Watershed moment
The PM’s defence of ‘wealth creators’ marks a refreshing ideological forthrightness
In Indian politics, it can be hard for a politician to defend wealth creators in a public forum. Despite the success of three decades of liberalisation (lifting controls on production, lowering barriers to trade and opening up the financial sector in a calibrated way) in lifting millions out of poverty by unleashing entrepreneurial energy, politicians would rather not say that they are for ‘capitalism’. On Wednesday, however, the Prime Minister chose to be forthright. On the floor of the Lok Sabha, he made two major points: One, the country needs wealth creators or producers in the first place for that wealth to be distributed, and that they should not be unfairly attacked; and, two, the idea of the government running public enterprises has outlived its time and that the bureaucracy in any case should not be running them. Scarcely ever has any senior politician, let alone a prime minister, spoken with such candour in Parliament in recent years. It took China’s iconic leader Deng Xiaoping to make a rhetorical break, when he famously said, in the 1980s, ‘it does not matter whether a cat is black or white (capitalist or socialist), so long as it catches the mice’. He spearheaded China’s transformation from a closed economy to a market-oriented one.