Opinion Jobless reforms

An article in CPM weekly People’s Democracy claims that the retrenchment of public employees,reductions in development spending and privatisation,all contributed to job losses. “Two decades after neo-liberal economic reforms started in India as part of the agenda of imperialist globalisation,the condition of the masses of the labouring poor is worse in every part of the country except where some positive intervention has taken place to stabilise livelihoods,” says Utsa Patnaik.

Patnaik identifies three issues of most concern — the increasing levels of unemployment as high GDP growth fails to translate into jobs,the high rate of inflation in the price of basic necessities and the attempt to take over lands and resources by corporate entities in rural areas.

Whose parivartan?

The editorial in the CPI’s New Age slams the UPA over Anna Hazare’s arrest,saying its “blunder” prompted thousands to protest the attempt to curb the rights of dissent,if not for the Jan Lokpal. It says that the government was at fault right from the beginning,when,after Jantar Mantar,it bowed to the “extent that it forgot the constitutional niceties and constituted a ten-member joint committee with five ministers and five nominated by an individual to draft a bill for Lokpal institution.”

“In the process,it not only ignored the other sections of public opinion (wrongly termed as civil society) but even failed to take the parliamentary opposition into confidence. Such unilateral action and calculated mischief was bound to be doomed. And it happened. Even after that the government did not take corrective measures for facilitating a real nation-wide debate on effective Lokpal Bill,” it adds.

The result,it says,is the current confusion. Creating the Lokpal was not enough,says the editorial,and adds that even Hazare has said that the Jan Lokpal bill that his team is espousing will eradicate corruption by 60 per cent at best. “Hence he talked about parivartan (change). That is the crux of the matter. Parivartan cannot be confined to change of one set of bourgeois politicians with the other including the so-called civil society that is very much the part of the bourgeois polity itself,” it says.

Compiled by Manoj C.G.