When I first heard the phrase "Dhan Vapasi" it seemed like a war-cry for the repatriation of funds, affectionately dubbed as black money, stashed by rich Indians in overseas bank accounts in the shady watering holes of the financial world such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. In contrast, Dhan Vapasi called for the repatriation of money – Indian money – from a much closer proximity: from India's governments.
Dhan Vapasi is the brain child of serial tech-entrepreneur Rajesh Jain, one of the masterminds behind the BJP's election campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He is a man of big ideas – one of his other goals is to rewrite the Indian Constitution along of the lines of the American Constitution – and Dhan Vapasi is certainly a very big idea.
Dhan Vapasi is centered around the idea of Public Wealth and the right of every Indian citizen to derive income from it. Public wealth is defined as everything not owned by private parties such as public lands, mineral deposits, forests, public sector undertakings, government guest houses, ambassadors with red sirens, etc.
The argument for Dhan Vapasi rests on the following equation:
When public wealth is suitably and effectively utilized it can create sustainable income for its owners, the Indian public. Due to a combination of historical and political reasons, most of India's public wealth is legally owned and controlled by the Government of India and state governments. Starting from the Chanakya's Arthashastra the ruling classes have tried to usurp and control natural wealth, particularly land, in the name of public welfare. This process was accelerated by the British and hasn't slowed a beat since Independence in 1947. Dhan Vapasi conservatively estimates public wealth in India as Rs. 15 lakh crores (15 followed by 14 zeros!), or roughly Rs. 50 lakh per family.
Governments (states and center) are sitting on this incredible stockpile of public wealth. And yet, instead of effectively utilizing this wealth to generate prosperity for all Indians, Dhan Vapasi claims that governments across all political stripes have done the opposite. They have willfully mismanaged this wealth to enrich their own pockets. Dhan Vapasi claims that such mismanagement and corruption is unavoidable given the improper incentives baked into our political system. To come to power politicians have to spend obscene sums of money and grease multitudes of palms. Once in power, they have a very limited timeframe to recoup this vast investment. This incentivizes public loot for personal enrichment. Public wealth is treated as a cash-cow and on those occasions publicly-run enterprises go belly-up thanks to incompetent administration, the government bails them out using more public money. A case in point is the recent Air India bail-out. There is no reason for the Indian government to run an airlines and yet it continues to prop up a shambolically-run organization.
Convinced that governments cannot be trusted to effectively utilize public wealth for public welfare, Dhan Vapasi calls for the liquidation of most of India's public wealth. It argues for the immediate auctioning of public lands, mineral deposits, privatization of public undertakings, etc. and distributing the generated income to every Indian as an annual payment of Rs. 1 lakh per family. Dhan Vapasi asserts that this income will have transformational benefits to India, including eliminating extreme poverty, generating millions of jobs, reducing the avenues for public corruption, and rendering unnecessary most public assistance schemes.
Dhan Vapasi's website includes a booklet and a deeply informative wiki on India's public wealth. The booklet is rambling, repetitive, long on moral justifications and short on implementation details. It is also self-contradictory in places. For instance, to the question of whether the people can be trusted to responsibly spend the income from Dhan Vapasi, the booklet retorts, "If the people are capable enough to assume the responsibility of choosing their political leaders — that’s democracy — why are they incapable of deciding what they should do with their own wealth?". Dhan Vapasi's invectives against the political system would suggest that the people are clearly incapable of selecting the right political leaders; wouldn't it follow that they cannot be trusted to spend their wealth responsibly?
I see Dhan Vapasi are an interesting garb for a Limited Government manifesto. The movement calls for the complete disentanglement of most of the Government's powers, leaving behind just three – the Army, domestic law & order, and the courts. A Dhan Vapasi Bill has been crafted and the organization appeals to politicians across the political spectrum to rally around this singular objective. Instead of organizing around abstract ideals such as Libertarianism or Classical Liberalism, Dhan Vapasi is a call to organize around an end-product – Rs. 50 lakh per family – and sees Limited Government as a natural fallout of this desirable end-goal.
Though the scheme may seem too simplistic, its true power rests in its simplicity and potential 'to go viral'. Like the war against black money, Dhan Vapasi could become a powerful rallying cry in the public imagination. It is ripe for adoption by anti-establishment movements. Even if the idea of Dhan Vapasi is impractical at a pan-national level, it could be applied to every level of public governance – panchayat, municipal, state, and federal. Could we devolve lands and resources owned ineffectively by city municipal boards? Could we offload government interests in at least a few PSUs? Are there more such low-hanging fruits for Dhan Vapasi?
It is self-evident that the Indian state is too big and too powerful. The remedy cannot be a call to cut it down to the size of a post-card. The government has to do more than just manage the army, the police, and the courts. It has to protect the environment, regulate responsible business practices, promote welfare-schemes for the historically downtrodden, provide basic education and healthcare for the neediest, and more. It remains my hope that by offloading the government of things it need not do, it can better focus on the things it should do.
Further reading:
- An excellent conversation between Amit Varma and Rajesh Jain on The Seen and the Unseen podcast.
- The Dhan Vapasi booklet and wiki.
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