“Brothers and sisters, greetings to you on this day on which we remember our
glorious past. Things are getting a little expensive I know, and you keep
moaning about food prices, but look at it this way—more than six hundred and
fifty million of you are engaged in and are living off agriculture as
farmers and farm labour. But your combined efforts contribute less than 18
per cent of our GDP. So what’s the use of you? Look at our IT sector. It
employs 0.2 per cent of the population and accounts for 5 per cent of our
GDP. Can you match that? It is true that in our country employment hasn’t
kept pace with growth, but fortunately 60 per cent of our workforce is
self-employed. Ninety per cent of our labour force is employed by the
unorganised sector. True, they manage to get work only for a few months in
the year, but since we don’t have a category called “underemployed”, we just
keep that part a little vague. It would not be right to enter them in our
books as unemployed. Coming to the statistics that say we have the highest
infant and maternal mortality in the world—we should unite as a nation and
ignore bad news for the time being. We can address these problems later,
after our Trickle-Down Revolution, when the health sector has been
completely privatised. Meanwhile, I hope you are all buying medical
insurance. As for the fact that the per capita foodgrain availability has
actually decreased over the last 20 years—which happens to be the period of
our most rapid economic growth—believe me, that’s just a coincidence.
“My fellow citizens, we are building a new India in which our 100 richest
people, millionaires and billionaires, hold assets worth a full 25 per cent
of our GDP. Wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands is always more
efficient. You have all heard the saying that too many cooks spoil the
broth. We want our beloved billionaires, our few hundred millionaires, their
near and dear ones and their political and business associates, to be
prosperous and to live a life of honour and dignity in an environment of
peace and goodwill in which their basic rights are protected.
“I am aware that my dreams cannot come true by solely using democratic
means. In fact, I have come to believe that real democracy flows through the
barrel of a gun. This is why we have deployed the Army, the Police, the
Central Reserve Police Force, the Border Security Force, the Central
Industrial Security Force, the Pradeshik Armed Constabulary, the
Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the Eastern Frontier Rifles—as well as the
Scorpions, Greyhounds and Cobras—to crush the misguided insurrections that
are erupting in our mineral-rich areas.
“Our experiments with democracy began in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir.
Kashmir, I need not reiterate, is an integral part of India. We have
deployed more than half-a-million soldiers to bring democracy to the people
there. The Kashmiri youth who have been risking their lives by defying
curfew and throwing stones at the police for the last two months are
Lashkar-e-Toiba militants who actually want employment, not azadi.
Tragically, 60 of them have lost their lives before we could study their job
applications. I have instructed the police from now on to shoot to maim
rather than kill these misguided youths.”
this and more at:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267040
|