Former AAP leader and current Swarajya Party leader tweeted a “7-point action plan” that was evidently endorsed by “leading economists and intellectuals”. The 7-point plan aimed to lay-out of a path that was meant to help the country fight the current Coronavirus pandemic. However, the 7-point plan, as OpIndia termed it, was one that could be written by a 14-year-old and had several problematic clauses. One of the clauses was 7.1 which stated that all private property, which included bonds, gold, property etc ‘must be treated as a national resource’ to fight the pandemic. One of the intellectuals who endorsed this juvenile ‘action plan’ was Ramchandra Guha. However, after much mockery and hue and cry, Guha has taken a u-turn and distanced himself from the action plan.
Ramchandra Guha took to Twitter to announce that the clause that was presented to him during the discussion and the clause that was finally printed were vastly different, referring to clause 7.1.
https://twitter.com/Ram_Guha/status/1264061843208691713?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwRamchandra Guha said that when he had approved the mission statement, clause 7.1 read, “All resources within the nation are national resources, available for this mission.” However, the printed version is vastly different.
The published version of the clause was ‘radically different’ according to Ramchandra Guha. The published version of Clause 7.1 says, “All the resources (cash, real estate, property, bonds, etc) with the citizens or within the nation must be treated as national resources available during this crisis.” Guha claimed that he had not endorsed this version.
https://twitter.com/Ram_Guha/status/1264062101942751233?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwGuha further said that this version did not have the approval of many signatories and has a “taken the attention away from the many sensible suggestions made in the Statement”.
It must be mentioned that though Ram Guha has tacitly said that the clause is not sensible, he has refrained from distancing himself completely from the 7 point action plan. He still endorses the rest of the suggestions made in the statement. Some other suggestions made in the statement are ‘jobs for everyone’, ‘income for everyone’, and ‘no interest till economy revives’. The utopian, socialist measures suggested by the so-called leading “intellectuals” are unimplementable and almost seem like the intellectuals, many of whom were in Sonia Gandhi’s NAC are laying the groundwork to ensure that the state benefits from private resources to fill its own coffers.