The Hindu Business Line : Time for ideological reinvention?

When I was in college, I had a roommate who used to lecture me about the perils of capitalism and the beauty of equality enshrined in the communist order. The cold economics in me could never adequately respond to his attempts to educate me. Moreover, a low-income family upbringing and values put the highest premium on taking care of the family with whatever one could earn. I and many others like me had benefited immensely from the educational opportunities the then newly independent nation created and the opportunities the rest of the world offered. The countries of the West could do so, thanks to their outward-looking policies, while India, along with the likes of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, followed inward-looking policies that made a few fat cats out of relatively inefficient but protected enterprises.

China started liberalising and linking itself to the rest of the world from 1978 and India did so a decade or so later. The surging economic growth rates of the two nations, their swelling foreign exchange reserves, the frequency with which their economic performance is applauded in top business journals, the new billionaires — all these and more should not blind us to the problems on the ground.

In many ways, we in India have relatively more to sort out. To champion the cause of the poor, less endowed, and the working class, our democracy — particularly, the people of West Bengal and Kerala — has accommodated, for decades, the Left parties.

Had the Left served as effective demonstration points in terms of enriching our lives en masse, the country would have voted it to power, despite the efforts of landlords and entrepreneurs. The average voter does not belong to eith er of the groups to simply blame them for the erosion of the Left’s political fortunes. In the last quarter century of elections to the Centre, the Communist parties have obtained 5-6 per cent of the popular vote. Why is the Left not managing a better showing? Part of the reason could be that, globally, communism has lost its sheen.

The Left has great potential if its approach becomes result-oriented, as for instance, ensuring houses and not house sites to every family below the poverty line; land to the tiller on long-term lease; focused subsidies; equalisation of educational opportunity in terms of physical and human infrastructure of schools; quality health-care in government hospitals; and, most important, worker welfare by launching a series of cooperative enterprises that would provide them a range of goods and services including items of essential consumption, medicines and banking, insurance and travel products.

Isn’t it time the Left re-invented itself?

(The author is Professor Emeritus, GITAM Institute of Foreign Trade, Visakhapatnam. He can be reached at bhanoji@gmail.com)