Opinion The CPI guns for Manmohan Singh
It seems the CPM and the CPI hold divergent views when it comes to deciding the line of attack against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the context of his alleged inaction on the 2G spectrum issue.
It seems the CPM and the CPI hold divergent views when it comes to deciding the line of attack against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the context of his alleged inaction on the 2G spectrum issue. The CPM has shied away from raising questions on his integrity,but the CPI has gone on an all-out attack against the PM. The latest edition of its weekly,New Age,says an attempt is being made to shield the PM by claiming that he had written to former Telecom Minister A. Raja and he was satisfied with the reply. Actually the PM went out of the way in defending the erring minister saying that he has followed the procedures laid down by the previous government… The second argument is that Manmohan Singh is an able administrator whose integrity cannot be questioned. This is sheer nonsense. The biggest share market scam,the Harshad Mehta episode,happened when Manmohan Singh was the finance minister under P.V. Narasimha Rao. The duo initiated the so-called economic reforms that led to the scam.
It adds that the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) that enquired into the Harshad Mehta episode in its report specifically commented adversely about Singh not being able to pre-empt the multi-crore scam. Now the apex court also has come to the same conclusion. It has almost charged the PMO for not taking pre-emptive measures and showing an aptitude for inaction in curbing corruption, it says.
Liberalisation breeds corruption
With the CAG report on 2G spectrum licence allocation saying that Rs 1,76,000 crore was lost to the exchequer,the CPI(ML) argues in its weekly ML Update that about 12 times that sum has been illegally siphoned off from India to Switzerland and other tax havens since independence. To back up its claim,the article says that US-based research body Global Financial Integrity has estimated that between 1948 and 2008,India has been drained of $462 billion (over Rs 20 lakh crore) in this way.
The more interesting fact is that,growing at 11.5 per cent a year,nearly half of this amount exited the country after 1991,and about a third of the outflows occurred between 2000 and 2008. What this demonstrates is that the decline of the quota-permit raj yesteryears convenient whipping boy for rampant corruption did not lead to any decline in the menace. Quite to the contrary. All-pervasive liberalisation and globalisation have thrown the floodgates of corruption wider open,bolstering the black economy and further degrading the quality of politics in India, it says.
Selling agriculture to America
The CPM is of the view that the US newfound cooperation with India in the field of agriculture was heavily loaded in favour of predatory agribusinesses mainly based in the US,while Indias ruling classes also pushed the agenda of Indian corporate houses.
An article in Peoples Democracy argues this real motive can be gauged if one looks at the composition of the India-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture,which determines the direction of the cooperation. US monopolies in seed,food and retail trade,namely Monsanto,Archer-Daniels-Midland and WalMart,have representation on the KIAs board,in addition to the present-day incarnation of the erstwhile Imperial Tobacco Company and others like FICCI and CII,representing the interests of Indian businesses. Ironically,the board meant to deal with agriculture does not have a single representative of the peasantry, it says.
The five-year-old KIA had come to an end in March,but is all set to get a three-year extension,as the agriculture ministry took up the issue with the US authorities. This,it says,is despite the parliamentary committee on agriculture asking the ministry to review the implementation and achievements of the initiative and concluding that it failed to spend much,as grants offered by the US were not available.
While this was the reality,US MNCs have used the opportunity and managed to infiltrate all Indian centres for agricultural research and policy-making structures. Although the KIA appears to be in cold storage for the time being,it succeeded in promoting unwanted US technologies in several farm universities and research centres,and also got the farm gates opened to American agribusinesses, it says. This subversion of research and the dilution of university autonomy through forced collaboration systematically strengthened the US unbridled access to Indian agriculture. The direction of agricultural research in the country is now being altered to cater to the needs of MNCs driven by profit. Peasant agriculture is being sidelined by promoting technologies tailor-made to benefit corporate agriculture, it says.
Compiled by Manoj C.G.
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