Poll promises can become political nightmares

Poll promises can become political nightmares

Mangalore Today News Network

By Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon

Mangaluru, Oct 18, 2025: In all democratic countries, electoral campaigns provide politicians with platforms to articulate grandiose transformative visions and promises filled with hope, development goals, and reform narratives. However, the translation of these grandiose promises into tangible outcomes becomes a big challenge, due to paucity of funds, no fresh taxation avenues, and high corruption in the well-entrenched bureaucracy, apart from other factors. 

RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, has dropped a bombshell by promising to enact a law, that if voted to power in next month’s Assembly elections, he will ensure that each family in the state has a government job! Tejashwi, the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, said the proposed Act would be brought “within 20 days of formation of the new government”. “My first announcement after the election notification is that whichever Bihar family has no government job, we will bring a new law to ensure one. They (the NDA) have not given any jobs, but once we form the government, we will enact a new law within 20 days and ensure that all such families get a government job within 20 months of our government’s formation,” he said.

It is very obvious that the RJD leader has made a thoughtless promise, without doing proper evaluation of the present and future burden on the state’s exchequer. The promise that each and every family would get a government job is simply a Utopian dream. How many fresh vacancies have to be created? The salary bill of the employees itself is bound to be staggering, are there sufficient resources? Will fresh taxes have to be imposed? What about the pension burden?

There is no official data on the total number of government jobs in Bihar, government sources estimate that there are 26.5 lakh government employees in the state. As per the 2023 caste survey, there are 2.76 crore families in Bihar, whose overall population is around 13 crores. Even making a modest guess, the state government has to get ready to create a minimum of 2 crore new jobs, either by expanding existing departments or creating new departments! 

The persistent disparity between electoral campaign rhetoric and actual governance outcomes reveals a consistent pattern where campaign promises collapse into negative tones during actual governance, thereby signalling broken promises and increasing public disillusionment. This dissonance creates a growing gap between political rhetoric and governance reality, fuelling voter apathy, corroding democratic integrity, and creating democratic fatigue. 

The performance of the Karnataka government is an eye-opener. A slew of freebies was announced with great fanfare, and the electorate lapped it up greedily. Once in power, the new government realised that such freebies were simply not practical. The consequence was to finance these freebies, by drastic revision of existing tariffs on electricity, water, milk, property tax, land tax, entertainment tax, road tax, and green tax. The local bodies also had to add fresh increased levies. Bridging the rhetoric–reality gap cannot happen overnight. 

As the elections approach, the choice is not merely between candidates, but between two paradigms of governance, populist theatrics versus strategic, accountable leadership. Leaders must remember that the true test of power lies not in grandiose promises, but in performance. Campaigns may win votes, but only genuine delivery can win trust.

This is an age of vision-driven developmentalist narratives that rely on visions of linear progress. Politicians need to account for ways to explain undelivered and uncertain promises, collapsed industries, and growing unemployment. Bihar’s most powerful politicians, and political families are a small group, many of whom know one another socially, and many of whom have served in government together over the years. The muted background narrative of Bihar politics is that access to government power has made some communities rich while others stay perpetually poor, and politicians stand accused of fostering that narrative, constantly stirring up casteism to win office and pitching ordinary Biharis into frequent caste-wars.

Politicians are blamed, too, for the widespread use of gifts, and cash handouts, in elections – buying votes for a few hundreds of rupees and a bottle of liquor, and then going on to abuse their elected office to enrich themselves through corruption. Bihar’s elections then, appear as the ruthless game of leaders who pursue power at the expense of their people, not on their behalf. 

If election campaigns become a mela of only dramatic promises, then the electorate will be in for a major disappointment. No jobs can be created overnight. Prices will not drop overnight. Voting is just a small sprint, but economic growth is unfortunately a marathon. Deng Xiaoping, former Minister of Finance of the People’s Republic of China, had made an interesting observation “The United States brags about its political system, but the President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves”. Elections in democracies whether in Bihar or USA follow the same model, make reckless promises and later forget about it, and finally disown it.

As Antonin Scalia, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States puts it “Campaign promises are – by long democratic tradition – the least binding form of human commitment”

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Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon, IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics)

Former Director General of National Academy of Customs Indirect Taxes and Narcotics & Multi-Disciplinary School Of Economic Intelligence India; Fellow, James Martin Centre For Non Proliferation Studies, USA; Fellow, Centre for International Trade & Security, University of Georgia, USA; Public Administration, Maxwell School of Public Administration, Syracuse University, U.S.A.; AOTS Scholar, Japan. He can be contacted at shreemenon48@gmail.com