Envy
I don’t read tabloids regularly; perusing the daily “mainstream” newspapers is a masochistic enterprise in itself. Happened to read the Mirror today, and found N. Vittal’s article-
Close on the heels of the austerity drive of the Congress leaders, Salman Khurshid, the minister for corporate affairs, came up with advice to companies to refrain from “vulgar” salaries….
The minister’s remarks are a Freudian slip exposing an unmentioned or unmentionable aspect of our politics. Forty years of socialism has ingrained a mindset of envy against successful people in our society. As Gurcharan Das observes in his recent insightful book The Difficulty of Being Good, if greed is the sin of capitalism, envy is the weakness of socialism…
I put his comment down to Congress’ fascist mentality. I think the Party misses the good old days when people had to kiss the backsides of the powers that be to get things done. If 1990-91 hadn’t happened, we would still be watching Doordarshan and wondering about the strange phenomenon known as the internet. The Party can’t tolerate freedom—liberalism, and it won’t give up its attempts to curb freedom voluntarily. This reminds me of “you will not give, I ‘ll take!”
