Left is right out of the reform picture

On Wednesday morning, the day after the Left withdrew the support of its 61 MPs from the government, a garbage collector in the capital said he'd never heard of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the biggest of the four Left parties in Parliament and ostensibly a champion of the poor. But yes of course, he said, he'd heard of Coca Cola and Pepsi.

The reason he's heard of the last two names is that a relative from his village works in a corner store that stocks a cooler for these soft drinks, so he occasionally gets to sample them. He'd like a part-time job like that too.

Now: do these facts make him (a) a "running dog" of the Americans (to use a favourite sixties Leftist phrase) or (b) a regular guy trying to make a living in the hurly burly that is India, an aam aadmi in the current fashionable parlance?

Since it is difficult not to choose option (b), you begin to wonder just what the Left movement in India is all about. Here is a poor person, supposedly the focus of Left concerns, who senses an income-earning opportunity, however small and indirect, from a multinational business operation. 

The ideological distance between people like him and the Left parties that espouse his cause is wider than the circumference of the earth. The Left has withdrawn support to the government because it is worried that signing the Indo-US civil nuclear deal will hold India in thrall to the "imperialist" designs of the US and its big business. But those struggling at the bottom of the pyramid are unlikely to worry about possible nefarious designs of global companies that offer employment opportunities up and down the value chain.

The irony is that Indian business and industry probably have more in common with poor people like the garbage collector with whom I chatted Wednesday morning than any of the four Left parties - the CPI (M), CPI, Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Forward Bloc.

It speaks volumes that most businessmen in India have expressed moderate satisfaction (it still isn't safe to be unequivocally happy since politicians have long memories) at the exit of relatively non-corrupt parties from the policy-making scene in favour of allies with an uncertain record for rectitude and an indeterminate economic ideology. The Bombay Stock Exchange's Sensex all but said "good riddance' today.

More than anyone else, India Inc has understood the transformational impact of economic reform.  And even as economists and policy wonks argue over India's poverty statistics, no one can say India is more poor today than in the pre-liberalisation era. People at the bottom of the pyramid intuitively understand this too. 

Somehow the Left seems to have missed all of this. One paragraph of its carping press statement explaining why support was withdrawn is revealing. "The Indo-US Nuclear Deal is against India's vital interests. The Congress-led government has embraced a strategic alliance with the United States.  This dubious deal with President Bush is the centrepiece of a number of agreements like military collaboration and concessions to US capital in the retail sector, education etc."

Strange, but concessions to US or any foreign capital in "retail, education etc"are precisely what Indian business wants. Swadeshi is yesterday's discarded ideology.

Greater foreign investment in these and a range of sectors - from telecom and banking to airlines, insurance and even media - is widely seen as a means of sustaining and expanding businesses that will amplify job opportunities up and down the value chain.

Statistics cannot really capture the indirect impact of such business expansion but anyone can anecdotally or intuitively testify to this. Pramod Bhasin, CEO of Genpact has frequently spoken of how IT-enabled services - a sector that is strongly driven by US business - has created concentric circles of employment in terms of catering, transport and security services to name a few. Many of these are jobs that can bring India's vast unskilled manpower into the job market, allowing them and future generations to move up the income chain.

The Left's record since economic liberalisation has hardly been exemplary. Barring West Bengal which is bravely trying to muddle through with reform, the Left has stubbornly stood by an ideology that has been a manifest global failure, jettisoned by its ideological masters in Russia and China.

Worse, it has not bothered to take a clear-eyed look at the real problems of economic growth that assail the "proletariat" - abysmal working conditions for the 90 per cent of workers outside the union system, appalling health and education delivery systems, a deteriorating environment, a non-existent social safety net (its opposition to the long-pending pension Bill is an example of its confused thinking).  

The irony of this morning's conversation is that the garbage collector lives only a few kilometres away from CPI (M) politburo member Sitaram Yechury. So near, yet so far.