New Delhi:Â Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) provides no alternative to India’s neo-liberal economic polices but only pursues “the chimera of being a ‘honest’ variant of the same”, the CPI-M said Wednesday.
In a commentary on the Aam Aadmi Party, CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat said its alternative to the existing economic policies was “getting clearer by the day”.
Writing in the party journal “People’s Democracy”, Karat quoted AAP ideologue Yogendra Yadav as saying that the new party wanted “an alternative not just to the Congress or the BJP but also the Left”.
Karat pointed out that AAP leader and former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had told a CII meeting here that the government should not do business and this should be left to the private sector.
“This refrain of ‘government has no business in business’ and all should be left to the private sector is typical of the neo-liberal outlook which prevails around the world,” the CPI-M leader said.
“By this criteria, all sectors of business and economic activity should be in private hands and governed by the market.
“Even basic services like the supply of electricity, water and public transport should be privately run.”
Kejriwal argued at the CII meeting that what was required was for the government to set up a good regulatory regime to see that businesses play by the rules of the game.
“This again is part of the neo-liberal model where the regulatory agencies set the rules of the game in favour of big business,” Karat said.
“Kejriwal seems to have forgotten the days when he opposed the privatisation of electricity supply in Delhi.
“The criteria he has set out goes even against the stand of the AAP regarding privatisation of water set out in its vision document.”
Kejriwal had also claimed that he was against crony capitalism, not capitalism per se.
“Here Kejriwal and the AAP are missing, or, ignoring the main issue. It is in the nature of the neo-liberal order to spawn crony capitalism on a large scale.
“It is inherent in the neo-liberal regime which facilitates the loot of natural resources and the making of windfall profits for the big business class as a whole,” the Communist Party of India-Marxist leader said.
He said the CPI-M and the Left parties wanted the mining of mineral resources to be in the public sector. “This stand of the Left is dismissed by AAP leaders such as Yadav as ‘not intelligent economics’.”
Karat added: “The so-called non-ideological, neither Left nor right stand of the AAP, is only a cover for a mishmash of policies which do not go outside the neo-liberal framework.
“With such an outlook, the attitude of the AAP leaders towards the Left parties is not surprising.”