It is the misfortune of the world’s largest child and youth population that like its predecessor governments, the BJP-NDA government at the Centre and in several major states has failed to sufficiently comprehend that nurturance of the country’s abundant human resource is the prerequisite of national development – Dilip Thakore elaborates on the BJP education report card In May 2014, four years ago the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was sworn in New Delhi as the new government of India after ten years (2004-14) of uninterrupted rule of the Congress-led 11-party UPA (United Progressive Alliance), amid great hope and enthusiasm, especially among the young. Although in the decade-long rule of the UPA-I and UPA-II governments, the annual rate of economic growth averaged 8.02 percent, the national mood was dispirited because of a spate of big-time corruption scandals — 2G spectrum allocation, arbitrary awards of coal block mining rights, the Westland helicopters purchase deal, the Commonwealth Games scam — among other outrageous rip-offs. Consequently, great faith and expectations were reposed in the BJP leadership that it would introduce far-reaching reforms in this republic over-regulated by the self-serving neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) brotherhood. After ten years of essentially Congress rule, the electorate had clearly had enough of the self-serving socialism of the party which had ruled at the Centre and in most states of the Indian Union for over 50 years after independence. Under the Congress brand of socialism, India had become one of the world’s most inegalitarian nations in which the richest 1 percent of the population own 73 percent of the country’s wealth, government ministers and legislators awarded themselves repeated pay hikes and jetted in and out and across the country displaying lavish lifestyles reminiscent of the rajahs and princes of pre-independence India, even as tens of thousands of farmers — who number over 67 percent of the country’s population — took to mass suicides because of agriculture being rendered an unviable vocation by the centrally planned economic development model. Moreover law and order had collapsed across the country, highlighted by the brutal gang rape and murder of a paramedic student cynically christened Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the establishment in a moving bus in the national capital in December 2012. Against this broad backdrop of runaway corruption, shocking income inequality, deep rural distress and breakdown of law and order, the BJP led by its charismatic prime ministerial candidate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was awarded a clear majority of 282 seats in its own right in the Lok Sabha, while the Congress party which led India into independence after almost 200 years of British rule was reduced to 44 seats, an insufficient number to be awarded the status of official party of the opposition. Great hopes of a radical break from the past and particularly from Congress socialism which had beggared high-potential post-independence India, were reposed in Modi, who led the BJP/NDA coalition of 28 parties with a barnstorming campaign and the ringing promise of sabka saath, sabka…
