Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: October 17, 2004
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=57090
Introduction: Foreign advisors to
the Planning Commission in Delhi are anti-India and anti-people but foreign
advisors to the West Bengal Government are pro-people. FDI is a threat
to India's sovereignty at barely $5 billion a year but no threat at nearly
$50 billion to China's sovereignty and foreigners wanting to invest in
West Bengal are more than welcome. All of this is such rubbish that the
Prime Minister should stand up to the Comrades and expose their hypocrisies.
Instead, when they get really aggressive he invites them to breakfast.
This week's column has an unlikely
hero. Anupam Kher. As the latest victim of ''detoxification'', he was sacked
from the Censor Board last week but decided not to go gently. He called
a press conference to speak out against the Marxian machinations of Comrade
Harkishen Singh Surjeet whom he charged with being the man behind his dismissal.
He was considering legal action against said Comrade, he added, because
he had called him an RSS man and as someone who did not subscribe to any
political ideology he saw this as calumny. Before any of the hacks could
ask what was so alluring about the Censor Board that he should not leave
quietly, he said he was doing well as an actor and did not need the Censor
Board job but believed it was ''time to take a stand''. When he said this
I wanted to reach into the TV screen and shake him by the hand.
At last someone has dared say what
we should have been saying months ago. It is time to take a stand against
Comrades Surjeet, Basu, Yechury, Dasgupta, et al. Time to denounce them
for the bunch of hypocrites they are. With starvation deaths reported (in
this newspaper) from West Bengal, India's longest ruled Marxist State,
who are these Comrades to speak for the ''people''? Who are they to speak
for anyone? Yet, not a day goes by when they do not have some new rap on
the knuckles to administer to the Sonia-Manmohan coalition.
Admitted that the government survives
on Marxist life support but if the Marxists are ''outside supporters''
then they need to stop behaving as if it is they who are in government
and the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi their factotums. Uncertainty over
who really rules us is already an internal affliction of this government
with not even Cabinet ministers being sure. So, when the Home Minister
thinks, as he did last week, that he is about to lose his job he runs off
to plead with Sonia and not the Prime Minister. When ministers are unsure
of policy matters they do the same, which makes governance much more complicated
than it already is, so if the Marxists want the government to survive they
must stop acting as if they were trying to pull it down.
Unless this is what they are secretly
trying to do. Do not be fooled by the aged appearance and white hair of
our Comrades, at heart they remain youthful revolutionaries and could be
using the piggy-back to power in Delhi to try and demolish the bourgeois
State from the inside. It's been so long since I paid attention to Leftist
talk that I only half remember the jargon and the plotting from a time
in the early seventies when I hung about on the edges of a group of hardcore
Lefties. There were Marxists and quasi-Marxists, naxalities, ex- naxalites
and JNU political theorists and we would gather on the badly-lit terrace
of a barsati in Nizamuddin, drink cheap liquor, smoke cheap cigarettes
and talk revolution. As a wide-eyed, bourgeois, enemy of the people I was
never fully included in the plans but remember hearing much about the destruction
of the bourgeois State from the inside.
Then, of course, all plans for international
revolution went awry with the worldwide collapse of Marxist States but
somehow the changes in Europe and China escaped Indian Marxists. With the
extreme vanity of those who believe they are always right, they lecture
the Sonia-Manmohan government daily on what they call anti-people policies.
But, look even casually at the things they have made such a fuss about
and you will spot the insincerity and the cant. So foreign advisors to
the Planning Commission in Delhi are anti-India and anti-people but foreign
advisors to the West Bengal Government are pro-people. Foreign Direct Investment
(FDI) is a threat to India's sovereignty at barely $5 billion a year but
no threat at nearly $50 billion to China's sovereignty and foreigners wanting
to invest in West Bengal are more than welcome. All of this is such rubbish
that the Prime Minister should stand up to the Comrades and expose their
hypocrisies and their false pieties. Instead, when they get really aggressive
he invites them to breakfast. We see them totter happily off in their ill-fitting
''people's clothes'' and we see them totter out looking happy and well-fed
and then a day later comes another salvo.
The bourgeois State may still be
safe from demolition from the inside but the Congress Party was infiltrated
long ago by the Comrades and their defunct ideology. So, it is hard to
say whether the government's ''detoxification'' drive was Marxist instigated
or not but it certainly has Marxist support. Again, please observe the
shameless hypocrisy. It's alright for West Bengal to ensure that public
servants, teachers, sarpanches, historians, economists and virtually everyone
else connected with government is Marxist but if the RSS tries to do the
same thing it becomes wrong. Will someone explain to me why?
This does not mean that I believe
Anupam Kher is an RSS man. I am sure he tells the truth when he says he
is not but even if he was an RSS man his dismissal would be wrong. The
''detoxification'' drive is a dangerously bad idea because if it becomes
an exercise every new government wastes time on where will it stop? It
would be far more worthwhile to get government out of the business of writing
history books and censoring films but the Comrades would never support
such a move. In the end its not about the ''people'' but about power, and
with this government they have too much power without any responsibility.
It really is time for Sonia Gandhi or the Prime Minister to take a stand.
Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com