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The Indian Communists are incorrigible. They neither learn from their own experience nor from that of their fatherlands in China and Russia. These economic Neanderthals are determined to enforce their obsolete world view on the Manmohan Singh Government. China might have embraced pragmatism in economic sphere to improve the lot of its teeming millions.
Russia might have dug the grave of dogmatic Marxist-Leninist economic ideology. But the supposedly high-minded denizens of Ajoy Bhawan and Gopalan Sadan who claim to have the only key available in the whole universe to superior wisdom will not budge an inch from their ancient beliefs written in stone for them by their intellectual gods way back in the 19th century. Time seems to have stood still for the Sitaram Yechuries, Parkash Karats and D. Rajas of the Indian Left who cannot relate their grasp of Marxist theory to the empirical experience of the self-avowedly Communist States in the last century. That communism is another name for corrupt and inefficient statism where politburo fat-cats exploit the misery of the socially, economically and politically starved populations was proved once for all by the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Given half a chance our Communists would replicate that failed model in this country and thus aggravate further the misery of Indians striving to lift themselves up from the back-breaking poverty and ignorance in which half a century of ill-conceived experimentation with socialism had left them.
However, the surprising part is not that the Communists are behaving in an obstreperous manner. Being Communists they cannot be made to re-learn their economic and political theories all over again in the light of the experience of the world at large with their failed dogmas. No, the surprising part is that the Prime Minister and other lesser ministers in the UPA Government are willing to bend over backwards before the bullying Communists.
Since this is not a personal matter between two parties, and involves the well-being of teeming millions, we strongly condemn the Congress ministers' pusillanimity. By surrendering to the repeated blackmail of the Communists, who openly threaten to bite hard into the Congress skin if they are not allowed to have their way, the Congress Party is allowing the Communist tail to determine the path the UPA dog would take. The Government cannot be run smoothly if the Communists are allowed the veto without their being accountable to Parliament. Men like
Yechury, Karat, Surjeet, D. Raja, etc., do not even have the fig-leaf of being MPs to justify their almost daily interference in the policy formation by the UPA Government. These extra-constitutional authorities militate against the sovereignty of the people as expressed through the forum of Parliament.
The Leftists first provided a glimpse of the shape of things to come when they issued their edicts from on high against disinvestment and foreign investment in the early days of the UPA regime. When the Union Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, proposed a hike in the FDI caps in aviation, insurance and telecom sectors, the Left blew its top, and threatened to torpedo the fragile coalition.
Now, Chidambaram was serenading the assorted leftists at extended luncheon meetings, but the hide-bound economic dinosaurs refuse to budge from their stand. There is, apparently, no give in the Communist book, only take. They would extract their pound of flesh for providing support to the Government from outside. This cosy arrangement gives the Communists all power without any responsibility or accountability.
But take the latest flap over the participation of a handful of foreign experts in the current exercise to review the Tenth Plan. The Leftists argue that these experts would compromise the integrity of the Plan process by injecting into it the agenda of their foreign masters, a fear wholly misplaced since it is only a review and not a decision-making process and also that the number of these experts does not exceed more than 15 in a total of over 400. That these foreign experts are Indian and have the welfare of the country of their birth uppermost in their minds is wholly lost on the Communists, whether Indian or not it is hard to say from their obscurantism and obstructionism.
As if on cue from their Communist patrons, five left-leaning experts in the Planning Commission too threatened to resign if the foreign experts were not ejected from it. Deputy Chairman of the Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, initially, believed that he could bring round the Leftists by reasoning out the right and wrong of foreign experts with them, but once he realized how close-minded these people were he was obliged to allow the foreign experts to withdraw from the review panels.
The Leftist politicians and their economic experts sought the removal of foreign experts from the Plan panels on the principle that `national sovereignty' was essentially `exclusionary' in nature. True enough. In that case what is a foreign, and a failed and long dead, ideology like Communism doing in these parts of the world?
Levity apart, it is utter nonsense to take such a narrow view of national sovereignty when globalised economies thrive on the free movement of technologies, funds and even people across national borders at the click of a computer mouse. China has shown how in the last two decades it has lifted its people from abject poverty and hunger by doggedly pursuing foreign tech and foreign money. It has opened up its economy to FDI.
The World Bank has been co-opted more or less as a partner in the rise and rise of China. But the Indian Communists refuse to learn from the Chinese experience because their role model continues to be the erstwhile failed Soviet model. It is different that in the Communist-led West Bengal the same foreign experts and foreign funds are most welcome.
The Communist hypocrisy coupled
with their economic illiteracy can stop the onward march of India
unless the Prime Minister, the meek and humble Manmohan Singh, musters
the courage to call their bluff.
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