The most satisfying outcome of the recently concluded legislative assembly elections in five states across the country, is the utter rout of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in West Bengal, which the comrades party had continuously ruled for 34 years — the longest tenure in office of any communist party in a genuinely democratic country. Hopefully the crushing defeat at the hustings will finally bury this political mafia committed to the dictatorship of a clique of power-hungry autocrats subscribing to an obsolete ideology which has been discredited and discarded the world over including Russia and China, whence it originated.CPM rule in West Bengal began amid much euphoria in 1977 in the new dawn of the post-Emergency era conterminously with the start of my career in journalism as the first editor of Business India. Right from that time I have been repeatedly warning the public about the conniving comrades of the CPM hell-bent upon subverting Indian democracy, and predicted they would wreck the economy of West Bengal. Thirty-four years later it has finally dawned upon the 91 million people of this once most industrialised state of the Indian Union that as predicted, the CPM comrades and cadres have de-industrialised Bengal, exiled the educated middle class, destroyed the education system, terrorised the rural popul-ation and rigged the electoral process in a systematic and organised fashion as Abheek Barman graphically details in the Economic Times (May 17). But this time round by carefully spreading the assembly election over six weeks, the Election Commission successfully prevented ‘scientific rigging and intimidation of voters by CPM cadres in rural Bengal. This is perhaps the greatest victory of Indian democracy in post-independence India, on a par with the defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress party in the post-Emergency election of 1977. Yet it is pertinent to note that Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress were back in the saddle in 1980. If Mamata Banerjee, leader of the triumphant Trinamool Congress messes up and allows the CPM to re-occupy Writers Building, Kolkata, next time round itll be curtains for certain for West Bengal. Freeloader par excellence That government bureaucrats at the centre and in the states are the countrys greatest freeloaders wholly committed to taking maximum advantage of their positions within the pecking order, is a fact too well known to bear reiteration. The prime purpose of the plethora of punitive direct and indirect taxes imposed upon the long-suffering public is generation of revenue to pay the countrys huge 18 million-strong bureaucracy — including 4 million netas and babus on the payroll of the Delhi durbar — who are remunerated with a bewildering array of pay and perks completely divorced from productivity. Yet even within the neta-babu fraternity, which has developed freeloading and creation of parallel income streams (through corruption and abuse of office) into a fine art, there is a tribe of master freeloaders. A case in point is Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the St. Stephens and Oxford educated deputy chairman of the Planning Commission who was…
