Poverty and Wealth

I wanted to write this post a long time back, but now is just as good a time when the calls for coronation of the prince have reached a crescendo. During the election campaign Rahul Gandhi had said, "We believe in the poor people of India and they are ashamed of the poor in India." It is part of electioneering, I agree, but in order to gain votes and power the Nehru-Gandhi family and by extension Congress has equated Poverty with virtue and wealth to a vice. Add to this the famous Nehru quip, "Profit is a dirty word" and we have generations condemned to poverty. Sarojini Naidu once famously observed of Mahatma, " It costs a lot to keep Gandhi poor," only half in jest. Now, Mr. Rahul Gandhi says, " we should not be ashamed of our poor."

Perhaps, but we should be ashamed of the fact that such a large number of our people are condemned to poverty. Instead we are ashamed of our rich."Any wealth gotten is at the expense of someone else, therefore the rich deserve to be stripped off their wealth" is a tenet of socialism that has chained our wings. Instead, our aim should be "wealth creation." The Poor don't deserve to remain "poor" for such a long time. We should have taught ourselves how to fish, rather than take fish from one fishermen, cut them into pieces and redistribute it to others while taking a few pieces for doing the work of distribution. This leaves everybody but the distributer poorer.

When even the Communist party in china embraces free market and shuns socialist policies to achieve tremendous growth, it speaks of the rot that has set in that we regress time and again to our socialist policies, Unless, we see past the halo of our erstwhile leaders whose ideas have long past their shelf life(if they ever had one), we cannot identify this rot and will be incapable of eliminating it.

Here Atanu describes the tale of two countries, comparing U.S - Argentina at the start of last century to India-China in this century. Yet, the illuminated want us to believe that this is "really" a reform oriented government which was impeded only by the left with only a few sane voices questioning this hypothesis. Whatever growth we have achieved so far is despite the government, not because of it. The sooner we realize it, the better. After all, "Socialism is a luxury to the wealthy, but a suicidal creed to the poor"