Politicians are really making an issue of rising prices for their vote bank. Politics in all epochs and in all countries aims at the seizure of power. The power politicians aspire to-and seize-is intended to make use of instruments of various descriptions available to the state-administrative, legal, fiscal, and monetary-to further their own interests and those of their near and dear ones; the latter category includes not just kith and kin, but caste, religious class or ethnic fraternities too. Those entrenched in power use this power to ensure the enlargement of economic benefits for their particular constituency. Those at present outside the orbit of power will similarly shout themselves hoarse to espouse the economic interests of those who make up their support base.

Politics, it follows, is all about economics, and vice versa. The more likely thing is that he himself is playing politics by claiming not to know what is what. The Left parties in the country have their support base amongst the weaker sections, most hard hit by inflation. The Left must therefore, for sheer survival protest against rising prices and apply pressure on the authorities to do something about it.

The unleashing of the animal spirit is akin to prodding the predatory instinct of the producing and entrepreneurial classes to go on rampage and maximize their profit-taking to the extent possible by riding roughshod over all other considerations; how others in society live or die need not be on the agenda of the profit-takers. The inflation the Indian economy is currently experiencing is only a specific instance of predatory behavior. Rising prices offer opportunities galore for raking up extra profits on the part of producers and traders. The rule of neo-liberal economics is very clear: the Government has no business to interfere with the ongoing inflationary proceedings.

It is a multi-party democracy, the poor make up the overwhelming majority of the electorate. There has to be at least a temporary restraint exercised by the predators at work on the price front if the party which has been their patron saint is to emerge successful in the forthcoming polls. The concept of permanent loyalty too is alien to free enterprise. Since the government has, over the years, voluntarily withdrawn itself from the economic sphere and left it to the care of private entities, the levers of economic power are currently under the effective command of the creamy layer which has been the exclusive beneficiary of neo-liberal growth.

This class, growing in size and strength over the years, may now be as many as a hundred million, or even more. The creamy layer is not an integer, it is marked by heterogeneities. On occasion, the interests of manufacturing entrepreneurs can be in conflict with those of traders or of the rich peasantry. At the same time, it can happen to that, for instance, a group of textile manufacturers simultaneously exercises control over groups entrenched in cotton-trading and cotton-growing as well; their internal contradictions can then be sorted out with relative ease.

A kind of chaos comes to rage as profiteers determinedly proceed to make their pile; the workers and the rest of the poor are squeezed and squeezed, while the honest householder does not know in which direction to look for protection. There is no such thing as pure politics or, for the matter, it is all economics.