CPI(M) today took on Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal for his comment that "government has no business in business" and said the party provided no alternative to neo-liberal policies which spawned crony capitalism.
"This refrain of 'government has no business in business and all should be left to the private sector' is typical of the neo-liberal outlook.
"By this criteria, all sectors of business and economic activity should be in private hands and governed by the market. Even basic services like the supply of electricity, water and public transport should be privately run," CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat said.
"It provides no alternative to the neo-liberal policies, instead it pursues the chimera of being an 'honest' variant of the same," he said in an article in the forthcoming issue of party organ 'People's Democracy'.
"What the AAP alternative means is getting clearer by the day," he said.
Taking Kejriwal's statement at a CII meeting as a policy direction "in the absence of a full-fledged economic policy document of AAP", he said the AAP leader "seems to have forgotten the days when he opposed the privatisation of electricity supply in Delhi. The criteria he has set out goes even against the stand of the AAP regarding privatisation of water set out in its vision document."
Referring to another statement of the former Delhi chief minister that he was against crony capitalism and not capitalism per se, Karat said it was "in the nature of the neo-liberal order to spawn crony capitalism on a large-scale".
"It is inherent in the neo-liberal regime which facilitates the loot of natural resources and the making of windfall profits for the big business class as a whole.
