Keynote Speakers
V.Krishna Ananth
"The Political Economy of Fascism: Some observations
on contemporary political discourse in India"
Two years after we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary
of our independence, the civil society in India is at crossroads.
A nation, born out of a long drawn anti-imperialist struggle and
hence could give shape to a secular and democratic governing structure
is now witnessing the rise of fascist tendencies threatening to
dismantle its institutions of Democracy.
The Republican Constitution that drew its strength primarily
from the pluralist and democratic spirit of the anti-imperialist
struggle is sought to be distorted. If this (the efforts to distort)
is essentially an integral part of the political project of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) through several of its outfits
(the BJP being its arm in the electoral arena), the ``others''
in the political spectrum (and here I would like to identify the
Congress in particular) have been refusing to take the battle
on in right earnest.
More than a mere refusal, the Congress as a political party
had played and continues to play a role that has only aided the
rise of such forces; apart from compromising with the Hindutva
forces, the Congress party had, on several occasions in the past,
attempted to appropriate the right-wing slogans. The opening of
the locks (through a court order manipulated by the then Rajiv
Gandhi Government), the conduct of shilanyas at the site where
the Babri Masjid stood and the passive role played by the Narasimha
Rao Government when the sangh parivar hordes demolished the structure
on December 6, 1992 are all part of the political folklore in
this regard. These, however, were only the visible or much pronounced
occasions where the Congress party aided or rather participated
in communalising the political discourse in India. And it is important
to look at the long background to this process, which I will come
to a little later.
At this stage, suffice it to say that the outcome of all
these is what we are going through in both the countries, India
and Pakistan at this moment.
A nation that was born out of one of the mightiest battles
against colonialism and where normality (from sectarian strife)
could be restored within only a couple of years after the worst
communal violence of the time (I am referring here to the mindless
killings, arson and looting that were witnessed in several parts
of the country in the wake of partition) is now witnessing ``celebration''
of a war (or a war like situation); much worse is that the ``celebration''
is orchestrated by the political class, cutting across party lines,
to kindle, what is being called, the spirit of nationalism.
Any appeal for peace or even a private statement that meaningful
efforts must be initiated to ensure de-escalation of hostilities
between India and Pakistan is soon branded as anti-national and
by extension anyone being an agent of Pakistan and by extension
anti-national. I am sure it is the same in Pakistan.
In other words, nationalism in India is sought to be constructed
on a new plank; rather than the ethos or the tradition of anti-imperialism,
the basis of Indian nationalism is now being sought to be located
and constructed on the basis of a perpetual conflict with Pakistan.
Indeed, such a project -- to locate Pakistan as the ``other''
and construct Indian nationalism on that basis -- is certainly
not a new one. In fact, this project had begun even earlier than
August 15, 1947. The communal fire that gripped the civil society
months before the declaration of independence, was, in any case
a manifestation of such a nationalist project, whose ideological
roots can be located, although in a weak form, in the writings
of Golwalkar and the campaigns of Hedgewar on the one hand and
adoption of the two nation theory by the Muslim League.
It may be true that the Muslim League's Pakistan resolution
in 1940 was only in response to the Hinduisation of the Indian
National Congress at various levels, particularly its provincial
leaders in United Provinces; I am referring to such leaders as
Govind Ballabh Pant, Madan Mohan Malaviya or Gopi Chand Bhargava
in the Punjab who were not only accommodated in the Indian National
Congress but were able to hold important offices in the organisation
despite their record of having participated and even led movements
with a definite anti-Muslim bias. But then, I must stress here,
that the core of the nationalist movement and by extension the
Indian National Congress leadership was not merely secular but
was committed to the view that the Indian nation must and will
have to be built on secular and democratic principles and that
there was no place for religious or cultural identities in this
project. Thus, there could be no justification other than a fundamentalist
premise to the Muslim League resolution of 1940.
And only because the core of the nationalist movement had
remained secular, the flames (lit by the communal violence in
the wake of partition) were doused within just a couple of years;
and far more significantly, independent India matured soon into
a Republic whose Constitution was rooted in the pluralist tradition
of the freedom movement and democratic principles, emulated essentially
from the bourgeois socio-political order that had matured in Western
Europe around the same time.
The concern, particularly for those of us who are committed
to the Constitution and look back into the glorious legacy of
the anti-imperialist struggle for inspiration, is that the basic
spirit of our Constitution is now being challenged. I am not exaggerating
when I say today that the challenge is no longer weak. ``They''
are not just on the fringes of the civil society; ``they'' have
not only entered the mainstream but have grown in size to the
extend that they are beginning to hegemonise the political discourse
to a large extent.
