Page 74 - Education World September 2021

Postscript

Damaging Legacy pain and injury, was overdue payback.
This spectacle of top order English batsmen being
scattered by India’s Gunga Din (Trueman’s description)
OMMON-SENSE DICTATES THAT WHEN MNCs speedsters was also very satisfying for your editor, who
(multinational corporations) contract offshore while a cricket-playing law student in the London league,
C deals, the capital gain if any, accrues beyond Indian had to endure numerous jibes and racial slurs from the
jurisdiction. Yet circa 2010, by convoluted reasoning natives, a nasty tribe with a genius for double-crossing
for which India’s income tax department is infamous, it and back-stabbing camouflaged by plum tones and
calculated pro rata capital gains for 17 MNCs including sanctimonious propriety. But this genius enabled this
Vodafone, Netherlands and Cairn Energy (UK), levying essentially mediocre tribe establish perhaps the greatest
capital gains tax on their Indian subsidiaries. colonial empire in world history. That’s why the humiliat-
Unsurprisingly in 2013 the Supreme Court upheld ing English capitulation at Lords, beamed worldwide on
an appeal filed by Vodafone (India) against the income real time on television, was an unexpected and hugely
tax department’s levy of capital gains tax plus interest satisfying spectacle to behold.
of Rs.11,217 crore. Enter the late Pranab Mukherjee, the
worst Union finance minister in the history of indepen-
dent India. Literacy & intelligence
Seething with nationalist fervour and disregarding
the advice of prime minister Manmohan Singh (whose N ALMOST ALL HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT
leadership he never acknowledged), Mukherjee amended indices including the Education Development Index of
the annual Finance Act, invoking national sovereignty INIEPA University, Delhi and UNDP’s Human Devel-
to override the Supreme Court judgement. But Voda- opment Index, the picturesque southern state of Kerala
fone citing a bilateral India-Netherlands treaty went in (pop.35 million) is invariably accorded high praise. This
appeal to the Court of International Arbitration at the is because during the past seven decades since indepen-
Hague, and again won a favourable verdict. Recently, dence, the state has attained 99 percent literacy. The high
to prevent wrongly taxed companies from seizing and status accorded to Kerala is enthusiastically propagated
selling national assets abroad, the BJP/NDA government by Left academics and intellectuals as validation of com-
repealed the retrospective taxation legislation passed by munism, which has struck deep roots in the state. Way
the Congress-led UPA government in 2012. Meanwhile, back in 1957, the people of Kerala elected the first com-
India’s reputation as a safe destination for foreign inves- munist government of post-independence India. Since
tors has been severely damaged. then, Kerala has routinely elected CPM (Communist Party
As editor of Businessworld I was the first journalist of India-Marxist) governments. This despite communist
to interview Mukherjee, a lecturer in an obscure college ideology decisively rejected in Russia, China and most
in Kolkata, when he was first appointed Union finance famously in West Bengal where the CPM-led Left Front
minister in 1984. Never before or since have I met a more ruled uninterruptedly for 34 years (1977-2011).
confused top-level government official. His every next Nevertheless, despite the obsolescence of communist
sentence contradicted the previous one. That such an ideology, in the legislative assembly election of April
apotheosis of mediocrity almost became prime minister 2021, the country’s most literate electorate returned a
and ended his days in Rashtrapati Bhavan with its 16-acre coalition headed by the CPM to power, clear proof that
rose garden, explains the pathetic condition of the masses there’s a wide gulf between literacy and intelligence.
and the country’s pitiable also-ran international status. The plain truth is that Kerala’s high literacy is not
the outcome of communism or its faux intellectuals,
Overdue payback but of the Roman Catholic Church whose missionaries
established a vast network of primary schools across the
state over two centuries. These schools have in effect
HE INDIAN CRICKET TEAM’S COMPREHENSIVE been nationalised and transformed into aided schools
mid-August victory over England in the second Test (teachers and staff salaries are paid directly by the state
Tplayed at Lords, London, the sport’s most hallowed government) and heavily infiltrated by CPM party cadres
ground worldwide, marks an inflection point in the history recruited as teachers and employees. This lot has been
of Indian cricket. For the first time ever, all 20 wickets in brainwashing children with class conflict ideologies and
England’s two innings were taken by Indian pace bowlers anti-free enterprise sentiment for decades, transforming
hitherto routinely dismissed as gentle medium pacers. the state into a hotbed of militant trade unionism
Unfortunately because of reiteration, this disparage- which has provoked capital flight creating a chronic
ment was internalised by Indian cricket selectors and unemployment problem and forcing millions of Kerala’s
players for several decades. On the other hand English youth to emigrate to Middle East and Gulf autocracies
speedsters such as Fred Trueman, an uncouth racist where they have to endure cruel working conditions and
delighted in making Indian batsmen fear not only for human rights violations.
their wickets, but lives. It’s worth remembering that in a True Kerala is India’s most literate state, but its people
1952 Test match at Lords with Trueman on the rampage, are ill-educated. If they were enlightened, they would
India’s score-board famously read 0-4 (four wickets have seen through the regressive Marxism of CPM and its
down without a run scored). Therefore, the recent victory elites who have scared away domestic and foreign invest-
at Lords with the four-man Indian pace attack forcing ment, forced millions of youth to emigrate abroad, and
English batsmen to duck, back away and inflicting serious lumbered it with a snowballing unemployment crisis.

74 EDUCATIONWORLD SEPTEMBER 2021