By Rajendra Prabhu
In Malayalam there is a saying that asks: will the crow become white if it takes a bath? So far, all of us thought it will not. But the Marxists are apparently well set to prove us wrong.
Take what their mouthpiece, People’s Democracy says about the tsunami rage: “The tsunami striking us in the last days of 2004 must be seen…. as the culmination of a legacy of hate and destruction that we, the Indian people, unitedly and finally overcame in the political sphere in 2004.”
Long ago, Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Following their guru, Marxists do not believe in God and in the countries ruled by communists, religion and belief in the supernatural phenomenon are always at a discount. In Soviet Russia, cathedrals were converted into tourist spots. But the Indian Marxists seem to be a changed lot. They believe in the supernatural! Nature was flagwaving with the tsunami the end of BJP rule!
May be Harkishen Singh Surjeet and company were cosying up to God, otherwise why the response of a God-fearing man like Dr Manmohan Singh who sought to present them as saints rather than sinners at the CII-sponsored capitalist summit at Kolkata.
Some fool said in Moscow in early 1910 that eventually when the communists would hang the last capitalist, the other capitalists would wager on the price of the rope. Was that Lenin who said that? Was that Khruschev who promised to bury America with his mountain of wheat and butter? By Marx, I am losing my memory.
Though the Marxist Chief Minister did not convince many investors’ new avatar as Adam Smith and even asked for a reality check, there was Dr Manmohan Singh to freely give certificate of merit to the Marxists in the economics of liberalism. “With Buddhadeb Babu at the helm of affairs, it appears Bengal is once again forging ahead”, certified the Prime Minister. Some of those present at the audience thought that was more clever politics rather than good economics.
The Prime Minister’s plea was seen more as a desperate cry to believe him despite the Left support that keeps his government in power.
Only two months back, Jyoti Basu was deriding the PM’s friend and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek, Singh Ahluwalia, as the ‘World Bank man’. Patent law reform, FDI inflow into critical infrastructure, private airports, all these programmes of Dr Singh receive a daily dose of disapproval from the Left. So the investors are making their own reality check.
The Prime Minister exhorted everyone to ‘think big and think differently’. But why are his I&B and HRD Ministries narrowing their thinking when it comes to inspiring people with thoughts of what Bharat was a millennia back—a knowledge-consuming, knowledge-sharing society where seekers from Rome to China came to learn and take back? Arithmetic, astronomy, steel and alloy technologies, textile wizardry, hydrology, environment—the list is almost endless. Why should any reference to this knowledge creation be dubbed as partisan politics or sectarian obscurantism?
The Congress that is ruling the country in a coalition should be the Congress in its original inspiration. But it appears that the Congress gets contaminated day by day by Marx and his obsolete doctrines—that, even as life-long Marxists are dropping their doctrinaire attitudes—at least they claim to do so publicly. There is after all no need for the Congress to get under the skin of the Marxist crow that is visiting Adam Smith’s beauty parlour for a badly needed make-over for acceptability in the 21st century.
