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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1968

By 331/3 per cent has not helped the situation. It has been reported that India has reached the point were she would soon be unable to meet her debt payments, a position long ago met by Latin American countries.

The Bank of Baroda in its Weekly Review of August 21, 1967, wrote:

“Indian economy has now been passing through a very critical period. While the agricultural sector is in a perilous state thanks to two successive droughts, industrial economy is affiliated with recession on a scale unknown hitherto.

“The declaration of the growth of industrial production in the last two years may be termed as stagnation. Recession, on the other hand, is a recent phenomenon which represents a climate of chronic stagnation in the past few years and has proved to be more far-fetching in terms of its undesirable economic consequences.”

China, on the other hand, despite its internal political turmoil, has been making repaid strides. Little wonder that the Washington Post, editorializing on July 3, 1967, on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee’s Special study of the Chinese economy, stated: “Far from being the land of total chais and conflict, China is . . . a country which has made considerable progress in the past and which continues to tackle major economic concerns.

“The Committee’s study is the most comprehensive and timely one available. Its central conclusions summarized in Chairman Proxmire’s report, are that China is in a ‘reasonably satisfactory food situation with no indication of food stringency,’ that “remarkable gains’ in education is limited not by its economic resources but by its technical knowhow (itself ‘not inconsiderable and expanding’). China’s recent explosion of its thermonuclear bomb underscores this assessment of its nuclear progress.”

The reason for China’s advance is rooter in the basic fact that the Chinese in 1949 expelled the foreign exploiters, nationalized the mines, factories, plantations, banks, insurance companies and trade firms owned by the imperialists and their Chinese collaborators, the “comprador” capitalists, and took away the land from the warlords and landlords and gave it the exploited landless peasants.

India, on the other hand, suffered a decline because from the time of independence to this day, she was saddled not only with the big foreign exploiters, but also with big local capitalists, zamindars and taluhdars. Besides, she carried on her a huge burden of defense, a legacy of the cold war and partition.