People's Democracy

IN the course of the last week, the Vajpayee government has been quietly proceeding to sell away public assets at throw-away prices. The Hindustan Teleprinters Limited has been sold to the Himachal Futuristic Corporation (of Sukh Ram and subsequent stock market scam fame) for a paltry Rs. 50 odd crores.

Early this week, the Cabinet Committee on Disinvestment decided to proceed with the sale of Hindustan Zinc Limited, ITDC and Hotel Corporation of India (HCI). The HCI is an Air India subsidiary. Another of its subsidiaries dealing with airline catering, Chefair, is also to be sold.

The Cabinet Committee also decided to make easier the acquisition of the petroleum distribution giant, IBP, by private parties. It has done away with its own earlier condition that the successful bidder had to furnish a Rs. 500 crore bank guarantee to acquire the IBP. Now, 'penalties' have been introduced if the successful bidder does not invest Rs. 2,000 crores in the Hydrocarbon sector over a period of the next ten years -- a commitment which cannot , in any way, be enforced or even monitored.

Clearly, this Vajpayee government, utilising the distraction provided by the US war in Afghanistan, has once again embarked on a hasty and reckless spree of selling public assets for a song.

The track record of this government shows that the proceeds from such sales of public assets, despite all pious declarations, have gone primarily to meet the expenditure requirements of the government in order to reduce the fiscal deficit. Such a policy makes neither economic nor common sense. It is like a farmer who sells his land to meet his daily expenditure, only to end up sooner than later in destitution.

We have earlier seen how Balco, whose assets were valued at over Rs. 5,000 crore, was sold to the Sterlite (another company blacklisted in the stock market scam) for a mere Rs. 500-odd crore. Similarly, the Rs. 2,000-odd crore Modern Foods was sold for a Rs. 100-odd crore.

It will not be long before evidence of sleaze and corruption surfaces.

Such loot of public assets cannot be allowed. The owners of India's public sector are the Indian people. Any government can only function as the manager. A manager cannot sell the assets without the permission of the owners. In this case, the owners have not permitted such a loot of its assets. The Vajpayee government must be forced to reverse such anti-national policies or else forced to quit.

AS we go to press, the USA's unilateral war against Afghanistan is increasingly claiming the lives of innocent people. As the war enters its third week, its stated objectives of nabbing Osama bin Laden and destroying Al Queda terrorist bases remain as remote as ever. Innocent lives continue to be consumed with one of the first casualties being United Nation's staff in Kabul. The United Nations itself has now confirmed that at least three congested civilian areas have been bombed, including a hospital in Herat. All this is happening while the United States is claiming that only military and terrorist bases of the Taliban are being attacked through high-tech precision bombing.

Such attacks take us back to the US bombing of a civilian defence shelter in the suburbs of Baghdad during the Gulf War to name only one instance.. The Amiriya Shelter sheltered nearly 500 women and children when incendiary US missiles struck, killing every single inmate. The USA initially claimed that the bombing was against a Command-and-Control center of the Iraqi army. Only international outrage forced the Pentagon, a week later, to express insincere apologies for this inhuman action.

It is appalling heaping of tragedy on tragedy that such bombing of civilian areas continues. And this in the face of the growing calls for the USA to halt its unilateral actions and proceed to fight global terrorism under the auspices of the United Nations. The recently held APEC Summit at Shanghai, in a not so subtly worded resolution, called for a virtual halt to unilateral US action, the involving of the United Nations and prevention of any further loss of civilian lives. Amongst the other heads of countries attending this Summit, which included Russia and China, was US President George Bush.

But clearly such opinions of other countries appears to least matter to the USA. It continues to pour bombs on an already war-ravaged Afghanistan and hapless Afghans. It is one of the ironies of this war, that of all the peoples in the world, probably the only ones not to have seen the awesome destruction of September 11 in New York and Washington, to avenge which the bombs are now raging down on them, are the Afghan people, banned some years ago from watching television by the Taliban on the grounds of it being anti-Islamic!

This war must be stopped immediately! The killing of innocent people, and the odious terming of it as "collateral damage", cannot be allowed to continue. The United Nations, which has nearly concluded its draft proposals for an international fight against global terrorism, must be rapidly activated and a truly unified international coalition built to put up a real fight against terrorism in all its forms, and of all varieties.