Pinkish intellectuals love to hate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They are busy these days denouncing him for the heavy toll that Covid-19 has taken in the second wave. Their denunciation is the apogee of hypocrisy and duplicity, for the Modi regime messed up in its response because it was following the Leftist policies in the first place. The duplicity persists: now he is being slammed for partly abandoning the statist approach they favor.
An article by Prof. R. Ramakumar of the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences or Tiss (https://scroll.in/article/992738/indias-decision-to-liberalise-vaccine-sales-likely-to-push-up-prices-and-block-access-to-millions) is an example. He is more worried than happy that every adult can get a jab from May 1. The reason is simple: the government “announced a series of new measures that would essentially liberalize vaccine sales and deregulate vaccine prices. There is genuine fear that these new guidelines will make vaccines unaffordable and exclude millions of India’s poor from access to vaccines.”
Notice the morbid fear of liberalization and the equally morbid love for price controls. Also notice the series of lies: vaccines will become “unaffordable”; “millions of India’s poor would be excluded from access to vaccines.
We mentioned earlier (https://thehinduchronicle.com/2021/04/noting-wrong-if-serum-institute-and-bharat-biotech-profiteer/) affordable and unaffordable prices are stupid and dangerous terms. Just like the Puritan hated bear baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators, the Leftist hates prices control not because they help the poor (they don’t) but because they hurt the private sector.
Ramakumar goes on and on with the perverse mathematics of “super profits.” His prediction seem to be worrying: “vaccine prices will rise sharply unless the state governments decide to subsidize the vaccine from their budgets.” But this will worry those who are not familiar with ilk of Ramakumar—the Marxian scholastics who publish their pedantry and sophistry in the rags like Economic & Political Weekly and fancy themselves as great scholars.
They are the folks who thundered that the Green Revolution will turn Red, computerization will kill jobs, and economic reforms will make India a colony. Almost every prediction that they have made in the past has turned out to be false, and yet there has been no decrease in their self-righteousness and self-confidence. They are often wrong but never in doubt.
Ramakumar’s verdict: “the vaccine producers insisted on their right to make super profits, and the Union government has succumbed to the pressure.”
I wonder how J.R.D. Tata would have reacted to such Leftwing propaganda by the professor of an institute he himself had set up in 1936. Tata was taken aghast when Nehru had called profit a “dirty word.” Now, a Tiss academic is railing against profit making, even though the pretext is that he is just against super profits.