By ``they'' I mean the political platform rooted in the
Golwalkar-Hedgewar tradition, now being identified in the Indian
political discourse as Hindutva; the thrust of their ideological
position is that Indian nationalism must look back for its roots
in the ancient empires that existed such as the Guptas and the
Mauryas and that this ``nation'' was invaded and colonised by
Ghazni, Ghori and later on by the Moghuls; and by this definition,
the Marathas, the kings of Vijayanagar and all those who fought
against the Moghul rule were the first of the nationalists. In
short, the ideologues of this brand insisted upon locating Indian
nationalism in the Aryan kingdoms established and sustained on
the basis of the Vedic tradition.
The fact that Delhi Sultans or the Moghul Emperors were
no different from the Guptas or the Mauryas or any other Hindu
rulers when it came to perpetuating an oppressive economic order
and that all these setups drew their legitimacy to oppress the
masses from the social order (based essentially on the Vedic tradition)
does not appeal to this school. Similarly, it does not appeal
to them that nationalism is essentially a modern concept and that
it evolved in the struggle against the colonialism.
It will be beyond the scope of this paper to deal with,
in an elaborate manner, the historical context in which Indian
nationalism evolved or the making of Indian nation. I will prefer
a brief statement on this aspect before getting into the thrust
area of my paper here. A brief statement on this aspect is crucial
to my argument.
Instances of resistance to the British rule in the form
of armed battles by native rulers are part of recorded history;
the most important of such battles was the armed rebellion in
1857. But then, it is also a fact that most of these battles were
guided or led by the native rulers and their vision could hardly
go beyond defending their own interests. After all, the outcome
of the 1857 revolt was the crowning of Bahadur Shah Zafar, an
inheritor of the Moghul empire that was in any case a decadent
and backward looking dispensation; in other words, the end game
turned out to be restoring Monarchy. Notwithstanding the valour
and sacrifices by the participants in the battle, one certainly
cannot treat the uprising of having been nationalist.
Instead, Indian nationalism evolved only a few decades
after 1857 and the basis of its evolution was a critique of colonialism
as a process. The first ever systematic critique in this sense
was Dadabhai Naoroji's ``Un-British Rule of the British in India.''
No doubt the thrust of this treatise was to appeal to the ``good
sense'' of the emerging bourgeois intellectuals, which indeed
was the `dominant ideology' in Britain towards the end of the
19 th Century (I am using the phrase dominant ideology in the
manner in which Antonio Gramsci uses this), to reform. Indeed,
colonial structure by its very nature -- the dependence of the
metropolitan bourgeoisie on the spoils from the colonial hinterland
-- had rendered bourgeois intellectuals in Britain insensitive
to such appeals from Dadabhai Naoroji or for that matter from
the Indian National Congress in its initial years. And it was
the realisation of this reality that triggered the growth of Indian
nationalism, not merely as an intellectual critique of colonialism
but also in the nature of an anti-imperialist struggle.
It is now a well established fact of history that the basis
of Indian nationalism was the conflict of interests between the
metropolitan bourgeoisie on the one hand and the colonial people
on the other. The metropolitan bourgeoisie and more so its agent
(the British administration) was the ``other'' in the making of
the nationalist consciousness. In other words, the basis of nationalism
in India (and this includes present day Pakistan too at least
until 1937) was the colonial structure and the resistance to this
structure, whose cause was located in the exploitative mode of
production.
There was hardly any place for such other symbols as religion
or any glorious past in the making of Indian nationalism although
such symbols as the past glory (the Indus Valley Civilization,
the valour of the Marathas or Tippu Sultan's resistance to British
invasions) were employed by the leadership of the national movement,
time and again, as symbols to inspire the struggle.
It is important to note in this context that Bal Gangadhar
Tilak, one of the early nationalists to break out of the prayer-petition
mode and instead engaged himself in mobilisation of the masses
against the British administration, had, even while invoking the
Shivaji legacy and the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in the course
of mobilising the masses against the British rule was clear in
his approach when it came to locating the Aryans as invaders from
the Central Asian region. And at another level, we find that Jawaharlal
Nehru had not only agreed with Tilak but had even gone a step
further to trace India's past to the Indus Valley civilization;
apart from categorising the Aryans as invaders, Nehru's effort
was to present before the world that a ``superior'' civilization
existed here even before the colonial era began.
