COMMUNISTS FAIL TO FIRE MAO'S GUN

By Siddhartha Reddy

Even now Indian Communists find their inspiration from the relics of a long destroyed cult — from Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. Mao said power flows from the barrel of the gun, so CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, emulating Chairman Mao, holds the Communist gun to Sonia Gandhi’s head, threatening to blow the UPA government into powerlessness. But aware that Karat would not pull the trigger, Sonia Gandhi continued with her Shimla holiday, briefly interrupting her vacation with a phone call to pacify Karat.

Long-dead Communist leaders must be turning in their graves at Karat’s willingness to wait for Sonia Gandhi’s holiday to be over. Imagine Prakash Karat and A.B. Bardhan leading the French Revolution. They would have gladly accepted Queen Marie Antoinette’s dictate, “If you don’t have bread, eat cake.” Sonia Gandhi knows that the Communist gun does not have any ammunition. The comrades just want to impress their voters with loud rhetoric, forcing the Congress to roll back lucrative disinvestments.

The moment the Bhel sell-off is shelved, the Communists will drop the gun, threatening to light the fire later. A good government would never sell Bhel. But if necessary, it would have to convince the Communists behind closed doors. Public squabbling would not help. Sonia Gandhi has massaged the Communist ego and has saved the UPA government. P.V. Narasimha Rao, in 1991, launched the liberalisation-economic reforms process by selling off our nation’s assets.
Public money started going into private pockets. What was worth Rs 100 was sold for a song, fetching not more than Rs 10. Devious evaluators assess public assets at a low price to facilitate private gains. Successive governments have merrily sold precious mega-employment generating institutions to businessmen in the name of disinvestment.

As for Bhel, the Communists are searching for a needle in the haystack. Those who voted for the Communists, expected their MPs to put pressure on the government, and to expose the intensity of the fraud that has taken place in the disinvestment process from 1991-2005, quantifying the actual loss to the exchequer, and recover the money diverted and punish the culprits. They expected them to prevent such future robbery of public funds. Nothing of that sort happened. Instead, there’s a meaningless spectacle of a pro- and anti-disinvestment divide, with high noise but no sensible reform.

The Communists should have listed the governmental posts which are a huge drain on the exchequer. They should have forced the government to amend the Constitution to do away with the posts of the vice-president, governor, also Rajya Sabha members, Sonia Gandhi’s advisory council members, Planning Commission members, apart from those belonging to the numerous advisory councils and committees and inquiry commissions. There are hundreds of high-spending bureaucratic positions in every department, institution and enterprise which can be done away with.

A lot of money is spent on providing security to corrupt politicians and to facilitate holidays on government expense. But it’s beyond Karat’s capabilities to launch such a mammoth activity. Karat is busy making an MP out of his wife Brinda Karat, and cutting down to size a sulking Sitaram Yechury. Pontificating is easy, but reform is difficult. Imitating Mao is easy, but replicating Deng Xiaoping is difficult.

The Communists are yet to realise that by supporting the UPA government’s policies they are making the people of West Bengal and Kerala turn away from them. In Bengal, Communist complacency comes from the disarray in the BJP-Trinamul camp, and the 20,000 bogus voters enrolled in most constituencies cushioning the impact of the anti-government vote. Fair elections are feasible only if electoral lists are revised by authorities from other states, under President’s Rule.

The Communist-Congress hysteria against Jinnah will prove costly. Muslim vote is turning against the Communists. And the Hindu vote will go to the Trinamul. The middle classes are not happy that the Left is supporting a government under which the country is witnessing an all-round price rise. The lower classes too are suffering. Their jobs are vanishing because of a flood of Bangladeshi immigrants, willing to be underpaid and overworked. Both Muslims and Hindus are angry with the Left for allowing immigration to swell the number of bogus voters.

A certain Communist victory next year can end up being a hung Assembly, or an upset defeat. Complacency unseated Haryana’s Om Prakash Chautala, Andhra’s Chandrababu Naidu and Karnataka’s S.M. Krishna. Buddhadeb should be wary, Mamata can still be Chief Minister if she keeps her mouth shut and allows Karat and A.B. Bardhan to topple Buddhadeb by continuing to support the UPA government.

As for Kerala, the anti-Congress vote would have gone to the Communists, had the Congress not split in that State. There is resentment against the corrupt Congress State government and fury against the Communists for supporting the Central government. From a sure win, the Communists have now deteriorated to a hung Assembly situation. If this trend continues, then Hindus and Muslims could combine to surprise aged Karunakaran’s Nationalist Congress (Indira) with unexpected victory.

By talking about secularism, by saying that it is keeping the BJP away from power, the Left can impress the party circuit, the anti-saffron columnists and the JNU crowd, however, election results will prove that voters in Bengal and Kerala do not approve of the Communist support to a capitalist UPA government. Then Karat and Bardhan will be as surprised at the self-goals they have scored as Vajpayee and Advani were when they lost their government last year. Karat and Bardhan will belatedly realise that power flew out of Communist reach for they failed to fire the Maoist gun.