How ironic that the BBC should be running a series called Giants, comparing India and China, at the very moment that our government is making it clear that it will ensure that India is forced back into its earlier pygmy days. How ironic that India should have begun this year by so overwhelming the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos that people still talk of the ‘India Everywhere’ campaign as one of the most successful ever. By the time Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and their Marxist allies have finished with us we will look back on that campaign with nostalgia because it is as if they are conspiring to ensure that we regain the depths of backwardness in which we dwelled in those dark socialist days. A whole new meaning will attach to the acronym OBC when we go back to being just that other backward country.

Ask anyone what India needs from its government and the answer is: infrastructure. From the shining chambers of corporate Mumbai to the poorest mud hut villages of rural India I meet people daily who spell out India’s needs in almost the same words. Bijli, pani, sadak, of course, but also schools, colleges, sanitation, healthcare and housing. Without these things we will continue with the shaming situation of having more than 30 per cent of our people living in conditions so bad that animals in developed countries live better.

Ostensibly it is to help the wretched and the educationally backward that the Government gives us 27 per cent OBC reservation, the tribal rights Bill and the Employment Guarantee Scheme. But look more closely at these efforts and you realise that when implemented they will achieve for India universal backwardness.

... contd.