Remember the days of the foreign hand? For those of you who may have been too young in Indira Gandhi’s time or born after she passed on, allow me to give you a short refresher course. Foreign hand was code for the CIA and in those bad old days, when India was desperately poor and forced into employment as a Soviet submarine, the CIA was blamed for all our woes. We feared and respected it so much we believed it capable of anything—floods, drought, assassinations, even causing our poverty. What other explanation could there be?
Here was our Leader desperately trying to garibi hatao and yet poverty was everywhere. Nearly half our people persisted in remaining below the poverty line despite Mrs Gandhi’s brave efforts. So adamant was she that poverty would be abolished, she inserted the word ‘socialist’ into the Constitution, but the poor continued stubbornly to be poor. And they continued to be poor despite her keeping the rich on a leash so tight they found it hard to be rich, and despite endless largesse to the poor in the form of free electricity, water, houses, schools, health care.
It had to be the foreign hand, just as it was the foreign hand that was the cause of our political problems. Had it not destabilised Punjab and Kashmir and spread sedition in our North-eastern provinces? We believed it had. Many Indians believed so completely in the omnipotence of the foreign hand that few doubted that it was responsible even for arranging a marriage between the Chogyal of Sikkim and an American agent called Hope. So when Mrs Gandhi decided to outwit the foreign hand by dismissing the Chogyal and making Sikkim a province of India, only a handful of cynical hacks sneered and jeered.
We who did were quickly put on a black list by Mrs Gandhi’s Minister of Truth, H Y V Sharada Prasad, and this was not a good place to be because it meant that government intelligence agencies would start following you around to establish your personal links with the foreign hand. Ah, what dark, scary days those were.
So, why out of the blue am I reminiscing this week about the foreign hand? Well, memories revived when I saw this government’s life support—the CPI(M) Politburo—meet last week to pronounce against foreign direct investment in telecommunications and insurance. Marxists remain the only Indians who continue to fear the foreign hand and they seem to see it operating now in the guise of FDI. The premise being that if we allow foreign investment in Indian companies, we are allowing the foreign hand to sneak in once more. What puzzles me is why our Chinese-inspired Marxists do not notice that China gets more than ten times as much as FDI as we do and instead of it becoming a plaything of the foreign hand, rich Western countries fear it as the foreign hand.
The other thing that revived memories of the bad old days, when we were an economic dictatorship, was a couple of provisions in Chidambaram’s Budget that, if unchallenged, will turn the Income Tax Department into a worse monster than it already is.
Did you notice that in future if you buy something worth more than Rs 50,000, you have to inform the Tax Department? Either Chidambaram has been temporarily blinded by his new job or he chooses not to notice that nearly every MP these days wears watches which cost ten times more than that and would easily spend Rs 50,000 on a handbag for the wife. Even the middle classes who cannot afford Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags would easily spend Rs 50,000 on something useful like a fridge or a washing machine. Does he seriously expect everyone to be ringing up his local tax inspector every time he buys a fridge?
There is worse. If a friend gives you a gift worth more than Rs 25,000, you are obliged to pay tax. Again, may I suggest that the Finance Minister send his tax inspectors to calculate the cost of the shoes our politicians wear these days.
Or let him just spend a morning examining the Mont Blanc pens in their khadi pockets and it might shock him to discover that Rs 25,000 when translated into FDI is not a great deal.
The worst throwback to our old economic dictatorship days is the power he gives income tax inspectors to arrest those who might be abetting someone to evade tax. Mr Finance Minister, have you not noticed that income tax and excise inspectors are the most corrupt officials of all? Have you paid no attention to the crores of rupees worth of properties and jewels that get revealed every time the income tax raids one of its own? And, it is to these fine gentleman you now give such dangerous powers?
It would be so easy to dismiss the Finance Minister’s attempts to take us backwards as merely a concession to the Politburo, but it would be wrong to do this. We must remember that in those foreign hand times, the Congress functioned with a full majority and needed no leftist life support. No, dear readers, let us not fool ourselves into blaming the Left. What we are seeing is a return to classical Congressism, so be prepared for a time soon when our exports to foreign hand countries will be banned and we return to the barter trade with the Soviet Union we once passed off as exports.
Mercifully, the Soviet Union no longer exists and despite Putin’s totalitarian ways, he is unlikely to seek a return of our old barter of Hamam soap and Agra shoes for tanks and guns. That, though, is only a small mercy because if we return to our old economic ideas, we are perfectly capable of self-destructuring without the help of any kind of foreign hand.
