IN George Orwell`s fable of the Animal Farm, the pigs become the ruling elite after throwing out Mr Jones from the Manor Farm together with his capitalist worldview. But before the story is over, which closely resembles Stalin`s ascent to dictatorship in Moscow, the pigs had acquired many of the habits they had set out to delete from a new socialist curriculum. While their initial slogan was distinctly anti-man four legs good, two legs bad, it soon mutated to read four legs good, two legs better.

The story ends with the bewildered working class animals observing the revelries of their leaders from a distance where they could see the pigs walking on hind legs and drinking wine, thus breaking two key tenets that came with the revolution. “No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Thus ends the saga of the Animal Farm.As the Wall Street turned into the Fall Street in recent weeks, the clamour to apply the hitherto denigrated principles of socialist command economy to shore up the hub of world capitalism had the trappings of an Orwellian satire gone horribly wrong. Equally bizarre on the other hand was the aborted attempt last week by India`s main communist party to usher an era of unbridled capitalism in their satrap of West Bengal. The irony was heightened by history, for it was in India that we saw a unique communist victory in 1957 for a post-Stalin world that was otherwise withdrawing from the horrors of a dream that turned into a nightmare.

Orwell belonged to a generation of communist sympathisers, which included Arthur Koestler and Howard Fast among others, that went on an emotional rebound with Nikita Khrushchev`s revelations of 1956 when he uncovered the horrors of Stalin`s rule. And yet in India the trend was just uniquely opposite. Far from being disillusioned by Stalin, the state of Kerala democratically elected a communist government. Faint reverberations of this experiment were to be felt years later in the phenomenon called Euro-communism. And here, in West Bengal, till last week, the same communist party was wooing the nation`s most successful corporate house, the Tatas, to set up a motorcar factory. To complete the irony, West Bengal`s opposition leader Mamta Banerjee, who was hitherto identified as a spokesperson for India`s capitalist lobbies was now seen as a votary of poor farmers` rights, their land allegedly stolen by the communists to turn it into an industrial park.

In this drama of high intensity, for a soliloquy there was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He appeared in Washington DC with an agenda which was at total variance with the firefighting drill that seemed to have overwhelmed his hosts. In his zeal to get a vote passed by the US Congress on his pet nuclear deal in the middle of the American trauma, Mr Singh may have failed to notice the ideological ground shifting beneath his feet. The neo-con mantra that had shored him up as a factor in Indian politics without ever requiring him to face the voter, was crumbling where its fountainhead once was at the Wall Street.

(I wonder if Mr Singh got a copy of The New York Times where his fellow free markets guru Thomas Friedman advised Mr John McCain on nuclear energy. Friedman wrote “McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from?”)

Anyway the initial bipartisan rejection of the Wall Street bailout by the US Congress came after my favourite character from Animal Farm, Benjamin the mule, blew the whistle on the plunder that was being advocated. And that character, yet again, was Michael Moore. There were many people questioning the Bush proposal to hand over $700 billion to Wall Street bankers, but Moore campaigned like a man possessed against the proposed package.

He canvassed support from all and sundry and his desperate SOS reached the far corners of the world through email. Moore described the proposed package as the biggest robbery in the history of the United States. “Though no guns are being used,” he wrote, “three hundred million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies who must soon vacate the White House are looting the US Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.”

The first four paragraphs of the lead story in the New York Times stated starkly what the deal was all about “Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

“Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

“At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

“Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury`s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.”

Unbelievable, said Moore. “Wall Street and its backers created this mess and now they are going to clean up like bandits. Even Rudy Giuliani is lobbying for his firm to be hired (and paid) to `consult` in the bailout.”

So what was the `collapse` all about? US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson admitted he didn`t know the exact amount that was needed. “He just picked the $700 billion number randomly.” The head of the congressional budget office said he couldn`t figure it out nor could he explain it to anyone. And yet there was panic, there was talk of recession, depression. “This bailout mission is to protect the obscene amount of wealth that has been accumulated in the last eight years.” Moore`s Benjamin-like insights into the murky affairs of the state might seem somewhat disparaging, but they also reflected the fears expressed by the Congressmen. Many of them face elections later this year. The bailout was intended “to protect the top shareholders who own and control corporate America”, Moore reminded us. It was to make sure their yachts and mansions and `way of life` went uninterrupted while the rest of America suffered and struggled to pay the bills. “Let the rich suffer for once. Let them pay for the bailout. We are spending $400 million a day on the war in Iraq. Let them end the war immediately and save us all another half-trillion dollars!”

Back to India. There was a time not too long ago when Indian communist rallies raised slogans targeting the country`s big business houses as a key ideological plank. “Ye Tata-Birla ki sarkar nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi”, they would thunder berating the `bourgeois governments` controlled by the house of Tatas and Birlas, for example. That slogan was still being heard in West Bengal last week. But it came from the corner of Mamta Banerjee. Her quarries? Indian communists.

In a somewhat similar twist in the tale, when Manmohan Singh whispered to Mr Bush how much he loved him, it was difficult to tell which side of the split personality he was addressing. For, apart from the cataclysmic ideological shift Mr Singh failed to notice, the journey from Stalin to Bush has had a solid continuity. The terror of the Gulags have mutated into Guantanamo Bay. The Big Brother`s prying eyes have changed into the Patriot Act. Let`s see what these lessons will mean to India.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com