High Comedy

"The Big Fight" on NDTV today is about the relevance of Socialism. Vijay Mallya, Surjit Bhalla, Subhashini Ali (socialist activist) and Atul Kumar Anjaan (CPI Secretary) are the participants.

Subhashini Ali provided a lot of unintended comedy. Comradini Ali claimed that the fact that Russia developed into a superpower within 50 years after the 1917 revolution proved that socialism was a good system (though she did say that 100 years or so of socialism was not enough to judge if it was better than capitalism, which she said succeeded only through colonialism ). When Bhalla predictably guffawed at this suggestion, mixing the name Stalin with mass murder, Comrade Anjaan was sufficiently aroused to claim that Bhalla was un-necessarily maligning the good name of Lenin. In Soviet Union, apparently, all people were equal and they enjoyed the freedom of speech and expression. The US had to create the Taliban in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviet Union (which is partially true). But the fact that commie regimes all over Eastern Europe were being deposed (non-violently, unlike how those countries were originally overrun by Soviet Union, for example Hungaryin 1956) provided the required impetus for the fall of the USSR.

Bhalla asked a simple question which went unanswered by the two comrades on the show - if socialism is good, can you name any country where socialism has succeeded?. While Anjaan tried to dance around the question, Ali claimed China has/is growing economically because of socialism. Bhalla it seems is incapable of understanding the greatness of socialism.