announced recently, then we really need a political party that will promise to support capitalist farming.

The size of farms has to be allowed to grow big enough for them to become profitable. This would be the opposite of land reform and the fragmentation it brought. The dependence of more than 60 per cent of Indians on subsistence farming also needs to be gradually changed.

This can be done if we allow massive doses of private investment into the rural economy to build the cold storages and air-conditioned supply chains we need if nearly half of what our farmers produce is to stop being allowed to rot every year. Food processing and other agri-industries will create the new rural jobs that we so badly need.

These ideas will get the support of voters if they can be certain that their lives will improve. But, to articulate this total shift away from the policies we have followed so far we need a new political party. A post-modern version of the old Swatantra Party if you will. A party that will have the courage to admit why our socialist policies have failed and articulate what needs to be done for ordinary Indians to share the benefits of an economy that is supposedly the second fastest growing economy in the world.

What we do not need is a revival of a Third Front that stands for the very socialist ideas that we should have junked long ago.