displayed a loyalty to the High Command, which ensured that he was not seen as a threat in any way and left undisturbed. It is also alleged that he used this power to derive a huge business empire, earning large amounts of money.
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