Opinion Skulduggery or stupidity?

So unaccustomed have we become to good news on the economic and political front that last week,a spectacular bit of good news went almost unnoticed

September 2, 2012 02:47 AM IST First published on: Sep 2, 2012 at 02:47 AM IST

So unaccustomed have we become to good news on the economic and political front that last week,a spectacular bit of good news went almost unnoticed. The rating agency,Crisil Ltd,reported that for the first time ever rural Indians were spending more than those of us who live in cities and towns. The number of rural households that own a television has nearly doubled in the past five years as have those that own a motorcycle or a scooter. I would like to add here that on my travels in rural India,I very rarely come across a family who does not own at least one cellphone. This remarkable surge in rural prosperity would simply not have been possible if the economy had not been liberalised and it would be even more remarkable if governments had matched it with an equal improvement in public services. This has not happened.

As someone who spent my impressionable years as a reporter in those socialist times when the Indian economy never grew at more than 3 per cent,I feel it is my bounden duty to remind you what rural India looked like then. I remember that most villages were so poor that it was not possible to find a single pucca house or a shop that sold more than food grain,spices,oil and rough cloth. If there was electricity,it disappeared for several hours a day and clean water was so rare that if you came across adequate supplies in a village,it came as a pleasant surprise. All you needed to do was leave the boundaries of Delhi to come upon villages that had never heard of televisions or telephones.

It was after 1991 when our socialist policies brought us to the edge of bankruptcy that the government was forced to loosen state controls on the economy and it was this liberalisation that resulted in the dramatic changes we have seen in the past twenty years. It is private enterprise that has fuelled the change but ever since Shri Vinod CAG Rai became the arbiter of Indias future,there has been an outpouring of venom against the private sector. Since coalgate,most political commentators on our news channels have joined crusaders against corruption,Supreme Court judges and Opposition politicians to demand that the commanding heights of the economy be returned into the supposedly able hands of officials and politicians.

Personally,I have found this bewildering and bizarre considering that it is because of criminal negligence on the part of officials that valuable national resources were wasted in the first place. If Shri CAG could calculate the losses caused by the underground fires that have for decades been burning up our best reserves of coking coal in Jharia,he might come up with a figure that would exceed the losses he says were caused by coal mines being given to private companies. Had the Jharia mines been owned by a private companies,they would have almost certainly found a way to put the fires out rather than allow billions of tonnes of valuable coking coal to be destroyed.

Officials have shown that they do not care about these things. As their political masters have shown,they care more for votes than the loss of our national wealth. Is public memory so short that we have forgotten that more than ninety per cent of our public sector companies have never made a profit? It was because of this that a hesitant sort of privatisation was permitted at all but from the general reaction to CAG reports,it is clear that most Indians continue to believe that private enterprise is evil and the public sector the embodiment of goodness.

So there have been in recent weeks raucous demands in media and political circles for the coal blocks allotted to private companies to be taken back by government. And,given into whose charge? Officials? It has seemed to me as I have watched those interminable primetime television shows that a dangerous madness has taken hold of us. Or,perhaps,something far more sinister is going on. As someone who began my career as a journalist in the seventies when the Soviet Union owned several ministers in the Government of India,I am a believer in conspiracy theories. So it would not surprise me even a little if I discovered that the enemies of India have colluded with our enemies within India to whip up a frenzy against the very economic policies that have brought the only prosperity we have seen in 65 years as an independent nation.

For obvious reasons I cannot name names but I am sure that some day soon someone like the KGB spymaster,Vasili Mitrokhin,will emerge from the murky shadows of international skulduggery to write a book that will reveal all. May that day come before our economic ruin.

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