While the Congress party agitating against the BJP’s land Bill appears poetic justice given how the latter obstructed major UPA Bills, the larger issue is that the Congress appears to have learned no lessons from its embarrassing rout in the Lok Sabha last year. The Congress is reportedly now planning to roll out state-wide agitations to protest the amendments the NDA has made to its Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, and hopes to cash in on popular sentiment with this. While some BJP leaders have also expressed their reservations against the government’s ordinance—the ordinance retains the compensation elements of LARR but makes it relatively easier to acquire the land for a variety of projects—and the Aam Aadmi Party has also run a campaign against it, it is not clear if this will help the Congress win back its constituency. In the last Lok Sabha election, as well as in various assembly elections after that, people have comprehensively voted against the Congress party and its policies. It is not as though people don’t like entitlement, the problem was two-fold: a) the promised subsidies were not being delivered and b) with no economic growth, jobs were in short supply. While voters were not sure of how Modi was going to fix this, at an intuitive level, they were opting for growth as a cure to their ills. Since getting jobs back requires industry and large infrastructure projects to be set up, and that requires land, amending LARR is critical. To that extent, anything that interferes with this process will thwart the larger mandate voters gave the BJP last May.
To be sure, parties like the Congress and AAP will derive some advantage by agitating against the NDA’s amendments to LARR—till economic growth picks up and creates jobs and prosperity, farmers will be susceptible to those arguing for easier land acquisition. What the BJP needs to do is to resist the pressure to cave in, and keep its eyes on the big picture, to get economic growth going again. In any case, with the next state election months away, this is a window of opportunity for the BJP to push through necessary reforms—moving people from ration shops to direct cash transfers will have short-term pain, for instance, but is beneficial in the medium- to long-term. And, given the BJP has an absolute majority in both houses of Parliament together, the joint sitting route is the one to use to pass pending legislation like the ones on hiking FDI levels in insurance as well as to amend LARR.
