Tavleen Singh delivers another strong dose to the Comrades who simply refuse to come out of their Red cocoons. A delightful read.

There are constraints. These come in the depressing form of the Lefties, jholawalas and povertarians who fill the ranks of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and who have taken full advantage of her economic illiteracy. Mrs G has proved that politically she is cleverer than any native politician but when it comes to economic ideas she remains naive.

It is this that her Marxist advisors have used to persuade her to put her name to the unworkable employment guarantee bill and the appalling tribal rights bill. Both have been done in the name of the ‘poor’ but if Sonia had not been an apolitical housewife in our days of Nehruvian socialism she would have realised that this kind of scheme was tried often in the past with disastrous results. The poor remained poor and a vast infrastructure of vested interests got created that served mainly to make a few officials rich. If we dismantled this infrastructure and handed the money physically (by money order as the Planning Commission once suggested) to every poor Indian we would eliminate poverty faster. [...] Comrade Yechury believes that economic reforms are ’solely preoccupied with raising corporate profits’ and not with the welfare of the people. This is almost too stupid a charge to answer but I am going to answer it. What liberalisers like your humble columnist want is for the state to stay away from ‘corporate profits’ and concentrate on its duties to the poor. Instead of running huge public sector companies at huge losses it should spend its resources on building schools, hospitals, roads, low-cost housing, sanitation and all the other things poor Indians are forced to live without.

India’s poverty is scandalous because it is so unnecessary. A country as rich in resources of every kind should be among the richest in the world and if we are not it is because we have followed bad economic policies. The kind Comrade Yechury would have us return to. [...] It has been said before in this column and I say it again this week the Marxists have a long history of opposing anything that benefits India. Sonia Gandhi needs to beware of finding herself in the same category. Instead of being so cozy with the comrades she would be doing herself and India a huge favour if she spent more time trying to understand why her handpicked Prime Minister and Finance Minister gave up Marxism for the market. [.] Why does the Government of India spend only 2% of its budget on education when little Bangladesh spends 18%? Why does India have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and the lowest school enrollment? Could it be because state intervention in India has traditionally been of the wrong kind?