Interesting Profile Of Prakash Karat

Newsweek has a profile of Prakash Karat, head of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the influence he wields over the current UPA government. Newsweek doesn’t mince words when they call him and the CPI-M Stalinist.

From his fortress-like red sandstone headquarters near New Delhi's Connaught Place—a bustling commercial hub lined with McDonald's, foreign banks and boutiques—Prakash Karat, India's reigning communist ideologue, is fighting to kill his country's economic- and political-reform process. If Karat gets his way, India will turn its back on its recent much-touted modernization—which, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has led to 9 percent growth for four years now. Karat also hopes to undermine Singh's recent pro-Western foreign-policy overhaul—embodied in the pending U.S.-India nuclear deal—in favor of old, blinkered, nonaligned politics. These are precisely the kinds of positions that kept India a poor and marginal backwater for many years. Yet to the amazement and dismay of many Indians, they may soon become its policy once more.

The article also mentions that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is so frustrated that he often wished his government fell. And this well may happen even though there is still two years left till new elections.