Author: Editorial
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date: September 24, 2004
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.
