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BY JM
 If
you thought a record electoral show and the resultant
power through the backdoor reformed Indian communists,
you are fooled. They haven’t. They are still frogs in
the wells, and very happily so. The latest sorry story
over the clamour for resignation of foreign experts from
plan panel consultative committees underscores this.
The paranoid lefties who felt national sovereignty
threatened due to proximity to foreign experts were
Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas
Issac and CP Chandrashekhar. Communists, defenders of
the country's territorial waters and collaborators during
war with China, who owed allegiance to the Soviet Union
for intellectual manna for decades suddenly felt waves
of imperialism lashing Indian shores. The trigger was
the inclusion of certain consultants and experts from
foreign institutions like McKinsey, World Bank and ADB.
The lefties shot off a letter to Montek Singh Ahluwalia,
deputy chairman of planning commission, to withdraw the
foreign spies and collaborators. When the CPM economists
threw a tantrum, the foreign bourgeois experts
immediately withdrew their membership from the councils.
The red warriors raring for a revolution felt cheated.
It is interesting to note that Mr Thomas Issac, one of
the sovereignty defenders, has been attacked by
fellow-Marxists in the intense faction-fight in the CPM
in Kerala for having colluded with the multilateral
agencies in the state's decentralisation programme.
The red-ink letter reads: "The planning commission,
which you say must listen to a range of views, is not a
debating society. It is an organ of the Indian state. A
sovereign state is necessarily exclusionary, in the
sense that its organs must exclude personnel owing
allegiance to, or under its control/patronage of a
foreign state. There can be absolutely no doubt that the
World bank and the ADB are under the control of foreign
state. Inducting their personnel, therefore, amounts to
taking a step, no matter how tiny, in the direction of
undermining not just the de facto, but also the de jure
autonomy and sovereignty of the Indian state.
"There are, in short, serious differences of approach
between you and us. We cannot, therefore, for the
reasons just mentioned, sit together with the
representatives of these agencies in these committees.
We would urge you, therefore, to reconsider your
decision to have these representatives on these
committees, failing which would have to withdraw from
these bodies."
I fail to understand why the lefty economists were
included in the plan panel bodies in the first place. It
is a misnomer to call them Communist economists because
there is no economy in Communist countries. The
five-year plans themselves were a foreign concept, a
discovery of Josef Stalin, Communist dictator and soviet
leader. I wonder about the fate of Indian communists if
one of them had raised similar objections to ANY of
Stalin's decisions on five-year plans. Communism,
everyone knows, itself is a concept foreign to India. It
was foreign to Soviet Union too, till German
imperialists financed the Russian revolution. All
Marxists leaders of Bolshevik revolution came from
Germany.
Meanwhile, Jyoti Basu, veteran CPM leader and West
Bengal CEO for 24 years, run amok in Kolkata, blasting
Monek Singh for being a World bank man. Lucky he wasn't
called a bogeyman. "He belongs to the World Bank. He
needs to change his mindset," Basu thundered.
But the Communists are so cute. The same day Basu went
ballistic, the Economic Times carried an interview with
West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, where
Buddha strongly defended foreign funds and private
investment. "Amar to FDI chai" he asserted, meaning
'I
MUST HAVE FDI'. While Marxist Buddha's bold attempts at
reforming the state are showing results -- those in
queue for investments include Wipro, Infosys, Satyam and
many other foreign spy & collaborator companies --
unfortunately, at the national level, Marxists have
decided to take the Kerala model which has taken the
tiny state into a timeless morass reminiscent of the
Macondo in Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude --
brimming with sovereignty and no practical use.
Power has not made Indian Communists any more
responsible. If at all, it has become made them more
irresponsible than before. At the drop of a hat, Masters
of our Communist Universe -- Sitaram Yechury, Prakash
Karat and HKS Surjeet -- rush to the press. Their love
to be seen and heard in the media reminds one of Preeti
Jain's aggressive courting of the media to claim rape.
They don’t wait to air these issues at the UPA
coordination committee set up precisely to sort out such
intra-alliance issues. They do not pick up the phone and
call Manmohan. They do not pick up the mobile and call
Sonia. As always, Marxist battles are
fought in the public. Why? Because they want to ensure
that the poor members of their trade unions see the
Marxists embroiled in battle, spilling blood, screaming
for the sake of revolution; so the cadre feels confident
- Yes, our leaders are fighters. Yes, our leaders are
fearless.
This was clear when the Marxist
honourables collectively hammered the Sensex by 800
points in a single day with anti-industry remarks just
when the UPA government was being sworn in. It took the
stock market nearly four months to recover from that.
The Marxists have not yet realised that they are now
supporting the ruling party of the country. They are
still caught in rut.
The Marxist letter reads more like a complaint from a
bunch of lazy students to their teacher saying that they
wouldn’t sit in the class along with their smarter
classmates, since there is a difference of approach.
Such students must be caught by the collar and thrown
outside in the larger national interest. Ideological
straitjackets must not hold the country's planning
process to ransom.
BY JM
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