Then I found myself answering my own questions. I remembered that Mamati-di formed her economic ideas in a time when the ‘foreign hand’ was India’s most feared bogeyman. A time when foreign investment was viewed as a new East India Company. On top of this, she has spent her whole life in a state that was ruled by communists for more than thirty years. She could not possibly have learned to question standard wisdom or search for new political and economic answers. So if foreign investors do decide to take their chances and start investing in the Indian retail business, they should stay away from West Bengal and other states that are ruled by chief ministers of leftist disposition. But, that is not India’s real problem. Our real problem is that the economic ideas that Mamata-di articulated so pithily are widely believed.

Not just by an older generation of Indians but by younger, middle-class Indians who in the past two years have rallied around the movement against corruption. And, it is not just new, young political leaders who believe that India is such a pathetic country that it can be destroyed by Walmart but NGOs, social workers and even (believe it or not) socialites. Together they constitute a mindset that is slowly but certainly eating into the economic gains made in the past two decades.

So confident is neo-leftism these days that its proponents have no compunction about articulating their bizarre views on television and online. Last week, I accidently came upon a BBC interview with our most bellicose ‘environmentalist’, Vandana Shiva, and nearly fainted with shock when she said that before 1997, Indian farmers lived in blissful harmony with nature. It was the advent of multinational seed companies like Monsanto, she added, that had shattered this rural idyll. Clearly Ms Shiva never travelled in rural parts in those times or she would have seen that the average Indian farmer lived off subsistence farming. If his meagre crops failed, his family starved. She seems also to have forgotten those shameful days when we imported shiploads of PL 480 grain. She believes that the green revolution was a fraud on Indian farmers.

Then in my mailbox arrived a press release from my least favourite NGO lady, Medha Patkar. It said that her ‘people’s movement’ now believes that ‘development’ is the enemy of the people. The word development encompasses schools, healthcare, roads, electricity so what her coalition of NGOs recommend is a return to those days when 80 per cent of our population lived without these things.

Why has the loony left suddenly returned from the graveyard of dead ideologies? Why are no political leaders speaking out against economic ideas that spell ruin for India? Well, because the current political landscape is painted in so many shades of pink that our only saffron party has been frightened into spouting economic ideas that even the communists abandoned towards the end of their rule in West Bengal.

An even more important question that we should all be asking is why our political leaders are so sure that foreign investors are queuing up to invest in Indian retail? Why should they not go further east, as they did before, and invest in countries like Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia that have a more salubrious investment climate? It is India that needs investment in these difficult economic times and not the other way around but this is not something our opposition MPs noticed when they stalled Parliament over FDI in retail last week.

As for Mamata-di and her fear of ‘Bhawlmart’, she should get over it as soon as she can. The FDI policy that the Finance Minister has devised allows every state to choose its own way. So when the lives of farmers in other Indian states are transformed by better opportunities and better markets, Bengali farmers will start demanding FDI in retail and then perhaps their chief minister will acknowledge that her definition of the ‘peepul’ is narrow. It could by then be too late for a Bengali renaissance, so bad luck once again for West Bengal.

Apology: My column in the Sunday Express on November 18 questioned the judgment both of the CAG in his estimation of ‘notional loss’ and of the Supreme Court in cancelling the 122 licences. Unfortunately, in the wording of a sentence, anger overtook reason. When I said that the judges should be ‘in the dock’ with the CAG, that was metaphorical not literal. What I meant was that the ruling was flawed and the government should seek its review. My intention was and is to disagree, not to show any disrespect to the Bench. I deeply regret writing the sentence and any misunderstanding it may have caused.