Things were not working out as the Left said they would, but they managed to continue controlling economic thinking at the highest levels of the Indian government, right up to the time when India became bankrupt and P.V. Narasimha Rao, as prime minister, was forced to end the licence-quota-permit raj.

Much has changed since. India has prospered more in the past 15 years than in the 45 that went before, the Soviet Union has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, Europe has thrown Marxism in the garbage bin of history, and ‘socialist’ China gets more foreign direct investment (FDI) from the Americans than we do, but our Leftist friends remain magically unchanged. They remain ideologically where they were at the height of their glory.

They want economic reform to stop and have succeeded in stopping it by infiltrating Manmohan Singh’s government. Those dream highways have gone back to being built at ‘socialist’ pace. India is going to need more than 1,50,000 megawatts of electricity in two years but there is no sign of reform in our aged power sector. Labour reform remains unmentionable.

Privatisation is on hold and every time there is a sign of the government allowing more private or foreign investment in retail, insurance or whatever, the Left publicly threatens to pull the plug.

They say they do this for the sake of the ‘aam aadmi’, they say that they speak for those ‘700 million’ Indians who do not know yet that India is shining. It’s a spurious figure. By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that three quarters of the Indian population continues to live in absolute poverty, but the figure is tossed around with the idea that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. Recently, it was repeated by Mani Shankar Aiyar, who seemed momentarily to forget that he is a minister in Manmohan Singh’s government.

... contd.