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Sunday, October 02, 2005
The real scandal
The BJP picks up on the KGB's revelations about how thick they were with Indira Gandhi's government, with LK Advani demanding an enquiry and calling it "the biggest scandal of independent India."
To my mind, the fuss is misdirected. We should all be outraged at the things that Indira Gandhi's government did in the 60s and 70s, and not at why it might have done them. As much as the emergency, I'm talking about the gradual stripping away of economic freedom, in a series of moves that have kept India from fulfilling its massive economic potential. The nationalisation of banks, the small scale industries reservations, the MRTP act, the urban land ceiling acts and the massive expansion of the License Raj disempowered millions of Indians and kept the country poor, and it is rather shocking that most people don't seem particularly concerned about these things. It is like condemning an assassin not for the murder he commits, but for the fact that he takes money from the mafia for committing it. What is the crime here?
To my mind, the fuss is misdirected. We should all be outraged at the things that Indira Gandhi's government did in the 60s and 70s, and not at why it might have done them. As much as the emergency, I'm talking about the gradual stripping away of economic freedom, in a series of moves that have kept India from fulfilling its massive economic potential. The nationalisation of banks, the small scale industries reservations, the MRTP act, the urban land ceiling acts and the massive expansion of the License Raj disempowered millions of Indians and kept the country poor, and it is rather shocking that most people don't seem particularly concerned about these things. It is like condemning an assassin not for the murder he commits, but for the fact that he takes money from the mafia for committing it. What is the crime here?