The idea behind this intellectual exercise clear; to explode
the claims by the British rulers that they were ordained to ``civilize
the uncivilized barbarians.''
Thus, it is clear that even while the nationalist leadership
in India resorted to glorification of the past, they were conscious
about the need for a forward looking ideology and opposed to any
kind of return to the past. Nationalism, hence, was a forward
looking idea; and the Indian National Congress, in the course
of defining swaraj, was conscious of this imperative. The Republican
Constitution was indeed the manifestation of this long and drawn
out debate carried out in the context of the anti-imperialist
mobilisation of the masses as citizens rather than as Hindus and
Muslims.
I must say that an important but tragic distortion of this
discourse was managed by backward looking sections at some point
of time leading to the demand for Pakistan. Let me make it clear,
once again at the cost of being charged of repeating the same
points, that the Muslim League demand for Pakistan was not just
a creation of Jinnah or the outcome of a successful plot by the
colonial rulers. The role played by forces of Hindu fundamentalism
(and here I will include sections within the Indian National Congress
apart from Hedgewar, Golwalkar and their ilk) in the making of
Pakistan is not being denied. But then the fact remains that this
was the first major distortion of Indian Nationalism as a concept.
In nutshell, Indian nationalism, as is the case with nationalism
in most parts of the world at the turn of this Century, evolved
during the colonial era was essentially secular, democratic and
played a unifying role; this certainly was true of the period
until a couple of years before August 15, 1947 when the Indian
National Congress had remained a platform of all sections of the
Indian people -- the Hindus, Muslims, Christians in the social
sense or the working class, the different strata of the peasantry
and the intelligentsia in class terms -- engaged in a struggle
against British imperialism. And the material changes undergone
in the reality when it became clear that the British were all
set to quit (an important fallout of the World War II when a whole
lot of nations were liberated from imperialist clutches) also
witnessed the transition of the Indian National Congress from
being a platform of struggle to just another political party --
the Congress party -- forced its leaders to embark upon a conscious
effort to formulate a different basis to nationalism.
To persist with the same old framework -- of struggle against
an exploitative socio-economic order -- would have necessitated
a radical questioning of or posing a challenge to the social and
economic order that prevailed. In other words, the imperative,
at that stage, for the nationalist leadership was to mobilise
the poor and the oppressed masses on the slogan of building an
egalitarian set-up, not only in the economic sense but also in
the social sense of the term. This, indeed, was a tall order for
the leaders of the Congress party, who, at that stage were drawn
predominantly from the Upper castes and landed classes. More than
anything else, such a mobilisation, challenging the vestiges of
the feudal order and taking on the class interests of the emerging
bourgeoisie, who had by this time cultivated important persons
in the Congress party set-up as their representatives was not
in their own interest.
Even a cursory glance on the Congress party set-up will
make this point clear. Govind Ballabh Pant, Pandit Madan Mohan
Malaviya, Sampoornanand, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla, C.Rajagopalachari
...; the list goes on. Most of the Congress party leaders were
either Brahmins or belonged to one or another Upper caste who
possessed large tracts of cultivable land but then considered
(and even now persist with the idea) it infra-dig to till the
soil. And these men found in the Vedas and other Hindu scriptures
a convenient tool to legitimise and perpetuate oppression of the
landless masses (who happened to be drawn from among the lowest
in the caste order, the Dalits) and further their own interests.
Hence, nationalism, in their perspective had to mean a revival
of the spirit of the vedic ages. This was manifest at another
level in the promotion of Hindi as a national language, the only
unifying force of the Indian people.
In other words, rather than building a secular and democratic
edifice on the foundations of the nationalist spirit laid in the
course of the anti-imperialist struggle, the ruling classes in
India began redefining the Indian nation on the lines prescribed
by Golwalkar and Hedgewar; this indeed was necessary to ensure
that the unity of all Indian people, particularly the masses who
rose against the imperialist set-up and its cohorts drawn from
among the native elite.
After all, the ruling groups could not have ignored the
rising tide of protests that marked the last few months of imperialist
domination all over the country; the armed struggle in Telengana,
Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar, the revolt by ratings of the Royal
Indian Navy, the large number of workers and poor people demonstrating
in the streets in all parts of the country against the trial of
the INA soldiers, the events on the streets of Bombay, Calcutta,
Madras and other industrial centres when the industrial workers
fought pitched battles with the police or the militant struggles
by Railway workers in Golden Rock, Lilluah, Kharagpur and other
places, taking place as they did soon after an interim Government
were clear signals that the spirit of the freedom struggle --
democracy, secularism and the dream of an egalitarian set-up --
were still relevant with the masses.
