Having lived most of my life in kerala, I ( like most others ) had a bias towards communism. Communism is an easy philosophy to like, One which appeals to a comman's man mind instantly.
I used to write speeches for the “wannabe communist leaders” in our college, most of whom sadly hadn't even bothered to read the Das Capital let alone understand it before hitting the campaign trail and and making promises bordering on the absurd ( yes, even at the college level, communists have a penchant for making populist promises ).
It takes a while for the impracticalities of communism to sink in. Atleast, It took a long while in my case. But eventually I had to give in. Communism is not practical however good it might sound.
But apparently most of the oldguard at the Communist party of India still don't have enough common sense in them to realise that communism has failed to deliver its promises. By a long margin.
What prompted me to write this post was the big fight on NDTV over the perils of the disinvestment process.
Here was sitaram yechuri, sitting with a big sheef of papers, making statement after statement about the perils of disinvestment. The whole audience, infact anyone who was watching that programme, could see the hollowness in his arguments. But was he willing to concede a point ? Was he even remotely willing to compromise ? No Sir. Not at all.
All he did was to repeat the same argument a thousand times. It is suffice to say that it was a sorry sight.
Chidambaram, on the other hand, was lucid and put forward a compelling argument on why certains PSUs must be privatised for the betterment of the people. Or why, “Government should not be in the business of doing business”.
It was suggested by someone in the audience that the AAI with a cash kitty of over 2300 crores could do the modernisation of the airports itself. Obviously, the guy who made this statement, has no clue about the amount of investment needed to create a modern airport.
It was said that HPCL & BPCL are strategically important to India. IOC ( 191 in fortune 500, the only Indian company in the 500 ) dwarfs both of these by a long margin and is the primary supplier to the defence.
Do we really need 30 odd nationalised banks ? Do we really need three big nationalised petroleum companies ? Does the government really need to run star hotels ? Simple questions with a straightforward “NO” as an answer.
Unfortunately, the likes of sitaram yechuri will not understand Or don't want to understand or even better, They understand but don't want to admit that they were wrong. All these years.
So sit they will, in front of Posters of Lenin, talk day and night about an outdated idealogy and hope that their union brothers don't see the obvious hollowness in their arguments.
Meanwhile here is my favourite quote about our politicians these days,
“India will grow inspite of its politicians.”