More Inflation, More Debts, More Taxes

Once again we are told by the Planning Commission that the turning point is just around the corner, and that after an additional injection of foreign aid and some additional taxation and inflation, the country will reach self­-sustaining growth and prosperity. Prof. Bauer has dealt with this policy and his opinion has been published in last week’s SWARAJYA. The Fourth Plan contemplates an expenditure of Rs 28,750 crores, during the next five years, out of which Rs 16,000 crores will be spent over the “public” sector, that is the Government sector, and Rs 7,750 crores are to be laid out in the private sector to help favoured units.

What is the plan for getting this Rs 16,000 crores for the State sector? The Planning Commission relies on additions to taxation and compulsory levies of various kinds including railway charges to create a railway, surplus to produce in all more than Rs 6,000 crores. Besides these additions to taxation on one kind or another, it is planned to borrow from the public in India Rs 2,500 crores. This too involves, it is well known considerable compulsion on those who can ill afford to save and lend to the Government. It is also planned to add to the present foreign debt burden a fresh sum of Rs 4,340 crores, so that our foreign debt burden will stand trebled. Thus the Fourth Plan means tremendous fresh squeezing of the people’s life-­blood and a gigantic addition to the burden of foreign debt to be placed on our children’s shoulders. Arid arithmetic is given to the people who ask for bread to eat and not arithmetical fallacies to swallow.

There is another aspect which should also be kept in mind. If this plan is carried out, that is, if all this expenditure is gone through, economists will tell us what its grave effect on the price line will be. Prices which are going up even now, will rise still higher. The life of the poor man will be what he cannot bear, just because Sri Asoka Mehta and others say that this is Socialism. If the Congress Government is allowed to play this tragedy out, there will be a terrible increase in the inflation under which the people even now are suffering. The cost of living will go up and no magic or tyranny can keep wages from rising. As a result of this and for other reasons, all the calculations of cost which go.to make up the figures in the plan will prove to be wrong.

Let no one imagine that there will be anarchy if the Congress is not voted to office. The Constitution has not failed to provide for such a contingency. The people will have order and good government instead of a government that is bent on taking us to bankruptcy. Let no one be misled by the threats the Congress bosses are making or the bribes they are offering in the shape of things that will be done if the people agree to accept fresh taxation and oppression and all else which the large figures presented mean and involve.

“But the Congress Party is the only strong and stable party”. This is an oft-repeated argument advanced by eminent persons as well as others who admitting the blunders of the Congress Party and its corruptions advise people to support it. What is this stability they talk of? A blundering and corrupt party is worse for its strength and stability which it has acquired through the exercise of power via the economic controls conferred on the State. Ravana could not be beheaded. When one of his ten heads was chopped off, another grew in its place. So also as his arms were cut off, others grew at once to take their place. This stability and strength did not make Ravana better hut worse. The longevity of chaos is not a blessing.

This plan must be rejected and the people can do it only by refusing to vote for the Congress in 1967 and asking the President to form a new government to save the people.