Page 1 of
2 Ram-ming the Indian
economy By Chan Akya
"If a man is not a socialist by the
time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a
conservative by the time he is 40, he has no
brain." - Frequently credited to British
statesman Winston Churchill, albeit without any
original reference.
What does a deity
worshipped by millions have in common with nuclear
reactors? Quite a lot, if you happen to belong to
the unwieldy coalition that runs India's federal
government. The train of logic apparently started
with the United States-India nuclear pact
that
opens up access for the latter to US nuclear
reactor technology, albeit with built-in
safeguards against misuse of reactors for uranium
enrichment to weapons grade, as well as a
moratorium on some types of tests going forward.
Always looking for an excuse to assert
their dominance, communist parties which support
the Indian government by providing it with a
necessary majority in Parliament that it lacks by
itself, threatened to abrogate the deal. With
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staking his
government's survival on the deal going through
Parliament, the next few months promise to bring
more tumult and with it a sharp reduction in
India's economic growth rate, as well as its
longer-term prospects.
Apparently
responding to the threat by communist parties to
cease support for the government, the ruling
Congress party may have instructed one of its
other electoral allies to make provocative
anti-Hindu utterances, which the chief minister of
the southern Tamil Nadu state and prominent member
of the federal coalition party, the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), duly obliged.
His
comments, which cast doubts on the historical
accuracy and the very existence of Lord Ram,
predictably elicited protests from right-wing
political parties. This turn of events may also
have reunited the country's communists with the
Congress, with the left parties promising another
look at the nuclear pact with the US.
India's weapons of mass destruction
India's communists are a separate
sub-species of global idiot culture that spawns
left-wing ideology. They tend to cling to the
principles of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin (and
Mao Zedong, albeit more obliquely) even as
communist governments in other parts of the world
have quietly embraced capitalist principles for
running their economies.
That they are
actually elected to power, and participate in a
free-wheeling liberal democracy, is testament to
their adaptive genes, even if those self-same
genes have not delivered any meaningful
adjustments on the economic side of things.
The two Indian states with the longest
history of communist (mis)rule are West Bengal and
Kerala, and true to the expectations of any
liberal economist, the two states are colossal
economic failures. To be sure, there is much to
like about both states, especially on the social
front, when literacy and overall social coherence
are considered. However, the two states are
minnows in the economic stakes across India,
attracting the least amount of investments [1, 2]
for their population sizes, as well as in terms of
overall economic growth.
The two
export-oriented industries that India is best
known for globally, namely information technology
(IT) and jewelry, are nowhere to be found in the
two states, despite excellent literacy standards.
The reason is that an overly-intrusive state
government will scare away even the most dedicated
Indian businessman on the IT side, while onerous
rules on worker protection would make jewelry
businesses highly uncompetitive both within and
outside India.
Even the industries that
are currently in place - autos in West Bengal for
example - have been in the middle of a long-term
decline as new factories coming up elsewhere in
India manage to out-price companies with factories
in these two states.
Given their record
for lasting economic damage, it is amazing to note
that India's communist parties manage to retain
their elected seats. As with most things in India,
the answer lies just below the surface and
involves organizational skills. The communist
parties are well organized, with trade unions and
left-wing intelligentsia forming the core
operating groups. Other interest groups such as
farmers' lobbies and students generate the foot
soldiers.
I have written in past articles
about the attraction of extreme communist
movements, such as the Maoists, for India's
desperately poor, that is part of the framework
supporting the overall base of communist
sympathizers in the country [3]. In comparison to
the communists and with the exception of the
Congress and some regional parties, most Indian
parties appear to have ad-hoc members and
operating groups.
The second reason for
the communists' success in India is, interestingly
enough, the Hindu-Buddhist ethos that underpins
Indians' morally anti-material view of the world.
Even if much of this ethos appears hypocritical,
contrasting between public support for
anti-materialistic views while privately pursuing
wealth maximization, there are enough Indians who
actually believe in this malarkey enough to
support the country's communists. This then is the
core of the Indian idiot culture that underpins
the communists who have single-handedly caused
more poverty and death in India than any nuclear
weapon attacks ever could.
Nuking
Ram Coalition politics [4] are relatively
new to India, starting in the 1990s, but going
forward it is difficult to envisage a government
led solely by one of the major political parties.
This is due to the fracturing of the national vote
in favor of regional political parties, leaving in
essence the Congress and the opposition Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) as the surviving national
parties. In turn, both these parties would need
the support of key regional allies, including the
religion-based and caste-based groupings [5], as
well as the communists who dominate key electoral
belts, as mentioned above.
About the only
thing that may be set in stone in the chaotic
coalition politics of India appears to be the lack
of any common ground between the communists and
the BJP, which leaves the former beholden to the
Congress or outside the government entirely. As a
general rule, the two main national parties do not
have much to choose between them in terms of
actual policy
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