The importance or the relevance of these mass actions in
the course of the freedom struggle is that we find the melting
down of the communal rhetoric and even its virtual non-existence
every time when the national movement took the form of such mass
mobilisation: The instances mentioned above, it may be recalled
were organised protests against the imperialist state apparatus
taking place at a time when the civil society was engulfed in
violent manifestations of the communal kind; and yet, there was
no communal overtones whatsoever in the Telengana armed insurrection
despite the fact that the Hindu masses (who participated in the
insurrection) were ranged against the Hyderabad ruler (a Muslim)
and his private army, known then as the Razakkars. The same is
true, in varying degrees with the Tebhaga movement also.
Source: Communalism Combat
The fact is that the logical course before the leadership
of the freedom struggle (whose material basis was anti-imperialism)
on the eve of independence was to embark upon a radical course
and strike at the vestiges of a feudal social and economic order
in rural India apart from putting in place an administrative structure
whose members would empathise with the poorer sections of Urban
India. In other words, a determined attempt by the nationalist
leadership to free rural India from the clutches of the Upper
caste landlords and their cohorts would have been consistent with
the egalitarian and democratic spirit of the anti-imperialist
ethos.
Instead, the strategy adopted by the Indian ruling classes,
who had by this time wrested immense control over the Indian National
Congress, particularly its leadership, had their own vested interests
to protect. The incipient bourgeois class found an alliance with
the those in rural India, representing the vestiges of a feudal
socio-economic order to be a better option than being part of
a bourgeois revolution in the manner it took place in Europe;
I refer here to the transition from feudalism to Capitalism in
Europe.
In other words, the strategy embarked upon was two fold:
if the immediate agenda was to put down dissent in whatever form
it came (a task that was carried out so well by India's Home Minister,
Sardar Patel), the ruling classes found in religion and the passions
associated with it the most useful tool to distort the democratic
discourse. And the increasing resort to use of religious identity,
which we are witnessing in contemporary political discourse in
India is only the culmination of this project, initiated by the
ruling classes of India on the eve of independence.
Let me make it clear at this stage that the increasing
resort to the religious idiom is only a means adopted by dominant
sections of the ruling classes in India and not the end in itself.
The end game is not very different from what was witnessed in
Europe and parts of Asia (Japan in particular) in the inter-War
period. In other words, we are witnessing the rise and growth
of fascist tendencies in the name of Hindutva; there are too many
parallels between contemporary Indian political discourse and
the developments in Germany leading to Hitler's rise or Mussolini
in Italy. I will come to this a little later. Meanwhile, a brief
foray into the paradigm of economic policy adopted by independent
India leading to the present regime of ``liberalisation'' (also
addressed to as the Structural Adjustments Programme) will help
us locate the problem -- the contemporary political discourse
-- in its context.
The political leadership, to whom the colonial masters
transferred power on August 15, 1947, had already passed on to
individuals who were opposed to the idea of revolution of the
Marxist kind. This was clear in the attitude of the interim Government
under whose regime working class protests met with severe repression;
there are several instances where industrial general strikes demanding
better living conditions (in the post-war period) were put down
and the political leadership, whether under Jawaharlal Nehru or
by the provincial satraps of the Congress party (no longer the
Indian National Congress) had no hesitation to order firings by
the police against any mass action organised by the trade unions
or the peasantry in response to the call given by the then Communist
leadership.
As I have mentioned earlier in this paper, the Indian bourgeoisie,
assured as it was of independence even while the World War II
was still on, came out with what was known at that time as the
Bombay Plan; it was in the year 1944. Recognising the need for
state intervention in economic activity, the thrust of the Bombay
Plan was state investment in the infra-structure sector, particularly
in those areas involving huge capital investments and a long gestation
period apart from social over-heads. Other salient aspects of
the Plan were poverty alleviation measures by the state, deficit
financing and state investments in the consumer goods sector particularly
in those areas where it involved a long gestation period. In other
words, the thrust of the plan was that the state must involve
itself in economic activity to the extent that it helps in employment
generation and by extension enlarge the size of the home market;
yet another aspect of this strategy was to erect protective barriers
against competition from imports. Indeed, radical land reforms
and freeing the agrarian sector of its feudal vestiges would have
served the same purpose, i.e. enlarging the home market for consumer
goods. But then, such a strategy also carried with it the potential
of a revolutionary upsurge, which could have, in the final count,
spelt the end of their dream insofar as the national bourgeoisie.
