What do we achieve by these bandhs?

What do we achieve by these bandhs?

A clever friend of mine looked at me on Bharat bandh day and said deadpan, 'So what happens now? From tomorrow do all prices come down?' Brilliantly put, I thought, the futility of NDA's July 5 agitation summed up in a single sentence.
The NDA partners are probably black and blue from patting themselves on the back, but what exactly did the bandh achieve? It showed that in Opposition-controlled states like Bengal, Gujarat and Karnataka, NDA partners can shoot themselves in the foot without any problem. As for Congress-ruled states, the bandh was partial except where parties who excel in violence, as in Maharashtra, led the agitation.
Political protest of this kind is now clearly outdated in the age of the electronic media, Twitter, blogs and all the other tools available to propagate your views. ('But what about rural areas,' someone is bound to say. 'People there don't have access to these modern tools.' Yes, but they don't have bandhs either; a bandh is a purely urban phenomenon).
A bandh though is absolutely suited to political parties like the BJP and CPM, outdated tools for outdated parties, political parties on opposing sides of an ideological divide but united by being frozen in time. Even Mahatma Gandhi, if he were alive today, would have jettisoned stoppage of work of the bandh type and gone on to evolve new strategies. But what do you expect of entities which still swear by Ram Rajya and Marx / Lenin?
But even antediluvian political parties must know basic economics. Which means that the states that get hurt the most are the ones run by the Opposition parties, since the bandh is most successful there! So the incredible strategy devised by the NDA 'Brains Trust' (the inverted commas are important) is: Let's harm ourselves as much as possible!
Bandhs are singularly 'successful' in another way: they do maximum damage to the very people they are supposed to help ie the poor. Most economic activities don't suffer as much as CII, FICCI, Assocham and other bodies would have us believe. That's because if a factory is shut down for 8 hours on bandh day, it will raise its output / work overtime to make up for the reduction in production.
But the ones who cannot make up for the day's stoppage of work are the poorest of the poor in urban areas: beggars, for example. Or unskilled daily wage earners like hand-cart pushers or porters and the like. Even semi-skilled or skilled workers suffer if they are self-employed or work from day to day.
The economist Bibek Debroy has rubbished the claims of industry associations about bandh losses. Their figures are: CII (Rs3,000 crore), FICCI (Rs13,000 crore) and Assocham (Rs10,000 crore). He puts the loss at a realistic Rs250 crore. That figure may pale before the industry estimates but it isn't exactly peanuts. More important, that Rs250 crore comes out of the pocket of India's 14 million daily wage-earners and to some extent the country's 21 million self-employed. And these are the people the NDA was fighting its bandh battle for!
In all the discussions and post-mortems on the bandh, there's one name that has not even been mentioned in passing. This is remarkable, because he more than anyone else in the country, has been responsible for the price escalation that was the basic reason for the bandh. That man is Sharad Pawar, who has presided over the ministries of agriculture, consumer affairs and food and public distribution. He has served the interests of neither the producer (the farmer), nor the consumer. Pawar has now asked the PM to 'reduce his burden.' The PM should take that request seriously and relieve Pawar of all his burdens and let him stick to his beloved cricket.
Unfortunately the compulsions of coalition politics will not allow that. So we are in for more untenable price rises, and senseless bandhs.`