Analysing the results of the Assembly elections in five states, the lead editorial in the latest edition of CPI(M) mouthpiece People’s Democracy said the outcome shows that the BJP’s desperate effort to communalise terror attacks, particularly the Mumbai strikes, did not yield the results that they were hoping for. “The advertisement campaigns put out by the BJP seeking votes by capitalising on these terror attacks have clearly been ignored, at best, by the voters. These results have also nailed the lie, so assiduously propagated by the BJP, of linking terrorism with the Muslim minority community in India”. It said the message conveyed by the voters needs to be consolidated for strengthening the secular democratic foundations of modern India. “This is all the more necessary as the RSS/BJP will continue in their desperation to sharpen communal polarisation seeking electoral benefits in the future,” it added.Economic crisis An article on the global economic crisis says the fiscal stimulus announced by the Government was too feeble to go very far. It said the monetary measures that were supposed to deal with the credit crunch all proved to be lacking because they did not accept the need to deal with the liquidity trap characteristics of the current economic situation. “In such a situation, reducing interest rates does not solve the basic problem of tightened credit provisions, even though it may marginally reduce costs for those who are able to access bank credit,” it said while noting that some of the measures seemed to be more designed to push up the stock market. “Unfortunately, the promised fiscal expansion is a rather small one — only up to Rs 20,000 crore of direct additional spending through the Planning Commission in unspecified areas. This is less than 0.5 per cent of GDP, a tiny fiscal input which is too small to be really countercyclical or even to change the expectations of private agents in any meaningful way,” it noted. Although there are some small tax concessions and a tiny Rs 350 crore addition to export incentive schemes, “these are hardly likely to counteract the effect of big losses of export orders as the major markets start shrinking. What was required was a more serious and systematic attempt to allow these industries to keep producing at technologically efficient levels and shift demand to other markets” .Don’t copy the USAnother article titled “Why the US got it wrong” by P. Sainath seeks to debunk the argument that India should learn from the US on how to respond to terror. “Al-Qaeda was the biggest beneficiary of the response of the US alongside US corporations. America’s war on terror produced far more terrorism in the world than there had been prior to the response”. “To learn from Mumbai’s events that we should emulate America’s response — at the very time Americans are figuring out how poorly they were served by it — would be to repeat history both as tragedy and as farce,” it added.Compiled by Manoj C.G.
