On A Flop Called Chacha

Swaminathan’s Aiyar’s Sunday column in the ToI is titled well: “The best of times and the worst of times.” Here he talks of India’s excellent economic performance despite “terrible misgovernance.” However, what is amazing is that our great leader for most of this dreadful decade that Aiyar is chronicling, Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, is not even mentioned! Should not the man in charge, under whom all this terrible misgovernance has occurred, not take some of the blame?

Let us leave aside all the pretty growth figures and the tales of the IT sector and some of our big companies. Have conditions in our cities and towns improved? Has anything been done to link satellite towns to cities with good roads? Indeed, has anything connected with The Chacha State (or any of its Bhateejas) improved? The only answer is a loud “No.”

Aiyar concludes on an optimistic note:

So, economic reform itself has improved governance in a hundred ways. I believe this explains why economic growth has accelerated despite terrible misgovernance in some areas. For this reason, we can view the next decade with optimism.

This is an optimism I do not share. Our Chacha has squandered all these years, and all our public funds, on all his pet projects – NREGA, education, climate change – while all these leading economic journalists applauded. The fiscal deficit has worsened under Chacha. No move has been taken towards privatization, for Chacha remains a Nehruvian in thought and deed. Recall that Chacha’s finance minister, speaking at a recent trade union event, dismissed rumours of privatization calling them “malicious propaganda” and said that his The State will work to “strengthen PSUs”: I have a post on this.

Thus, with Chacha at the helm, the economic scenario has worsened, and there are no signs that these bozos are in any way going to set things right by doing the right things. They want to continue with The Chacha State as planner and industrialist, as big employer, at the “commanding heights of the economy.” Indeed, the fact that Soniaji chose Chacha for PM shows that she too believes the biggest job of their The State is to run the economy, which is why an economist was selected.

In the meantime, the law and order front has further deteriorated. There is this Maoist-Naxalite uprising. There is Manipur and Kashmir. Aiyar says that our rulers are “clueless” as to what to do about these. Well, they are clueless about The Economy too.

Methinks Aiyar is not really aware of how life in an Indian city has only worsened this last decade. Aiyar has been living in Washington DC for over 10 years now. Sitting pretty in the USSA it is impossible to know what is actually happening in India. Methinks he is also being “polite” to Chacha, for that is our journalistic “culture.”

It is time we shed this culture, called a spade a spade, and judged Chacha to be the gross failure he actually is.