Chandrababu Naidu digs into past; brings back failed alternative

The former Andhra Pradesh chief minister recently unveiled his vision document for India and the state in Visakhapatnam. The document titled, ‘India, Indian and Telugus 2047’, prepared by his NGO Global Forum for Sustainable Transformation (GFST) outlines five strategies to make India the number one economy in the world, and to help Andhra Pradesh take a lead role in the proposed Indian growth story by 2047.

This is Naidu’s fourth vision statement. The first, called Vision 2020, was released in 1998. After becoming Andhra Pradesh’s chief minister following its bifurcation in 2014, Naidu had pitched the idea of Vison-2029; he later extended it to 2050. Now, he has come up with Vision-2047 to commemorate India’s Independence in its 100^th year.

‘Shining Hyderabad’ vs ‘failed Andhra’

Preparation for Vision-2047 began when Naidu, much to the surprise of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leaders in Telangana, began praising the economic growth of the state, especially of capital city Hyderabad. Ministers in the state hailed Naidu for finally acknowledging the achievements made by the K Chandrashekar Rao government after the formation of Telangana.

The truth is when Naidu was praising the high per capita income of Telangana, he was not really acknowledging the success story of the state under the KCR government. He, in fact, was highlighting Hyderabad as proof of the technological revolution his Vision-2020, unleashed in the 1990s when he was chief minister of united Andhra Pradesh, had brought.

To simplify it, the TDP chief wants to contrast the example of ‘shining Hyderabad’ with Andhra Pradesh which is yet to have a capital to show the ‘failure’ of the Jagan Mohan Reddy government to have a vision and realise it.

Explaining the need for a long-term vision, Naidu during the release of the Vision-2047 document on Tuesday (August 15), said he once had such a vision and Amaravati was designed to realise the dream.

“That villain (Chief Minister Reddy) has destroyed it,” he said.

Experts say that Naidu released Vision-2047 just to construct a narrative that his earlier Vision-2020 was a great success story and Hyderabad stands testimony to this. His idea was to highlight the fact that Andhra Pradesh had missed this opportunity following his defeat twice, in 2004 and 2019.

Vision-2020: Rise and fall of Naidu

Naidu’s Vision-2020 was a 337-page document, prepared by US consultancy firm McKinsey for a fee of ₹2.5 crore in 1998. The document, though opposed by many ministers, made Naidu a global political star. Both the Indian and Western media started calling him by monikers such as ‘CEO of Andhra Pradesh’, ‘Reformer Chief Minister’, ‘Techno Savvy’, and a model for fellow chief ministers. Time magazine declared him ‘South Asian of the Year’. And the accolades from like Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the World Bank helped him create an image that was at variance with ground reality in the state.

Noted International political commentator and author George Monbiot, who studied the ground reality in Andhra Pradesh around the same time, tore the media-created image of Naidu into smithereens. Analysing the Vision-2020 document, he exposed the destructive elements carefully hidden in the development jargon created by McKinsey.

Writing in The Guardian, in 2004, Monbiot said, “McKinsey’s scheme, Vision-2020, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents quite another. It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state’s hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by user charges. It extols small business but, way beyond the point at which most people stop reading reveals that it intends to ‘eliminate’ the laws that defend them, and replace small investors, who ‘lack motivation’, with ‘large corporations’.

Palagummi Sainath, India’s well-known rural development journalist, was equally strident in exposing how Naidu’s development was really destructive. He showed how Andhra lagged in Human Development Index which made it look like ‘Bihar of South of India’. Sainath had extensively toured rural Andhra Pradesh to probe why so many farmers were committing suicide in ‘CEO’ Naidu’s Andhra Pradesh. “Rural employment fell from 2.40 per cent to 0.29 per cent during Naidu’s era and is a worse decline than seen in the rest of India… The growth of GDP was just around 5 percent for 1994-2001,” he wrote.

The media’s tall claims that Andhra Pradesh was the fastest-growing economy was debunked by the people of the state in 2004, just five years after the release of Vision-2020, when they voted Naidu out of power. In Monbiot words “the voters have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment”.

Vision-2047: Old wine in new bottle

In the past 20 years, Naidu disappeared from the media that once promoted him as a role model for India. His defeat in 2004, his inability to build the Amaravati capital during his tenure as chief minister between 2014 and 2019, and his crushing defeat in 2019 followed by a drastic change in Indian politics seem to have forced Naidu at 75 to invent himself and show voters that he is still relevant.

The result of his endeavours is the Vision-2047 document prepared by his own NGO manned by retired Babus who worked under him. The document appears to have been built on the cut-short story of Vision-2020.

In the document, Naidu enlists five strategies to make India a global leader and Andhra Pradesh a leader in India by 2047. The strategies are: 1. Solar, wind, pumped energy hybrid model democratisation decarbonisation and digitisation, 2. Water secure India, 3. Deep technology and innovative leaders for future 4, Demographic management and P4 model of welfare, and 5. Indian citizens to serve the global economy.

“In order to achieve this, India should focus on the Indian diaspora that is expected to reach 10 crore from the present 1.80 crores in order to direct their investments homeward,” Naidu said and added that India should bear in mind Jews who occupy five places in the list of top 10 billionaires in the world.