Food Security: Why Sonia’s Pet Project Is Pawar’s Pet Peev?

It is hard to liken Sharad Pawar to anything so slender and agile as a cat. Yet, in the manner in which the NCP leader and agriculture minister has been struggling to articulate his ‘conscientious objection’ to the Food Security Bill, he resembles nothing so much as the “cat i’ th’ adage” that Lady Macbeth alluded to. That cat, as is well-known, loved fish, but was afraid to get its paws wet in the water. It, therefore, lived, in Lady Macbeth’s colourful turn of phrase, like a “coward… letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’” – conflicted between a desire to act and an unwillingness to strike.

Likewise, with Pawar, there is something for which he yearns in the realm of power, in which proxy cause he repeatedly invokes his opposition to the Food Security Bill, the welfare measure that’s so dear to Sonia Gandhi’s heart. Yet, for all his valour as a Maratha strongman, he can’t seem to spit it out in full, and ends up waffling incoherently.

In Nagpur on Monday, Pawar returned to a drum that he’s been banging away at for a while now: the sheer unsustainability of “populist” schemes like the provision for food security and the NREGA rural employment guarantee programme.

Such schemes, he said, required serious re-consideration, particularly the proposal to provide foodgrain at concessional rates to 68 percent of the population. While he conceded that there was social merit in providing food subsidies to the very poor, and he approved of such welfare measures in principle, the wisdom of covering nearly 70 percent of the population was open to challenge, he added.

According to this report, Pawar said that the new food security scheme would require a subsidy of Rs 1.1 lakh crore to implement it. “This puts an unbearable strain on the already precarious financial situation and a huge burden on the Union budget,” he added.

In any case, Pawar pointed to a larger philosophical failing in extending the coverage of the food security provision to such a large section of the population. “If we project that nearly 70 percent of the population needs such dole, the question that would inevitably crop up is: what we have done in the past 65 years to alleviate poverty?” It reflected rather poorly on “our economic achievements”, he added.

Pawar makes a sound political argument when he reasons that the Congress, as the party that has been in power for much of these 65-plus years since independence (either by itself or as the head of a coalition), has much to answer for for the state of the nation if up to 70 percent of the population needs to be serviced by welfare measures with unsustainably high price tabs attached to them.

The Food Security Bill envisages provision of wheat at Rs 2 a kg (barely a tenth of the current procurement cost of Rs 18 a kg). In his recent speech before the National Development Council, Pawar pointed out that the economics of the programme were so skewed that a failure to secure a good price for marketable surplus of wheat would incentivise farmers to migrate to other crops, which would impair food security and compel India to import wheat.

As for NREGA, Pawar pointed to a regressive ‘unintended consequence’ of the rural employment guarantee scheme: an erosion in the “work culture” in rural areas. He claimed that given the current level of NREGA wages, labour productivity in the rural areas, raising which ought to have been the desired goal, was being negatively impacted. Agricultural wages had shot up because far fewer farmhands were available since, he said, “most men are simply enjoying the benefits and sitting idle.”

That narrative, painting a picture of rural agrarian life as idyllic, perhaps overstates the case, and possibly reflects in some measure Pawar’s defence of the interests of the landed gentry class. Even so, the contributory role that schemes like NREGA have played in the decline of agricultural labour productivity has been sufficiently well-established.

For all these reasons, Pawar reasoned, schemes like NREGA and the Food Security Bill required careful reconsideration, since unsustainable spending on such big-scale projects would prove ruinous, particularly given the country’s straitened fiscal situation.

It requires political fortitude in some measure for a regional leader with the backing of only a handful of MPs to target schemes that are, in a sense, Sonia Gandhi’s favoured ones. As Firstpost has noted earlier, the Food Security Bill is a political project intended to secure the UPA’s re-election (in much the same way that the NREGA greased the tracks for the return of the UPA in 2009), and for that reason, it has encountered little meaningful opposition within the Congress.

Yet, Pawar’s repeated but ineffectual protestations over the Food Security Bill—and his seeming unwillingness to escalate the battle—only resemble the exertions of the conflicted cat in the Lady Macbethian narrative. There may have been a time when Pawar would have been able to up his game, perhaps even dreamt of prime ministerial ambitions. But today, even he is aware of his powerlessness within the UPA — and is given to public airing of grievances merely to assure himself that he is still relevant.

At a meeting in Nagpur on Monday, Pawar shared the dais with Nitin Gadkari, who was recently eased out as BJP president, but with whom the NCP shares, as Arvind Kejrial established, a cosy business relationship that transcends beyond notional political rivalries. That relationship also offers something of an exit clause for Pawar and the NCP – in case the arithmetic of the next Lok Sabha requires them to realign their political affiliations. Cats have nine lives; so too do political leaders who are politically nimble and agile.