People's Democracy

What Makes Sushma Swaraj Angry?

THE health of a nation is an important focus for every government, except those that thrive on human misery and whose idea of a civilised government is devoid of the concern about welfare of any kind --- for the people, that is. 

The state of public health in India has never been much to write home about in the first place. Under the BJP-led NDA government, health has been de-prioritised perhaps as never before. The head of health in union budget has undergone overt and covert cuts. 

A national health policy is in existence simply by default. The infrastructural facilities, poor and disorganised to start with --- thanks to the indiscretion of successive Congress regimes at the centre --- has undergone deterioration to the extent that people enamoured of liberalisation and privatisation are no longer in a mood to give kudos to private-run health institutions vis-à-vis state sector hospitals. 

Infant mortality is on the rise despite the fact that official statistics, not very reliable to start with, have been bent and twisted out of shape to meet political ends. The vicious propensity of in vitro investigation and what amounts to controlled infanticide is becoming prevalent across a wider spectrum of the society as never before. 

The deterioration in the male-female ratio across the country is a telling commentary on the policy of social stability that is made much of by those running the union government and their moral and mental supervisors.  Sermon from the podium does not become a union government that cares more for trying to support the crisis-prone economy of an imperialist power by opening its portals wide for imports that cut the ground from under the feet of the national economy and giver preference to ruination of the political sovereignty of the nation to the resuscitation of it while speaking all the time about resurgent national identification and nation-building, the Hindu way. 

Thus, the union minister of health, Mrs Sushma Swaraj had very little reason to be angry with the department of health of the Bengal Left Front government over the virtual non-issue of the conduct of the anti-polio drive in the state. Bengal is not an island and yet, at a time when the state of the health of our children is often sought to be made into a political issue to berate an elected and popular government with, it has been the Bengal Left Front government that could successfully put in place what is commonly perceived by the masses as a pro-people health policy --- a policy provides for comprehensive care of children’s health under the protective and curative cover of the state-run health infrastructure.

BUDDHADEB IN MUMBAI  

WHEN Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya chose to visit Mumbai with the unpronounced but clear intention of seeking to attract investment from the private sector, or what is corporate capital in the business media’s parlance of, the corporate media, abetted by a small section of big business, scoffed at the whole exercise as being “pointless.” 

The principal argument was that in a state where a Left Front government is in office, “nothing worthwhile could be expected from the industrial sector, opposed as communists are to private investments.” But these perennial detractors of everything Left were in for what can only be called an unpleasant surprise. 

Chief minister Bhattacharya set the tone of his visit on the first day of his tête-à-tête with the corporate heads of Mumbai. Bhattacharya made it clear from the moment the interaction started that he was chiefly looking forward to investments and at terms considered fair by the Bengal Left Front government in four areas: iron and steel; chemical produce; trade based on agricultural products; and information & technology. 

The carping bugbear of the corporate business has been the so-called militancy in the trade union movement. The Mumbaikars of the corporate world were predictably no exception in having this weird apprehension about militant trade unions having the sole aim of wrecking business and industries. 

Chief minister Bhattacharya was frank in stating with no apologies that in the Left Front government’s view the workers’ rights were not something to be bartered away. At the same time, he insisted that of late very few mandays were ever lost in Bengal due to “labour trouble” --- lockouts and closures have taken care of that. Bhattacharya also out in a quiet word about the continuing enhanced efficiency of the workforce in Bengal compared to other states in terms of productivity.  

At the end of two days of intense and businesslike sessions, there were interactions with no less than 25 corporate heads. While Bhattacharya did not officially disclose the number of memoranda of understanding that industries minister, Nirupam Sen would subsequently clinch on a visit to Mumbai, the quiet confidence of the CPI(M) leader when he stepped out of the aircraft at Kolkata airport after his visit to Mumbai leaves all  concerned hopeful about the prospects of industrial investments in Bengal in the days to come. (BP)