T N Ninan: Left turn

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

This last week has been dominated by the fall-out of LK Advani's comments on Jinnah.

I find it odd that much more significant and important comments made by Mr Advani a couple of weeks ago, have gone virtually unnoticed; namely, how the Left parties in India have opposed every reform that has resulted in good for the country""whether it is computerisation per se, the starting of telecom companies in the private sector, price decontrol, or foreign investment.

The Left responded immediately with a flanking counter-attack that focused on Mr Advani's role in Ayodhya, which of course did not address the immediate issue; and no one else has taken notice.

This is odd, because the questions that Mr Advani raised on that occasion are far more relevant to this country's future than any re-assessment of Jinnah (though it is worth mentioning that the Left's record during the freedom movement bears even less scrutiny than Jinnah's).

We can trace the Left's sorry record (and baleful influence) on economic issues a long way back to the 1960s, when the Left parties and their cohorts argued that the green revolution would increase rural disparities as it would help only the rich farmers.

The truth, as everyone now knows, is that the country has been able to feed itself only because of the green revolution, and many small farmers have kept their heads above water because of the technologies ushered in by the green revolution.

Without that, the poor would be paying much higher prices today for their food.

Or take that other once contentious issue, of the rupee's external value. Devaluation of the rupee used to be a political hot potato and, every time the subject cropped up even obliquely, the Left would shout that it was being pushed down the country's throat by Washington.

The fact is that the decision to devalue in stages from 1991 has rid the country of the foreign exchange problem, it has led to an export boom, and today the country can ride out a bigger oil shock than the one in 1990 that caused near-bankruptcy.

This is in some ways the most spectacular change since 1991. But will the Left admit it was wrong on either the green revolution or on currency management, or on all the other issues where it has been so completely off the mark? Not on your life.

There can be many explanations for why Mr Advani's comments on the Left did not find any public resonance, unlike his comments on Jinnah.

My own thesis is that the middle class in India still buys into the Left's arguments on a whole range of issues, and therefore most people don't see how much damage the communists have caused and continue to cause by holding up progress.

Even those who have benefited from reform (and everyone has in at least one way, which is through lower inflation) find it difficult to accept that markets generally deliver efficiency and faster growth, and through that a reduction in poverty""although that has been the global experience.

So it is not just the Left. The majority of politicians from even the mainstream parties retain even today a broad socialist orientation (don't forget that even Mr Advani's BJP in 1980 chose as its original economic slogan "Gandhian socialism").

For these politicians, as for so many others, the world of markets that reform has ushered in is still a strange, alienating place, and one that must be treated with wariness if not suspicion.

Take a look at where your MPs (even the very rich ones who declare crores of rupees worth of assets) invest their wealth; almost no one touches the stock market, and almost everyone buys property.

Perhaps the fault lies with those who do subscribe to reform: they have not made their case strongly or loudly enough.

And so, if any pollster were to ask even the average middle class Indian, literate and employed, whether economic reform has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, the answer invariably will be "yes" to not just the first but also to the second""though the UN in its latest global report on the millennium development goals tells us that poverty in India has declined since 1990.

The result is that the Left has enough space to continue to peddle its intellectual wares.