MARXISTS in West Bengal, and elsewhere, are going to get the boot in the coming assembly elections, and high time too. There should be some kind of punishment for political parties that promise big things and fail to deliver. At the top of the list are the Indian National Congress and CPI(M). Throwing them out is not enough; they should be banished for life.
The Marxists cannot claim they were not given a chance. For over thirty years, the people put up with them, particularly in West Bengal, in the hope that they would deliver on their promises. They did nothing. All the while, they were busy strengthening their own base, and lining their own pockets, while subverting the very basis of democracy in the state. This is what all communists do but somehow we thought that Indian communists were different, but we were wrong.
A third of a century – which is how long the Marxists ruled in West Bengal – is long enough for any party or any government to make its mark. Look how Narendra Modi has transformed Gujarat in just ten years. West Bengal was a very advanced state, at least industrially, when Jyoti Basu & Co took over. Now it is one of the most backward in the country. The Marxists have done what nobody else could have – they have destroyed two generations of Bengalis. While the rest of the country prospered, or tried to prosper, everything in Bengal cause to a halt. Not a single big industry has come up in the state, cities and towns froze and the whole society was paralysed.
The Marxists have a way with words and are a clever lot. This is true of communists every where, including, of course, Soviet Russia, which, if you went by what they said and wrote, was the next thing to paradise. It was only after the Soviet Union collapsed that the truth came out – the Soviet Union was a big hoax and it was a paradise only for a few people, the Stalins, the Lenins and all the other “ins” but not for the man in the street.
There was a time when Bengal was No. 1 state in India. This was when the British were here and most British companies functioned from Calcutta (Kolkata). Independence should have been a shot in the arm, but the state could not make up its mind whether it should look ahead or just mark time and do nothing. It had not only a wonderful industrial infrastructure built up by the British but also nationalist-minded business houses headed by Birlas and others. No other state, not even Maharashtra in the west, was so well endowed. But Jyoti Basu & co were more interested in pampering their followers than help build a forward-looking industrial community. Calcutta became a city of processions and strikes, not what it should and could have been, India’s industrial capital.
The British abandoned the state within years of freedom and the Birlas and the Goenkas followed. They now live within a mile of each other at the other end of the country – in Mumbai. You find them in the glittering city on the shores of the Arabian sea – Birlas, Ambanis, Tatas, Mahindras and the Ruias. Some of them could have remained in West Bengal if only Jyoti Basu & Co had played its cards well. Tatas actually abandoned their car project in the state and fled to Gujarat because the Marxists simply could not handle such a project.
I don’t blame Jyoti Basu & Co. All communists every where from Soviet Russia to North Korea here failed when they have tried to put Karl Marx to work. Das Kapital is a wonderful book if you want to go to sleep. You open it anywhere, and promptly start dozing, but if you want to build up your state or country, you don’t read Marx, you read Adam Smith, a Scotsmen who is down to earth and knows his onions. I have a feeling that our Marxists have never heard of Adam Smith and never gone beyond the first page of Das Kapital either. In fact, I doubt whether they have ever run a factory or grown potatoes or brinjals, or, for that matter, ever gone to the market and purchased rice and onions and cooking oil, and come home to cook a meal. Whatever they know about life is what they have picked up from second-hand books in Kolkota’s College Street, or may be in Moscow. These men do not know what makes the world go round. How would they know how to run the world, which they profess to do!
Some of them go round saying that they should not be judged by what they did or tried to do in West Bengal, because they were working within the confines of a bourgeois system, not a Marxist are. Implied in this is the assumption that they would have worked wonders had they operated in a full-fledged Marxist system. Whom are they trying to fool? All Marxist systems, full-fledged or otherwise, have collapsed, led by the Soviet Union, which was the first to go under. Why did they collapse and do under if they were so strong? Because the system itself was a big hoax, a house of cards that tumbled at the first touch of reality.
Certain systems are real and certain are false. The democratic system may be slow and painful but it has stood the test of time. There are now only two Marxist countries and both on their last legs – Cuba and North Korea. There is China, of course, but it is an authoritarian capitalist country, with a façade of Marxism. There is nothing communist about China – it is run by a clique, as Hitler’s Germany was run by a clique, but cliques do not last long. China too will collapse in due course, as did the Soviet Union, and as did the German Reich.
But take Cuba and North Korea. In Cuba, a surgeon earns the same as a taxi driver, about 30 dollars a month (Rs 1500) which is why the health service in Cuba is so cheap. But every Cuban worth his salt wants to flee to America across the Miami bay, and many manage to do so.
Had West Bengal been a genuinely Marxist state, it would be worse than Cuba, with large-scale poverty and destitution, not to speak of famines every other year, as is the case in North Korea. Indian Marxists are lucky they are part of India which can feed them and look after them even though they have no love for India. Only a few years ago, they were going about shouting that Chairman Mao was their chairman. Though currently they pretend to be hostile to the Maoists. The trouble with Indian Marxists is that they do not know who they are – Indians or Maoists or Russians – suffering as they do from schizophrenia, a peculiar mental disorder characterised by withdrawal into fantasy from reality. It is a sad case!
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