Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 6, 2007
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/30221.html
Introduction: Dream highways are back to being
built at socialist pace, privatization is on hold-all in the name of aam aadmi
When I was young and impressionable and growing
up in Delhi in the seventies everyone I knew was a leftist of some kind or
other. There were the armchair revolutionaries who lived out their imaginary
revolutions in the dusty corridors of Delhi's universities. There were the
'intellectuals' who worked mostly in newspapers and were full of bombast and
jargon. And there were the Naxalites, who, to me, were huge romantic figures
because they were the only ones who had actually seen action. Some had wandered
the countryside looking for landlords to behead, others had been tortured
in Calcutta's jails. I remember hearing these tales of politics and passion
on terraces in Nizamuddin and Hauz Khas on endless hot evenings filled with
kebabs and cheap rum.
The seventies were when Indian Marxism was
at its zenith. Not only did revolution seem a mere breath away, but there
was a prime minister who was in total leftist thrall - Indira Gandhi. She
nationalised banks because she wanted the proletariat to get loans more easily
than evil capitalists. She abolished the princes and took away their privy
purses because they represented feudalism and other bad things. The Left was
delighted, and even more delighted when she came up with 'Garibi Hatao'. It
was a time of innocence and we did not realise then that poverty could not
be removed by slogans and that nationalised banks were going to be just as
mean about giving loans to the starving masses as private banks.
Things were not working out as the Left said
they would, but they managed to continue controlling economic thinking at
the highest levels of the Indian government, right up to the time when India
became bankrupt and P.V. Narasimha Rao, as prime minister, was forced to end
the licence-quota-permit raj.
Much has changed since. India has prospered
more in the past 15 years than in the 45 that went before, the Soviet Union
has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, Europe has thrown
Marxism in the garbage bin of history, and 'socialist' China gets more foreign
direct investment (FDI) from the Americans than we do, but our Leftist friends
remain magically unchanged. They remain ideologically where they were at the
height of their glory.
They want economic reform to stop and have
succeeded in stopping it by infiltrating Manmohan Singh's government. Those
dream highways have gone back to being built at 'socialist' pace. India is
going to need more than 1,50,000 megawatts of electricity in two years but
there is no sign of reform in our aged power sector. Labour reform remains
unmentionable.
Privatisation is on hold and every time there
is a sign of the government allowing more private or foreign investment in
retail, insurance or whatever, the Left publicly threatens to pull the plug.
They say they do this for the sake of the
'aam aadmi', they say that they speak for those '700 million' Indians who
do not know yet that India is shining. It's a spurious figure. By no stretch
of the imagination can it be said that three quarters of the Indian population
continues to live in absolute poverty, but the figure is tossed around with
the idea that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. Recently,
it was repeated by Mani Shankar Aiyar, who seemed momentarily to forget that
he is a minister in Manmohan Singh's government.
Why is the Left in such a state of hysteria?
What is worrying them so much that their senior leaders have taken to making
the silliest charges like blaming the US for the West Bengal government's
problems in Nandigram? Could there be method in this Marxist madness?
When it comes to the Left, I am a conspiracy
theorist. I believe that our Marxist friends are working to an agenda whose
objective is to ensure that India's economic reforms stall sufficiently for
China to not be threatened in any way. China is 20 years ahead of us anyway,
and mostly because it abandoned socialist economic policies at least 10 years
before we did. It has already made the reforms we are still struggling to
make, but what is all right for China is not good for India unless it's West
Bengal. This seems to be the Marxist view and we ask too few questions.
I have words left for only two or three. Why
is the proletariat in West Bengal still in such bad shape that the 'aam aadmi'
has almost no access to such basic needs as good schools and hospitals? Why,
after 30 years of Marxist rule, is West Bengal so far from becoming a proletariat
paradise? Why is the war against poverty nowhere near being won?
