BJP should reflect on a significant year-end political reality: that it needs a meaningful, new counter to Congress ’ aggressive retailing of old ideas like blanket farm loan waivers.That experts have trashed the idea of a national holiday on farmers’ bank dues is neither here nor there electorally. Note also that BJP is guilty of the same sin — in UP and Maharashtra. Most important, that BJP lost three governments in states where it’s in direct contest with Congress that made loan waivers the central motif of its campaign.True, post-poll surveys from heartland states don’t demonstrate that it’s singularly loan waiver that powered Congress to three victories. Media reports on a Lokniti survey show that BJP was close to Congress in terms of farmer support in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. And that dissatisfaction on account of poor crop prices is a central concern. Also, crucially, there’s high awareness of the Centre’s many welfare schemes.It’s easy to conclude from this that a Congress promise of nationwide farm loan waiver may not seriously harm BJP’s prospects, provided the ruling party can get a fix on delivering better minimum support prices (MSP) and improve the delivery mechanism of its many welfare schemes.Easy, but probably wrong. There’s very little chance that in the time left for general elections, the Centre can make meaningful upgrades in implementation of either MSP or welfare programmes. Plus, the elephant in the room as far as rural discontent goes is declining rural real wages (wages in money terms adjusted for current price levels that indicate wage earners’ purchasing power).It’s not often discussed — that pretty much after Narendra Modi came to office, real rural wage growth has been in negative territory. An RBI working paper of April 2018 by Sujata Kundu, quoted in the graphics, identifies three phases in rural real wage growth.From January 2002 to September 2007, real rural wage growth was mostly negative. From October 2007 to October 2013, there were several months when growth in real rural wages was impressively positive.But starting around November 2014 (BJP came to power in May 2014) and continuing till now, growth in real rural wages has been frequently negative, even though inflation fell. That is, growth in rural wages in money terms was low enough so that wage earners’ purchasing power fell even with slower rates of price increase.There seems to be no credible data set that links rural voting patterns to negative real rural wage growth. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a very substantial proportion of the rural voting population is suffering from stagnant or falling income that’s not directly addressable by better MSPs or better welfare schemes, even assuming the Centre can perform heroically on these two fronts.Of course, a farm loan waiver doesn’t address stagnant or declining rural wage income either, or make any difference to farmer incomes. But here’s the difference. Congress is the Opposition peddling a populist idea to rural voters, who may not be incandescently angry with BJP but find their economic situation much less comforting than they want it to be.It’s entirely possible for a challenger to get more brownie points from voters on the basis of a freshly circulated old idea than the incumbent, who’s retailing ideas that voters have heard for five years. This is how electoral politics sometimes works, and BJP, which has exploited voter dissatisfaction with great finesse and quite cleverly repackaged some Congress ideas on welfare and delivery mechanisms, should know this.Also, BJP should remember that while Congress may have a long way to climb to get a respectable number of Lok Sabha seats, the latter has many potential pre- and post-poll allies, and it won’t mind being part of a messy government. BJP has fewer current and potential future allies, and only a short slip from its 2014 performance may make it impossible for it to form the kind of non-messy government it would want.Therefore, as we argued at the beginning, BJP needs to bring to battle a new idea. Or rather, throw its political weight behind an existing idea that’s never been seriously part of campaign discourse: a universal basic income (UBI) scheme.Literally, UBI means the government transfers a sum of money at regular intervals to all citizens. In practice, in India, an UBI should target low-income classes and the poor (estimates vary between 60% and 75% of the population). There’s considerable literature on how UBI will work in India, and whether it should be adopted, including an excellent chapter in the Economic Survey of 2016-17.What works for UBI is that, if properly targeted, it eliminates funds leakage and huge state- and district-level performance variations that’s inevitable with all welfare schemes. It provides low-income citizens with spendable money and has 100% bang for buck efficacy for welfare funds. It avoids systemic distortions that farm loan waivers impose. And, politically, it is easily saleable.The main constraint is fiscal. Some big-ticket welfare schemes will have to be axed if a meaningful, nationwide UBI is to be rolled out. Also, means-testing of beneficiaries will have to be first rate. There’s too little time for the Centre to design, far less implement, a nationwide UBI scheme before general elections.But for campaign purposes, BJP doesn’t need a nationwide rollout. A well-designed pilot scheme in chosen districts, accompanied by a blaze of political publicity, is enough to take to voters, with the promise that re-election will lead to an across-India UBI programme.This is not at all undoable. And it may be the best chance for BJP to get back the edge it has lost in its campaign pitch to the aam aadmi.