Painting The Town Red

June 20 2004:

In neighbouring West Bengal we see the even more scary spectacle of the Marxist government managing to stay in power for nearly thirty years despite doing so little for the poor that starvation deaths were reported from some districts last week. Marxist ideologues, ever ready with their talk of the ‘poorest of the poor’, dismissed the deaths as a localised problem.

Starvation deaths maybe, but poverty is not. West Bengal used to be, in that long ago time before the Marxists came, our most industrialised state. Our biggest industrialists were based there before Marxist trade unions forced them to move to Maharashtra. Even this would be fine if the Marxists had succeeded in providing ordinary Bengalis with schools, hospitals, clean drinking water but not only did this not happen but West Bengal’s ranking fell from being one of India’s richest states to being among today among its poorest.

May 11 2006:

The .. L[eft] F[ront] won a three-fourths’ majority in the 294-member state Assembly. It is the seventh successive term for the LF.

Now, will Tavleen Singh be so scared that she stops writing her columns or will she yet come up with a good explanation. Rigging seems to be readily at-hand, as it was in Bihar.