Author: Editorial
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date: September 29, 2004
UR: http://www.samachar.com/features/290904-editorial.html
So Jyoti Basu has called the Deputy
Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a `World Bank
man'. And that may be why, the veteran Communist leader seems to argue,
Singh insisted on the participation of the World Bank-IMF experts in the
on-going consultative process undertaken by the Commission to review the
progress of the 10th Plan.
Basu did not have to add that Singh,
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's most trusted aide, helps himself to a very
handsome World Bank pension every month which is many times more than the
meager salary he might be drawing in his present job with the Government
of India. But if we were to extend this line of reasoning, why stop only
at the World Bank-IMF alone? Since college and university education usually
helps to shape one's mindset and behaviour in latter life, Basu and other
comrades who had had the benefit of the Oxbridge education may well be
dubbed `British patriots'.
In any case, for decades close observers
of the Indian Left have suspected that senior Communist leaders with privileged
backgrounds have had a soft spot for the erstwhile British imperialist
powers. Whether it had something to do with their intense antipathy towards
Mahatma Gandhi and other icons of the country's peaceful freedom struggle
or towards the revolutionary freedom fighters like Subash Chandra Bose
and Bhagat Singh it was hard to comprehend. But one is certain that a certain
foreign power had dictated the actions of Indian Commies like Basu and
his seniors when the country was waging a mass struggle to throw away the
foreign yoke.
The short point is that it does
not lie in the mouth of someone like Basu to hand out certificates of patriotism
to well-meaning Indians whose heart and mind is in the right place, something
which can hardly be said for a man who despite 17 years of uninterrupted
rule in West Bengal could not ensure the basic amenities of `roti, kapda
aur makan' to `aam aadmi' in his State.
How small-minded Basu could be,
Congressmen would do well to remember, can be gauged from the fact that
not long ago he had contemptuously dismissed their leader, Sonia Gandhi,
with a shrug of his hand as `that woman' whose right place, he had then
insisted, was in her home. Or maybe a foreign-educated leader who has embraced
a foreign ideology can only see his fellow Indians through his own tinted
glasses.
It is absurd in the extreme to dub
Montek a `World Bank man' merely because he had the right credentials and
qualifications to get the coveted World Bank assignments to get which most
left- oriented economists would probably give an arm and a leg each.
We have argued in these columns
before that the Plan review is a mere consultative process, that the role
of the `outsiders' can at best be advisory and that their number is so
small that even if they wanted to they could not, would not, jeopardise
the integrity of the Plan process.
Indeed, when Indians attain success
abroad they seem to get more patriotic than some of the senile old men
who having spent a lifetime exploiting the poor, toiling masses seemed
to have forgotten how to lift them from extreme misery and destitution.
As reports have pointed out there are any number of serving and former
World Bank \ IMF men who have had an important role to play in shaping
the country's economic policies.
Why, even Ashok Mitra, who was the
West Bengal Finance Minister for a couple of years in the late 70s was
a former World Bank man. The present Finance Minister of West Bengal, Ashim
Dasgupta, too has been a consultant with the World Bank and if we know
it right he did not spurn his generous fees in US dollars for the services
rendered.
Will the pope of Indian Communists
please ensure that Dasgupta, who like Montek is a `World Bank man' is ejected
out of the Left Front Ministry immediately? Meanwhile, if the whole controversy
over the so-called foreign experts sounds phoney and cheap, it is the Left
which is squarely to blame. For they have no cogent, tenable case to make
against `foreign'consultants.
The Left is on its own trip ever
since it ended up with 60odd seats in the Lok Sabha due to the failure
of the nationalist groups to meet its challenge in a forthright manner.
The politics of pressure and blackmail it has practised since will erode
the credibility of the UPA Government. Unless the Prime Minister and others
in the Congress Party stop serenading these tin-pot soldiers of a failed
ideology, the UPA Government cannot deliver on any front economic, social,
political, et al.