Thus, the Nehruvian era witnessed implementation of the
Bombay Plan; interestingly, the Indian businessmen who authored
the Bombay Plan also prescribed, in the long run, handing over
the state-owned projects to the private sector. In other words,
a substantially interventionist state and an economy with a sizable
public sector governed in the political sphere by a Constitution
that provided for a multi-party Parliamentary democracy was put
in place. The Congress party under Jawaharlal Nehru could entrench
itself in positions of power; the party could establish its claim
to the legacy of the freedom struggle against the socialists and
the communists, whose role in the freedom struggle was no less
significant but then their leaders could not stand up to the charisma
of Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad or Sardar Patel. And by virtue
of the goodwill enjoyed by the Congress party, it could ensure
that the power centres in rural India -- the landlords, rich peasants
and other sections of the social elite -- joined its ranks. At
the popular level, the Congress party was seen by the Muslims
and the Dalits as their saviour.
Hence, the need to address the challenge of poverty reduction
in a concerted manner was not realised; after all, the Congress
party was assured of unflinching support of the poorer sections
of the society even otherwise. A look at the broad contours of
the first three five year plans (1951 to 1965) will establish
the fact that there was hardly any thrust on tackling poverty;
instead, the assumption was that growth along a wide front will
translate into income poverty reduction; this strategy, no doubt
yielded some results. The fact that India did not have to export
commercial crops to finance its budgetary transfer to Britain
(a system that contributed to enormous drain of its wealth until
August 15, 1947) ensured a spurt in food-grains growth and by
extension larger amount of food grains absorption per head of
the population. With a substantial sterling balances India had
accumulated during the war years, there was no compulsion to export
food grains in order to shore up reserves.
This strategy, however, had its own inherent weakness;
its smooth sailing was dependent, primarily, on regular monsoons
and normal harvests. This, indeed, was revealed in the very first
bad harvest after independence in 1964-65, the last year of the
III plan. The 1964-65 food crisis was partly because the year
witnessed a much faster expansion of mass demand than before (the
growth registered by this time in the manufacturing and the service
sector leading to higher demands in food grains) and compounded
further by a bad harvest for two years in succession; 1964-65
and 1965-66. For the first time after independence, parts of Northern
India, Bihar in particular, witnessed famine conditions during
this time. As much as 20 million tonnes of grains had to be imported.
The five year plans were truncated and we find annual plans
instead until 1970. And the strategy now was a thrust on promoting
the use of fertilizers and irrigation projects; one is talking
here of the green revolution. A new regime of grain procurement,
subsidised supply of fertilizers and the setting up of a Food
Corporation of India, with whom foodgrains were to be stocked
up and distributed through a network of fair price shops were
put in place. All these, however, did not prevent in any significant
manner the continuing and more rapid rise in food prices (which
rose faster than the prices of other commodities) causing substantial
erosion in the real wages of large sections in the rural as well
as urban India. The outcome of all these, was the reverses suffered
by the Congress party in nine State Assemblies across the country.
The first time ever, the Congress party's claim to power came
under serious threat.
Source: Communalism Combat
Among the States where the Congress party lost power, Uttar
Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar were significant; not only because
these three States, together, account for about one third of Parliament's
strength but more so because in all these States, the challenge
came from what may be called the rich-peasant lobby whose increasing
clout in the political discourse from the sixties necessitated
a further distortion of the economic philosophy of the time. The
Congress party's response to this was Indira Gandhi's measures
to nationalise banks, abolition of privy purses and other such
``socialist'' programmes apart from strenthening the Public Distribution
System. But then, there was hardly any enthusiasm on her part
to take the logical course in this direction, i.e. meaningful
land reforms. While procurement and building up food grains stock
by the state could be carried out without much of a problem, thanks
to the strides made in agrarian production made possible by the
green revolution, we begin to witness, at this stage, there was
no effective means to check food grains prices. And this time
around, the cause was artificial (hoarding and black marketeering)
rather than a bad crop or any such factor.
Indeed, it will be pertinent at this stage to refer to
a new ``class'' that was emerging in the national stage; for want
of a better expression, I will describe them as ``political contractors.''
