Last week’s Budget brought home to me a sad reality. It was not the Marxist parties who prevented economic reforms from going forward during Dr Manmohan Singh’s last government, it was the Congress Party. This is not just disappointing but scary because now it is certain that India will remain a wretchedly poor, hopelessly backward country well into the middle of this century. We have to alter course if this is not to be the case and the Finance Minister made it clear that not only does he have no intention of altering course but as an admirer of Indira Gandhi’s ‘visionary’ economic policies, he plans to emulate them.

So instead of policies that will create wealth we will return to spending huge amounts of our scarce resources on keeping the poor in poverty. It is my view that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) will serve mostly to keep millions of very poor Indians in perpetual poverty because a hundred days of employment a year can do no more than that. It is my view that the Congress Party did not win 200 seats in the last election because of guaranteeing rural employment but because the average voter was scared of seeing some Mayawati type politician as Prime Minister. Or some aged Hindutva warrior. By comparison, Dr Manmohan Singh and the possibility of Rahul Gandhi as his heir seemed like a better choice. But, halfway through the first hundred days of this government and it is beginning to seem like a return to our bad old socialist days.

... contd.