Articles by AM

The people in Buenos Aires and other towns and cities in the Argentine Republic have rolled into the streets with their pots and pans and sticks and umbrellas and faced police batons and tear gas shells and flying bullets because they have a tolerance level which is different from ours. We are hungrier than they, more emaciated, with less health care and with perceptibly less clothing and other protection against the elements. Compared to the Argentinians the level of tolerance in our case is pronouncedly on a higher plateau. The wretched categories in India have a level of consciousness, or of awareness, of a low order.

The Republic of Argentina has proved the point. It is not necessarily TINA. There can be an alternative, there is an alternative. Suppose, way back in 1991, the Indian ruling class, instead of capitulating, had defaulted on the country's external debt commitments, India need not have gone down either.

Substitution of sales taxation by value added tax, it is being claimed, will reduce distortions in the economy caused by multiple rates of taxation of inputs and help the establishment of an integrated national market. What a pipe-dream. A seemingly fractured market which nonetheless promotes faster and more balanced development is to be preferred any day to an arrangement where the national market is technically integrated and yet overwhelmingly unfriendly to growth. Who will tell that though to the docile chief ministers and state finance ministers who have volunteered to sign their own death warrants?

The two amendments proposed to the Representation of the Peoples Act requiring open voting by members of state assemblies while electing members of the Rajya Sabha and dispensing with the residential provision for election to the Rajya Sabha are an invocation of, and tribute to, national corruption.

In the fiftieth year since the commencement of the republican Constitution, India is safely re-established as an impeccable feudal realm. The Gwalior funeral merely confirmed the reality of Indian democracy doubling up as a feudal oligarchy.