Opinion In the name of the poor

In this newspaper some weeks ago (June 11,2013,http://bit.ly/1bT2yZb) appeared the transcript of a Walk the Talk interview that Shekhar Gupta did with Milind Kamble,who founded the DICCI,and his mentor Chandra Bhan Prasad. I recommend it to anyone who wants proof that the economic reform process has been ‘inclusive’ all along and that nobody needs free markets more than India’s poorest citizens. Listen to this comment from Chandra Bhan Prasad,“Now we see that there is an economic process,that capitalism is changing caste much faster than any human being. Therefore,in capitalism versus caste,there is a battle going on and Dalits should look at capitalism as a crusader against caste.”

The reason why the leftists in Sonia Gandhi’s kitchen cabinet have managed to reverse the economic direction that India took after 1991 was because nobody spoke for reforms. The Prime Minister,a man of silences at the best of times,said nothing and the handful of ministers who believe in the economic reforms said nothing either. As for the supposedly ‘right wing’ Bharatiya Janata Party,it became the loudest cheerleader for every regressive new law that Sonia’s National Advisory Council came up with. And,it did not improve matters that major Indian companies were caught colluding with ministers to help politicians become tycoons in their own right.

If anyone had really had a mind to sell ordinary Indians the need for economic reforms,it would have been quite simple to do. The economic benefits that come with highways are easy to explain. The need for officials to be kept out of commercial activity so they can concentrate on improving the quality of public services is easy to explain. And it should be fairly easy to explain that the reason why efforts were made to privatise the coal or power sector is because officials have run these so badly that the country’s resources have been wasted in a criminal way.

Speaking of which,we now have a situation in the Niyamgiri hills in which half-literate Adivasis have been allowed to lay claim to bauxite reserves that are in hills they do not own. They have been allowed to do this on the specious grounds that they believe the Niyamgiri hills are their god. With Rahul Gandhi and a small army of bleeding-heart busybodies on their side,they have been voting in village referendums to ban mining altogether in the Niyamgiri hills. This has been hailed as a victory for democracy without anyone noticing the precedent that is now set.

Tomorrow villagers in Bihar and Jharkhand can refuse coal to be mined on similar grounds and how long is it before gas and oil are forced to remain in the ground or the oceans simply because some bunch of semi-literate villagers decide that mining offends their gods?

What will happen then? What will happen when we run out of foreign exchange to buy the things without which no economy can run,not even the leftist kind? And,why are we in this mess? Well,having thought about it long and hard I have arrived at the conclusion that India has never in all her decades of independence been led by a bunch of political leaders who have failed to understand what the word leadership means. I point my finger not just at Dr Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi,although they are certainly most to blame,but at every political leader in Delhi’s murky corridors of power.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh