The campaign for the Kerala Assembly elections showed two contesting approaches to development, with the Congress advocating neo-liberal, market-driven policies and the Left challenging them, Communist Party of India (Marxist) has said.
Anathema to Congress
Responding to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's charge that the Left had failed to recognise that the fundamentals of development had changed and it pursued programmes not relevant to the needs of the common man, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat said on Friday that the Left's approach to reviving public sector undertakings and making them profitable “is anathema” to the Congress.
“For the Congress and the UPA government, the ‘fundamentals of development have changed,' i.e., it is necessary to adopt neo-liberal, market-driven policies. It was the disastrous agrarian policies of the Centre which led to distress among farmers and suicides in Kerala. Integrating agriculture into the global market and dismantling subsidies are part of this development. By this neo-liberal approach, what the Kerala government undertook — the revival of the public sector enterprises and making them profitable — is anathema,” Mr. Karat said in the latest edition of the party organ Peoples' Democracy .
Sharing his assessment after campaigning in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Mr. Karat said the various measures for the welfare of all sections of the working people, the push for universalising the Public Distribution System and the measures taken to alleviate the indebtedness of farmers and to ensure minimum wages, pensions and other social security benefits were precisely the programmes which the Prime Minister decried “as not relevant to the needs of the common man,” but which ensured that there was no anti-incumbency mood.
Crony capitalism
The LDF manifesto, he said, set out on a path of development that challenged the neo-liberal approach of the UPA government at the Centre, and it was this which was being “attacked and bemoaned” by many critics and commentators. They wanted Kerala to adopt the path of crony capitalism, facilitate the loot of natural resources and promote a corrupt nexus of big business-politicians and bureaucrats that became the hallmark of the States run by the Congress or the BJP.
“In the absence of any serious discontent among the people about the performance of the LDF government, the Congress-led UDF is banking upon the caste and communal organisations to rally support… Kerala has also seen the flow of money and liquor on a scale not seen before. At the end of the campaign, the LDF can be confident that it has broken the veil drawn on its successful campaign through manufactured opinion polls and hostile media coverage,” Mr. Karat said.
