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Meet Super PM Sitaram Yechury

Meet Super PM Sitaram Yechury

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.
 


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