The Congress party, being in power, naturally was a haven for
this new class; while this class was dependent on their political
connections for survival, the party too was dependent on them
at times of an election or other forms of political activity.
After all, the Congress party now had to mobilise crowds, even
bigger crowds than the opposition to ensure its own presence in
the political discourse. In other words, if the opposition to
the Congress (essentially drawn by the rich peasants in Western
Uttar Pradesh or Haryana by those former Congress leaders known
otherwise as the Syndicate) in the Sixties and the early Seventies
could display their ``huge following'' in the form of rallies,
the Congress party under Indira Gandhi devised this strategy,
of engaging contractors to bring crowd and reward them with ``favours''
of various kinds. In other words, corruption came to be institutionalised;
the most important fallout of this was that the Congress party,
gave up all pretentions to ideological positions leading to the
Emergency.
Rather than addressing the issues in a serious fashion
the issues that came up in the early seventies -- increase in
food grains prices compounded by the hoarding and black marketeering
and the consequent unrest all over urban India and the Railway
general strike in May 1974 -- the Congress party found an easy
way out and resorted to unprecedented repression (the manner in
which the anti-corruption movement in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and
Gujarat were crushed) leading to the curtailment of even the Constitutional
rights. The outcome was its own defeat and a humiliating defeat
in the elections. And this led to a conscious change in the economic
philosophy adopted by the Indian ruling classes, whose most important
and representative continued to be the Congress party. In other
words, after its return to power in 1980, the Congress party (it
changed its name to Congress(I) by now) appeared a bit more sensitive
to the ``common man'' leading to (1) expansion of the PDS and
(2) an increased thrust on poverty alleviation programmes.
A systematic policy of employment generation in the rural
and backward areas accompanied by the expansion of what could
be called the consumer class -- a direct fallout of the bank nationalisation,
employment generation in the non-farm sector, both directly in
the state sector (the number of Public Sector Undertakings) and
via the multiplier effect in the private sector too -- was the
hallmark of this phase.
The result was reduction in the proportion of people living
below the poverty line, a trend witnessed for the first time in
independent India. We have figures (even after allowing for some
distortions in the data base) pointing to a reduction in the percentage
of people living below the poverty line during the Eighties. The
data is as follows: In 1972-73, the percentage of people below
poverty line was 54.90; it fell to 51.30 % in 1977-78; and further
down to 44.5 % in 1983-84; to 38.9 % in 1987-88 and further fell
to 36 % in 1993-94.
Source: Communalism Combat
(There are, indeed, variations in the estimates on poverty
and the methodology adopted and a debate is on in India. However,
for the purpose of uniformity and brevity, I have relied on data
available in the Draft of the Ninth Plan 1997-2002 for these figures.
Source: Draft Ninth Five Year Plan 1997-2002, Volume I, Government
of India, Planning Commission. page 27)
Indeed, let me make another important clarification here.
The substantial reduction in incidence of poverty could be enabled
only because we find the emergence of what is called in India
as the regional parties engaging in competitive populism (I am
using populism not in the pejurative sense here) laying stress
on supply of food grains at highly subsidised prices even if it
meant cutting down on their own resources. For instance, the Left
parties led Governments in Kerala and West Bengal or the Telugu
Desam in Andhra Pradesh. This led to considerable decline in the
percentage of population living below the poverty line in these
States and whose effect on the national average cannot be neglected.
And it is also true that the absence of a similar political culture
in States like Bihar or Uttar Pradesh have meant that there is
hardly any such ``populist'' schemes in operation there and hence
the poverty figures in those States are bound to be higher than
the national average in practical terms. A discussion on these
are, however, beyond the scope of this paper.
Rather than growth induced poverty reduction, the strategy
was to introduce a plethora of State sponsored programmes such
as the food for work programme (this was one of the thrust areas
in the fifth plan, 1975-80) and also the expansion of the PDS.
This strategy, however, carried with it an inherrent weakness.
The food subsidy bill had to take care of the storage and transportation
costs too and hence there was pressure on the finances and hence
even if there was the political will to expand the PDS, there
were problems in implementing that. And as a result, we find a
peculiar problem; even while the subsidy bill on food and agriculture
was increasing, the proportion of the subsidy reaching the target
groups (being the poor and lower middle class consumer of food
grains in the urban pockets) began to fall.
As for instance, we have figures with us for the Ninetees.
