Opinion Set the record right

So the great pro-poor party gets stymied in Singur and Nandigram.

It was Rajagopalachari and Masani (not leftists,but thinkers genuinely concerned about “Nyaya” for the poor) who had pointed out that the fundamental right to property protects the poor more than the rich. The rich never had a problem with the leftist permit-licence “Niti”. The empiricist in Sen should be aware that some forty years ago the Dutt and Hazari Commissions established that moneyed business houses benefited most from the crony capitalism inherent in the policies that the Left would like to revive today. If we had listened to Rajaji and Masani and not to the Left,“property” would still be a fundamental right and the common law principle that the state cannot take from Peter to give to Paul would have prevailed. To attempt to take from a poor peasant to give to an Indonesian chemical firm or an

Indian automobile firm would not have been permissible. But since “property” is not a fundamental right our executive branch need have no fears in pursuing reverse Robin Hood policies of taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Then and now it is Rajaji,Masani and their intellectual

descendants who have been on the side of both right “Niti” and “Nyaya”.

The Left parties in India,including in the Marxist paradise of West Bengal,support the unions of school teachers and in turn derive support from them. It turns out that half these teachers do not come to work (more so in poorer neighbourhoods) and about three-quarters of them send their own children to private schools where teachers who are paid at a level that is a third of government school salaries routinely come to work and actually teach children. Can supporting these union members be reconciled in any way with either “Niti” or “Nyaya”? Well-meaning admirers of the Left like Sen’s Bhadralok friends send their own children to private English-medium schools as do the unionised teachers and yet the Left is all-out against any meaningful voucher system that could give poor parents the same access. To make matters worse,in a fit of regional chauvinism (and the Left Front in West Bengal is definitely chauvinist — why else would the Hindustanis,as migrants from UP and Bihar are referred to,vote en masse against the Left Front?),it eliminated English from the curriculum of government schools some years ago. This is not just absence of “Nyaya”; this is pernicious “Adharma” violating the Rawlsian principle of “fairness”.

Sen has noted that one of the positive fallouts of high economic growth is growth in government revenues which can then be deployed in imaginative anti-poverty programmes like the NREGA. One of the engines of high growth in the last decade and a half has been the computer software industry. Many of us have not forgotten that the Left parties bitterly opposed computers and delayed their introduction for years on end. One could argue that they set the whole growth process back for at least a generation. It is really ironical today to meet an old trade union veteran of the leftist persuasion who sheepishly admits that both his daughter and son-in-law are computer programmers. And that’s just what happened to me the other day!

The final nail in the coffin of leftist pretensions has been driven in by two recent data points. The Sachar Commission tells us that Muslim citizens in West Bengal are on every count worse off than their counterparts in most other states,not excluding much-maligned Gujarat. And West Bengal has been virtually the last state in implementation of the NREGA. So much for the Left’s concern for “Nyaya” for Muslim citizens or the rural poor!

Professor Sen: You have just written what could be the most

important treatise in political philosophy of the first decade of this century. Please do us a favour and do yourself one. Do not praise the Left and confer on “adharmic anyayis” the respectability they do not deserve.

The writer divides his time between Mumbai,Lonavla and Bangalore jerry.rao@expressindia.com