Telling right from Left

As someone who believes that Indian communists always act against the interests of India I pay close attention to what they say. These days ...

As someone who believes that Indian communists always act against the interests of India I pay close attention to what they say. These days this exercise has become more important since they control the strings that operate the Government of India. They are not bashful about this and make pronouncements on foreign and domestic policy with such regularity and confidence that it sometimes seems that Prakash Karat is our Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh his 8216;8216;outside8217;8217; support. Funny, how many people are in power these days who are not accountable under our system of checks and balances. This probably accounts for much of the Marxist sense of impunity. They only need to worry about winning elections in West Bengal; India they acquired through a business transaction in which the terms are totally in their favour, so why should they care what they say and do?

Last week Comrade Karat was in an especially belligerent mood. He warned the Government of India that he would not tolerate a foreign policy that did not have his seal of approval. 8216;8216;The UPA Government is obliging shamefully and showing willingness to change India8217;s foreign policy at the behest of the US. We8217;ll never allow this to happen.8217;8217; The United States was trying to turn India into a 8216;8216;colonial state8217;8217;, the CPM general secretary declared, and this was why there was 8216;8216;interference in our internal affairs8217;8217;.

By the standards of his Marxist pals this was a relatively mild statement, if you remember that not long ago the Chief Minister of West Bengal called the American President a mass murderer.

When it comes to mass murder the Marxists know what they are talking about since to date nobody, not even Adolf Hitler, has been able to match Comrades Mao and Stalin. These two gentlemen jointly win, by many millions, when it comes to mass murder in the 20th century and no Indian Marxist dares condemn them for their horrific massacres of their own people. Why should they when no political party dares put them on the line in Parliament or outside and inexplicably no hard-talking hacks ask uncomfortable questions either?

This has resulted in our Marxists being able to ignore history. So Comrade Karat rants and raves about the United States turning India into a 8216;8216;colonial state8217;8217;, conveniently forgetting that throughout the Cold War our foreign policy was 8216;8216;colonised8217;8217; by the former Soviet Union. We kowtowed so abjectly to the wishes of our colonial masters that we did not protest even when they invaded Afghanistan and used our supposed 8216;8216;non-alignment8217;8217; to always stand by them and against the United States.

Luckily, most of our more sensible political leaders have realised the error of our old ways and today when it comes to foreign policy they are guided by what is in India8217;s interest. It cannot be in India8217;s interest for Iran to become a nuclear power. Please remember that despite that country8217;s protestations about 8216;8216;peaceful purposes8217;8217;, their programme is based on manuals supplied by the A Q Khan nuclear supermarket. He made bombs, not electricity. Even in Comrade Karat8217;s blinkered worldview this little detail should have penetrated, but apparently not. Indian Marxists have made it clear that they support Iran8217;s nuclear ambitions with as much fervour as they opposed our own. Can anyone explain how they dare to claim that they act in India8217;s interest?

Our Marxists operate on double standards whereby they believe in the right of other countries to do things that they insist are bad in India. So privatisation and capitalism are bad for India but good for China. I have been to China only once, in the late Nineties, but it was enough to discover how eagerly capitalism had been embraced as 8216;8216;socialism with Chinese characteristics8217;8217;. Translated that means economic freedom and political repression. On this trip I met a minister in the West Bengal government. He was minister of industries, if I remember correctly, and when I asked him what he thought of Chinese capitalism he laughed uproariously and said he hoped West Bengal would take the same 8216;8216;socialist8217;8217; path.

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Under the leadership of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya it has, but when it comes to the Government of India the Congress is reviled as a party of 8216;8216;capitalists8217;8217; every time it attempts to do something that would benefit the Indian people and not the officials our 8216;8216;socialist8217;8217; economic system was designed to benefit. It would be fair to ask if our Marxists are acting on behalf of China8217;s capitalists in an economic race in which we are decades behind and still trying to catch up.

It would be fair to ask Comrade Karat why he never gets aggressive about the right of our people to an economic system that would at least give them their most basic needs 8212; bijli, sadak, paani, school. When was the last time anyone heard him mention these things, and will someone explain why the people of Marxist West Bengal are still deprived of them?

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