An editorial in People’s Democracy reiterates Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s stand on global warming and emission at the recent G-8 summit in the context of the latest Human Development Index report. It says that “unlike this HDI report, which prescribes solutions on the basis of total global emissions, the Indian prime minister at the recent G-8 summit in Germany proposed that per capita emissions must be the basis for a solution.”

It says that India’s emissions are 17 times lesser than the Unites States’, and therefore the threat to the planet caused by the advanced countries is “now to be met by the victims of this pattern of development — the developing countries — by bearing a burden three times greater. This imperialist logic of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ cannot be accepted. India must insist that the criteria of per capita emissions must be the basis for a solution.”

Learn from China

Sitaram Yechury writes an article in People’s Democracy, where he stresses that India needs to “learn from China”, which has had, in his opinion, a “stable democracy for more than a decade”: “China has a foreign exchange reserve of over $1.43 trillion, many times larger than our $260 billion. The Indian government must seriously consider a similar mechanism to prevent such a sharp appreciation of the rupee. However, if this is done, then, the superprofit bonanza for the privileged few would suffer. After all, in the final analysis, ‘Shining India’ is the class base of the Indian ruling classes which can only further fatten itself by intensifying exploitation of ‘suffering India’.” Capitalism, at its cruellest best, he calls it.

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