While 86.98 % of the subsidy component was passed on to the consumer
in 1991-92, we find this falling to 61.41 % in 1994-95. In other
words, although the successive budgets announced between these
two years recorded either the same quantum of food subsidy or
even a marginally higher subsidy, the fact is that an increasing
quantum of the subsidy was eaten up for storage (at the FCI godowns),
for carrying costs (this increased from Rs. 33.23 Billions in
1991-92 to 44.55 Billions in 1994-95). In addition, the increasing
subsidy bill was also on account of building a buffer stock in
foodgrains (a concept initiated around this time) whose quantum
increased three folds during this period; 5.580 million tonnes
to 16.590 million tones in 1994-95.
The trend has only continued in the following years. For
instance, in 1995-96, even while the proportion of people living
below the poverty line increased to 38.29 % (against 35.04 in
1990-91 and 33.7 % in 1989-90) the foodgrains stocks held in the
FCI godowns (and rotting there for want of adequate storage facilities)
reached an all time high and stood at 35.6 million tonnes. This
is in at least 13.3 million tonnes in excess of the minimum norm
fixed, for requirements to take care the food requirements in
the event of a bad crop and shortage thereof. Indeed, it was possible
for the Indian state to employ, on a food-for-work programme,
at least 13 crore men and women on a daily wage of 1 kilogramme
per day for at least 100 days.
Neither did the managers of the Indian state consider this
necessary nor did the opposition in the political sense put forth
such a demand. This, indeed is the reality, harsh I must add,
that marks the political discourse in our country today. And this
is what I will call a distortion of the political discourse where
the mainstream political groups are engaged, either in conjuring
up an image that the Hindu religion and by extension the Indian
nation is in danger or the ``other'' side occupied with countering
this campaign in the most superfluous manner. Neither of the sides
in the mainstream political discourse finds it worthwhile in raising
the hard life that a majority of the people are faced with.
Coming back to the problem of increasing subsidy burden,
caused essentially due to the increasing costs of storage of foodgrains,
transporting them to and fro the FCI godowns: This problem, that
began showing up in the early Eighties, could have been overcome
if only the state (the Congress party) had mustered the political
will to enhance its revenue collection by way of expanding its
tax base, including taxing agricultural income. But then, this
would have been a radical measure. It will be relevent in this
context to compare the direct tax regime in India with some other
countries. Even during the best of times (when the state was interventionist)
the central tax revenue was only 10 per cent of the GNP and after
including the indirect taxes, it did not exceed a meagre 17 per
cent of the GNP. Compare this with the over 33 per cent all over
Europe and 20 per cent in the US. And a natural fallout of this
was the low Central Public Expenditure in India (it has never
exceeded 17 per cent) against 45 per cent in most European countries
and 33 per cent in the US.
The point I want to make here is that there were limits
(imposed by the state itself by way of adopting a strategy to
not antagonise the rich) to subsidising food grains requirements
and other programmes that could remove poverty or at least reduce
incidence of poverty. And at another level, the system of Parliamentary
Democracy, whose dynamism or strength was experienced by the Congress
party (and also the ruling classes) in the humiliating defeat
of the Congress party in the post-emergency election and the mass
unrest that preceded the imposition of emergency all over the
country conveyed to India's ruling classes that the civil society
cannot be held by them for long in the same fashion.
In other words, the inherrent contradictions in the development
strategy adopted in 1947 -- ``Nehruvian socialism'' -- was proving
to be weak and incapable of stalling or scuttling popular protests
against the state arising out of imbalances in development. Indeed,
there is no way one can describe the rising tide of protests in
the early Seventies as having been a revolutionary movement. Instead,
with the benefit of hindsight, one can discern in those movements
a powerful rightwing content and also the abject failure of the
Left and progressive movements to intervene there and change its
course. As for instance, if the Railway general strike, the only
working class action in independent India, was not led by any
of the Left wing unions. Instead, a section of the Left had, at
that time, even disrupted the strike, helping Indira Gandhi to
put it down. Similarly, the role of the Left, particularly the
CPI, during the massive anti-corruption movement in Bihar and
other parts was far from being positive. And in case of the CPI(M),
although the party's formal position was to support the JP movement,
the physical presence of its own ranks in the movement was at
best marginal, particularly in the Hindi speaking region where
the movement had taken a mass character.
