Thoughts on Rajesh Jain’s(RJ) Free A Billion(FAB)

Check their website here.

The first thing you notice about FAB’s members or their “core operations” team (I think ) is how liberal they all look. A lot more like congress voters all of them than the right wing BJP’s and defnitely not DJT supporters. LOL!

And xavierites all(or most) of them. That college in churchgate named after a mass murderer who only cared about converting hindus and destroying temples. Any wonder that their principle in the past came out against modi and implicitly pleged support for the congress’s failed socialist policies like NREGA.

The princi spoke not a word about the scams of the congress and cited that the anti modi economist amartya sen supports the NREGA scheme.

And given the general trend among most young people I believe the FAB team probably supports NREGA too! lol.

Most of them were basically doing this as an internship or something while in college and probably didn’t have any real heart at understanding economics, capitalism etc.

Yet they were now entrusted with the task to “teach” capitalism to a mass of illiterate people. More precisely they are trying to teach people about the ancient BMC Act of 1819 or 1865, you get the point.

Obviously this isn’t fucking easy at all, a lot of the people who show up to their rallies and meetings were probably illiterate and even the educated ones were not the libertarian types by any stretch.

Further expanding what they are trying to do is to create a pressure group in mumbai who will together vote for the party which agrees to policy and economic reforms such as repealing of that old BMC act and replacing it with a modern one, getting a bill passed so that Mumbai can get an elected mayor with enough powers to run the city, decentralised from the state and centre.

I think their whole plan came unraveled though. Their calls and texts started to dwindle and then most meetings they would plan had to be canceled as no one showed up. Expected and sad. Rajesh Jain easily blew up lot of cash on this.

From the intial plan of coming with a modern replacement Act for the 1819 act and holding meetings with parties and civil societies and then deciding on the the party to vote for which promises the reforms etc they shifted the goal post to vote NOTA. And from the initial volunteer based organization plan they got desperate enough to try to lure people with certificates and cash.

At this stage a lot of questions come up for which there are no easy answers:

1. Rajesh Jain(RJ) has been instrumental in getting modi the 272 seats, is he now no longer a BJP supporter?
2. Deriving from the first question, which political party did FAB plan to vote for was vague from the beginning, they said “one which promises reforms” — well, they all would gladly do that, irrespevtive of the fact that most candidates probably can’t even FUCKING spell REFORM! And the BIG FUCKING JOKE is MODI probably PROMISED THE “Less government more governence reform” to RJ when they were in talks for the 272 seats movement. He got 282 and see what that got us.
3. Now FAB is banging the NOTA drums. Lord knows what NOTA even achieves. There are some rumors out there which state NOTA on getting the maximum votes will result in a re-election. If that is indeed true then that’s a BIG FUCKING problem and NOT something good as widely believed. A re-election will cause massive public money expenditure and nothing else will change anyway. But that’s just a rumor.
   1. What NOTA actually is, is just a registry to register the wish of some citizens to say NOTA and there for the public record. It has no value whatsover other than that.
   2. It does appear that given the huge FB likes FAB now has, NOTA will indeed see a huge surge in the coming BMC elections. But as stated already, will achieve nothing.
4. The reforms FAB wants to bring in, the mayor and repealing acts—can they even be done without constitutional amendments at the state and the centre level? I’m no expert so I’ll just leave this point at that.

In the end it seems like FAB lost all direction on what it is they wanted to do.

And it also is a stark reminder of how little people understand and read on ideas like economic freedom, free markets, capitalism in Mumbai. If this was done country wide there probably would be a huge base of supporters. Maybe that’s what they will do next.