The aam aadmi in Saigon, the taxi driver, was clear. “These communists? They ban what they cannot control, like the internet. Bah, useless. If India is the office of the world and China, its factory, we are all asking what of the world can we become?” I guess if Karat and his party have their way, we will have a power crisis anyway (and I am referring to electricity here), and we can gift Vietnam the positioning of ‘office of the world’.

That would indeed be a pyrrhic victory for the Indian communists — and for Mr Karat. As the poem ‘Casabianca’ goes: “The boy stood on the burning deck/ Whence all but he had fled;/ The flame that lit the battle’s wreck/ Shone round him o’er the dead.”

The writer is a management consultant