I Agree with Tavleen Singh

Abhinandan Sekhri is definitely a leftist (“vampanthi”) ideologue. In fact, entire Team Kejriwal (nowadays reborn as “Aam Aadmi Party”) is heavily far-leftist (I would even say anti-India). Prashant Bhushan is a well known Maoist sympathizer and anti-industrialization anti-liberalization whacko. Last year, he had even gone against India’s stance on Kashmir and advocated the plebiscite (followed by secession) in Kashmir from India (i.e. followed the Pakistani line on Kashmir). Ditto for Arvind Kejriwal with his anarchistic far-leftist ideas (opposing power plants, sugar industries, even dams and canals). It seems as if Kejriwal and his AAP just want to destroy India politically, socially and economically. Instead of proposing any concrete solutions, they are always simply bad-mouthing the so-called “system” (which is easy, even Bollywood directors do it regularly in their movies). Brainwashing and misguiding unaware and immature people by playing on their frustrations and anger against this so-called “system” is such an easy thing to do after all. Nowadays, Kejriwal and AAP are just misusing the emotions of the simple common man (especially young boys and college students) to spread anarchy as well as to undermine and destroy our constitutional democratic system.

So yes — Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav and Abhinandan Sekhri — these people are crazies and like a cancer for India. They have managed to grab the attention of urban educated Indians (with the help of a TRP-hungry media) by exploiting corruption issues and using good famous people like Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi (who have a history of service towards India over several decades) as ladders. But now they have conveniently discarded the anti-corruption issue (public memory is short anyway) and confused the common man so much that corruption has almost become a political non-issue! And now they want to capture power as politicians to play out their far-leftist ideologies on India, that has already been destroyed after 60 years of Nehruvian communism, and leftist-socialist-welfarist economic stagnation and the resulting crushing poverty. Either that, or they will just do Congress’ dirty job of splitting opposition votes to help the Congress regain power in Delhi and India.

Tavleen Singh is 101% right. The typical JNU-type leftist-dominated intelligentsia, journalists and media houses of India have cleverly tarnished capitalism and free markets by loosely throwing about terms like “crony capitalism” to falsely link India’s mammoth corruption (scams such as 2G and Coalgate) with private for-profit entrepreneurship and liberalization reforms. Fact is, the politician-bureaucrat-industrialist nexus-based corruption in India is not exactly “crony capitalism”. Let me explain why and how.

People like Narayana Murthy, Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Mittal aren’t really anybody’s “cronies”. They will obviously be happy if the government becomes more transparent in its economic and business policies, and the political class becomes less corrupt. But the scams occurred precisely because India does NOT have free market capitalism, which entails commodities and resources being transparently bought and sold in open markets through auctions. In India, we have the exact opposite where the government squats on everything from spectrum to coal mines and from oil-and-gas blocks to banking licenses (a legacy of our Nehruvian Marxist past policies and Indira Gandhi’s nationalization spree) and then throws the crumbs around through opaque, arbitrary and discretionary policies under a license-permit-quota-inspector raj framework institutionalized by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. So the reason why just a small bunch of people and corporate houses have managed to corner all the licenses for spectrum, or permits for industries, or leases for coal/ore/oil/gas blocks, or ownership of media, etc, is because the government (and therefore the political class) is involved in the business of allocating these licenses/permits/leases in the first place!

This is “crony statism”, and NOT crony capitalism. And it is this statist economic model that is at the root of the massive corruption in our polity. The problem also originates from the fact that the capitalistic free market reforms of 1991 were forced on us (by the IMF as a precondition for giving us the $1 billion loan that bailed us out from bankruptcy) and did not come out of an internal domestic political consensus. The people of the bygone era (Nehru, Indira, Rajiv) whose selfish politics and foolish economics conspired to keep India impoverished for decades were not publicly shamed and their legacies were not renounced (a la the Roman Senate’s “damnatio memoriae” against bad ex-Emperors) after the debacle of 1991. As a result, the ruling dynasty of the Congress party continues to hold a fig leaf to the “socialist legacy” of its deceased icons, lest the people of India realize that it is this very dynasty and its leaders whose politics of centralization of power (and therefore the statist economics) kept us chained. What we need now is an acceleration of the real kind of reforms that were undertaken between 1998 and 2004. We need privatization, and not just disinvestment. We need liberalization and a complete dismantling of the license-permit raj, and not just FDI.

This is just one issue. On almost all other issues as well, Abhinandan Sekhri was completely wrong (due to his idiotic leftist ideologies and poor understanding of economics and politics) and Tavleen Singh was right. Sadly, Abhinandan didn’t even have the courtesy to allow Tavleen to speak properly and make her points.

Gosh! Right! She should have “ribbed” that ‘Sick’ri back for his ghetto accent.

Thats not style its arrogance, she acted as such a snob that she asked his name twice, i wonder how she treats poor people on the roads and you think it style…..too classist.

one who lives on highland.

he only made a remark. there was no reason she should assault him on that. i felt like she was only trying to dominate him, deliberately pointing out he was “nervous”.