India
Vir Sanghvi
Bengal is the backwater of India, said Vir Sanghvi in the Mumbai Hindustan Times. Home to Calcutta, the state of Bengal is “always at least a decade behind the rest of the country”—thanks, in no small measure, to its old-style communist government. The communists have installed cadres at every level, from village councils to police forces. Those cadres promote “the totalitarian view that individuals are less important than the Cause.” Last month, they descended on Nandigram village to teach the locals the wisdom of “giving up their land for the greater good,” in a style that “would have done Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung proud.” They beat and terrorized the village leaders and let the police shoot a few for good measure. The opposition, meanwhile, responded by ranting into the television cameras, all but ensuring that people would assume it was exaggerating. Other Indian states don’t have such wretched leaders. Why is it that Bengalis choose to be ruled by an “obsolete, 19th-century totalitarian ideology?”
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