Less talk, more empowerment please

It is the considered opinion of your humble columnist that V S Naipaul is correct when he dismisses most intellectual discourse in India as ...

It is the considered opinion of your humble columnist that V S Naipaul is correct when he dismisses most intellectual discourse in India as 8216;8216;babble8217;8217;. Describing Delhi dinner parties he had this to say in a recent article: 8216;8216;Until the food comes there is apart from the gossip only babble, everyone appearing to offer ideas about India but only doing his familiar old turn. The babble is like last night8217;s babble and last year8217;s; it will be the same babble next week and next year.8217;8217; Take this newspaper8217;s 8216;8216;India Empowered8217;8217; series in which eminent Indians from every nook and cranny of the vast carnival of Bharat Mata have come forward to explain what an empowered India means to them.

One contributor who got beyond the 8216;8216;babble8217;8217; was Ratan Tata who began by recommending that the government needed to give us more than a 8216;8216;common minimum programme8217;8217;. Who can disagree.

At the top of Tata8217;s list of empowerment ideas is the need for India to accept 8216;8216;only the highest standards8217;8217; and the need for policies to be made keeping the 8216;8216;national good8217;8217; in sight and not 8216;8216;powerful vested interests or political ideologies8217;8217;. Did he write this with our Marxist bullies in mind? I certainly thought of his words last Thursday when Communist trade unions brought nearly all of eastern India to a grinding halt because of one of the most meaningless strikes we have seen.

The unions were protesting against privatisation and changes in the labour policy at a time when privatisation has been stopped and there are no signs of badly needed changes in the labour policy.

So what was the point of the disruption and chaos? Was it merely another exercise in showing Dr Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi who they have to kowtow to if they want their government to survive? As somebody who believes that communism and socialism have done more harm to India than any other political ideology I am perhaps slightly paranoid but more and more I see signs of a return to the bad old Leftist days. Worse, actually, since I cannot remember a time when the Marxist parties have had more control over the government in Delhi. We already see policies being made to appease powerful vested interests and political ideologies instead of for the national good. Privatisation would be in the national good but it is unlikely to happen under this government. Labour reform is vital for the national good but it is unlikely to happen either.

Our only hope is that the Prime Minister supplement the unfortunately named common minimum programme with some of Tata8217;s other suggestions like a 10-year Economic Vision with measurable goals with the 8216;8216;buy-in8217;8217; of all political parties. Even the Marxist parties might buy-in since they are unlikely to have ideological objections to things China has already done like a major expansion of the tourism industry. China gets more than 30 million tourists a year compared to our 3 million mainly because the Chinese government went out of its way to help the industry. The Marxists should not object either to the creation of limited access national highways since this is also something China did years ago. As for drinking water and national water harvesting there can be no ideological objection to these.

Since empowerment is the flavour of this week8217;s column may I suggest that the Prime Minister do something to empower himself. With the Marxists stomping around causing strikes and dictating foreign policy it8217;s beginning to seem increasingly as if they are ruling with Congress support instead of it being the other way around. Congress may not have got a full mandate but 145 seats is more than 60 and yet all the noise and most of the 8216;8216;babble8217;8217; comes from the 60 Marxist MPs. Even more worrying is the influence that all of this is having on government policy because almost always the Marxists oppose those things that are for the national good. At the moment it is privatisation and labour reform, in the past it has been the Green Revolution, computerisation and even the freedom movement. It is time the Prime Minister asserted his authority or we have quite simply had it. The world will go sailing by as India remains mired in ideological babble.

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