Confused comrade commissarsThough India‚s communist parties unexpectedly notched up unprecedented gains in the May 2004 general election (68 Lok Sabha seats) and as a consequence have acquired a stranglehold over the Congress-led UPA government in New Delhi, it‚s hardly surprising that despite overwhelmingly illiterate, poverty-stricken India being fertile soil for sentimental Marxist mumbo-jumbo, India‚s Left parties have never been ‚ and are unlikely to ever become ‚ a force to reckon with in their own right at the Centre. This is because it is painfully obvious even to the meanest intelligence that their leaders lack the common-sense required to provide workable governance to the nation.Two recent top-level decisions of the communist parties are testimony to the intellectual bankruptcy of their leadership and garrulous intelligentsia. First, despite it being plain as a pikestaff that foreign investment inflow into the Indian economy generates employment and additional incomes, the comrade commissars of the CPM and CPI are strenuously opposed to larger foreign investment inflows into insurance and even the capital-intensive telecom and civil aviation industries. Secondly the comrades are frothing at the mouth over the issue of World Bank and Asian Development Bank personnel being called by the Planning Commission to provide advice on plan implementation.Despite it being painfully obvious that central planning in India has been a disaster for over half-a-century and has transformed high-potential post-independence India into one of the poorest nations of the contemporary world, Left intellectuals are indignant that the UPA government has resorted to inviting foreign experts to advise the Planning Commission. All this blather against the backdrop of the Soviet Union having gone capitalist with a vengeance and communist China attracting more than $40 billion by way of foreign investment annually and the Marxist government of West Bengal rolling out thick red carpets for foreign investors.Quite evidently the communist and Left parties are unlikely to ever win the electoral race to form a government in New Delhi. How can they when they shoot themselves in the foot so regularly?Futile firmanPerhaps in anticipation of India‚s Athens 2004 Olympic Games debacle, the government of Uttar Pradesh (pop.166 million) issued an order in July decreeing sports compulsory in classes VII-XII in the 8,456 secondary schools (with 5.32 million students) affiliated to the state examination board. The state government led by former wrestler-turned-neta Mulayam Singh Yadav plans to print and publish books on several sports and henceforth the school syllabus includes a compulsory ‚Ëœsports paper‚ with 50 marks for theory and 50 for practicals. But already Yadav is discovering that it takes more than a chief ministerial firman to create a sports culture in the routinely neglected education sector. The teachers‚ community is up in arms and complaints about shortages of playgrounds, equipment and trained sports teachers are pouring in. Responding, the state government‚s sports directorate is training teachers with interest in games to double as sports instructors.With the cash strapped government not willing to open its purse strings, government schools are unlikely to raise any money for sports infrastructure and…
