Irrespective of who wins the general elections in 2009, centers like mumbai will find things getting grimmer.
For no political party wants to focus on fixing things, choosing to fall back on tired, ruinous ideas and shibboleths.
The Congress has promised a return to nehruvian economics.
Which means incubus like state smothering that slows everything in its path to a crawl.,
Fair enough, we've lived under that with the UPA.
Not to be outdone, the BJP too wants to take india back to the stone age by resorting to Gandhian economics.
We leave the readers to enjoy the fruits of some other Gandhain policies. The reason gandhian policies fail is not because Gandhi was not a good man. Far from it.
The reason they fail is because the world is not full of men as good as him. Hence, they are motivated by baser notions like greed, fear etc. Gandhian policies fail because they're designed for an ideal world, not the real one.
1. The Gandhian fetish of "rural-ism" that posits that india is a country of villages.
Sure it is, but most villagers dont want it to be that way.
That, is immaterial to policy planners, who focus on choking cities of infrastructure..
The result: Mumbai today
2. the Gandhian fetish of "do-it-yourself" or swadeshi.
The result:
3. The Gandhian fetish of "Non-violence", even when facing a murderous enemy.
Not one political party is talking about stuff that matters: such as making our institutions accountable for one.
