With the BJP deciding to stop focussing aggressively on its swadeshi platform several months ago, expectedly, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance's election manifesto which was released by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee says much the same things as the Congress' on eliminating bureaucratic controls and freeing up industry and agriculture, getting the government to divest its stake in public sector units, and so on.

BJP activists, in fact, argue that the Congress manifesto, released three days before their party's, has actually stolen several progressive ideas from the BJP. But given that the Congress began the reforms process, that's a bitof a chicken-and-egg kind of situation.

If the Congress manifesto, to cite one such example, talked of setting up an Expenditure Management Commission, then this is something that Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha first spoke of in his Budget in February -- for some strange reason, though, the BJP's manifesto doesn't mention this though. Similarly, both manifestoes promise to explore the possibility of getting Parliament to pass a law to put a ceiling on the kind of fiscal deficit that any government can possibly run -- both parties term it the `Fiscal Responsibility Act'.

Nor are the similarities restricted to just this. Some of the specific numbers are the same, giving rise to the possibly unjustified suspicion that both manifestoes have been made by the same person, with minor modifications to suit each party's image! What is the ideal amount of foreign direct investment that we should be targeting annually? The Congress manifesto puts the number at around $ 8 billion to $ 10 billion, as compared tothe $3 billion that we get right now. Surprise, surprise. The BJP, which says it rejects both `the old leftist approach' as well as `the rightist approach', says we should target to get foreign direct investment of $10 billion!

It gets better. The Congress promises economic growth of `7 per cent to 8 per cent per year', the BJP thinks it can get `7-8 per cent'. Both parties agree education is vital if India wants to make it big in the next millennium, both feel that spending 6 per cent of the country's GDP on education will achieve this.

Ironically, even when it comes to the bad news, both party's manifestoes are remarkably similar -- both duck uncomfortable questions on how their targets or aims are to be met. And if the Congress appears to be more vulnerable on this count, it's only because they've really stuck their neck out to give concrete targets. While talking of fiscal deficits, for instance, the Congress has promised to cut the combined deficit of the Centre and states to 4 per cent of GDP infour years (it's around 9 per cent right now) -- the BJP has confined itself to saying it will `control deficits'.

But while the Congress talks of slashing deficits in four years, it still talks of ensuring that the terms of trade are always kept in favour of agriculture -- in the short run, this can be done primarily by constantly hiking procurement prices for agricultural produce, and hence hiking farm subsidies. Similarly, the BJP talks of controlling deficits, but instead of slashing subsidies it talks of implementing subsidies of all kinds to maximise the benefit to all sections of the agricultural population. While both parties talk of sharply curtailing the role of the public sector, neither is willing to give any specific promise on giving the Disinvestment Commission a statutory status -- if this is done, it would make it impossible for the government to keep ignoring the politically prickly recommendations of the Commission (interestingly, in its manifesto last year, the Congress had promised togive statutory status to the Commission). In terms of the BJP's celebrated jargon, you could call this a case of `calibrated' promises.