Before some idiots in her party advised her to tone down her attack, lefties of varying hues, from boring A.B. Bardhan to scintillating Subhashini Ali, went on nationwide television to take her on. I thought they looked defensive, unsure and nervous. I think they know that they have blown it. Never before have I seen Hindi newspapers openly charge them with being stooges of China. Politicians of leftist persuasions believe that the vernacular press more accurately reflects public opinion than the ‘elite English press’, so they need to start worrying about the next election. As Sonia Gandhi said in her address to the farmers of Jhajjar, it was time to give these ‘vikas key dushman’ a kick in the teeth. Brava Sonia!

It’s not just because I dislike communists that I liked Sonia’s speech. I liked it because she is the first politician to take, however obliquely, the idea of economic reform to a grassroots gathering. Usually, we get to hear eloquent speeches advocating economic reform in the glittering halls of five star hotels in Delhi and Mumbai, but unleash these same politicians onto a rural audience and they revert to the standard spiel about socialism. One of the reasons why the average Indian is not a supporter of economic reform is because almost no political leader has attempted to explain what it means nor why we are doomed without it.

Now that Sonia Gandhi has talked about the link between energy and development, can we hope that others will follow her lead? If the next election is about economic reforms, then the sooner it happens the better. We need politicians to explain to ordinary voters that India would be the richest country in the world if we followed the right economic policies. We need politicians who tell the people that we moved away from socialism 15 years ago because socialist economic policies had brought us to the verge of bankruptcy. We need politicians who tell the people that the license-quota-permit raj had to end because entrepreneurs needed to be freed from the clutches of officials who were mostly corrupt.

... contd.