AAI Strike In India

The Manmohan Singh cabinet awarded contracts for upgrading of the Delhi and Mumbai airports. The Airports Authority of India employees have been on a strike since the announcement, goaded on by the Left parties. The Left says that "it is not against the modernisation, just against the privatisation".

My question is this, if the modernisation is going to cost thousands of crores of rupees, where is the money going to come from? Of course, it has to come from poverty alleviation schemes like the Rural Employment Guarantee program. In effect the Left is protecting the interests of the coddled middle class against the interests of the poor. This stand is borderline immoral, besides being against all possible national interests.

The AAI strike has happened in spite of the fact that the Government has promised none of the current employees with lose their jobs. The saddest part of the whole thing is that given the spineless behavior of this government in the past, it is probably going to give in to the Left front blackmail yet again.

My understated brother in law once said that the Left "is against anything that is reasonable". I appreciate the Communists for many genuine reasons, including things like raising the level of intellect in national debates, and being the voice of secularism in an age when being communal is becoming scarily "cool". However, their action on the economic front is causing the country to bleed. Will they ever learn to act in the national interest instead of their ideological interests, like their brothers in China do? More important for the immediate future, will the government show some spine this time around?

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