The importance of this, in the context of this paper, is
that the right-wing, the RSS in particular, managed to appropriate
the movement in a substantive manner lending these groups a sense
of legitimacy. After all, for the first time since independence,
the Jan Sangh found an occasion when it could enter the mainstream
political discourse and effectively mingle into their slogans
and activities their anti-Muslim campaign and also their own definition
of Indian nationalism. I must add here that the state in Pakistan
too aided this process; the ruling classes of Pakistan, in order
to distort or scuttle any demand for democracy and development
began playing games in India; although such games as aiding cross-border
terrorism and training the militia attached to seccessionist groups
in Punjab or Kashmir were essentially an imperialist project,
such activities also suited the immediate needs -- self preservation
-- of the ruling classes in Pakistan too.
And thus began the popularisation of the kind of political
discourse that I referred to in the beginning of this paper: Constructing
Indian nationalism with Pakistan as the ``other''. The project
that began soon after the 1971 war with Pakistan when Indira Gandhi
donned the mantle of ``liberating East Pakistan,'' the underground
explosion at Pokhran on May 18, 1974 (the all-India general strike
in the Railways that began on May 4, 1974 had reached its peak
by May 15 and we find that petering out soon after May 18 and
finally called off on May 28) and some of the specific programmes
carried out as part of the Emergency (the Turkman Gate episode
for instance) were all instances where we found the Congress party
beginning to use the religious idiom -- anti-Muslim -- to be specific
to build up a ``nationalist'' euphoria.
The Congress(I) continued with this roject with additional
vigour and in a systematic fashion after its return to power in
1980. What was witnessed on December 6, 1992 at Ayodhya and its
repercussions on the civil society all over the country later
on is only a culmination of this new strategy undertaken by the
Congress(I) under Indira Gandhi with a definite aim to distort
the democratic discourse and ensure that such issues like anti-poverty
measures, employment generation and radical measures in the rural
sector, particularly in terms of challenging the oppressive social
order, were pushed out of the mainstream political discourse.
We find incidence of anti-Muslim violence increasing and occuring
in regular intervels all over Northern India since 1980; Meerut,
Malliana, Bhiwandi, Bhagalpur, Biharshareef, Aurangabad and Hyderabad
or for that matter in almost all the small towns where there was
a substantial Muslim population were engulfed in violence and
in most such instances, the state machinery played, either the
role of bystanders or even incited violence and also participated
in attacking Muslims in some places. And the violence only intensified
in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition.
Babri Masjid demolition
The point here is that it is just not incidental that we
witnessed this communalisation of the political space in the Eighties.
Instead, I will insist on the point that this escalation is part
of a deliberate attempt by the ruling classes in India, after
they began to realise, that it was impossible to contain any rising
tide of protests among the masses on issues relating to their
day to day existence; and particularly so when they decided to
give up all pretensions of ``socialism.'' The increasing burden
of loan repayment (the legacy of their own economic strategy in
the Sixties and Seventies to set right the fiscal deficit by means
of borrowing) and the fall in public savings in the latter half
of the Eighties (thanks to the liberalisation of imports of goods,
particularly consumer durables), left the ruling classes with
no other way but to shed the mask or the facade of being concerned
about the welfare of the poor.
Subsidy, all of a sudden had to be frowned upon. There
had to be a departure or jettisoning of whatever little welfare
schemes were there in the area of employment generation or such
other areas. The lenders (international agencies as well as individual
agencies) were not prepared to let the subsidy regime continue
or allow any large fiscal deficit. The new package involved resorting
to market principles and not welfare economics, even of the kind
that was followed in India during the Seventies. But then, to
shift the thrust, in an open and direct fashion was bound to lead
to widespread social protests and unrest. And it is around this
time that we find the ruling party in India, Congress(I), resorting
to the religious idiom which was picked up by the BJP, an outfit
whose world view is based on majoritarianism. And a competition
ensued between the Congress(I) and the BJP, through the Eighties
and the first half of this decade as to who represented the ``Hindu''
cause better.
Indeed, the BJP is certainly larger than another political
party; ideologically, it has a lot in common with the fascists
-- its anti-Muslim campaign is similar to Hitler's anti-Semitism,
which not only distorted the democratic discourse in Europe at
that time but also drove the world into a disastrous war. But
then, not only were the fascists allowed by the ``others'' in
Europe to carry on their hate campaign but the ``others'' too
began echoing the same slogans, contributing immensely to the
building of a siege mentality among the Jews and all other sections
of democratic opinion in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
The Congress(I) did just this in India through the Eighties
and is today wanting to don the mantle of opposing the BJP. The
tragedy, in all these is that all those platforms, particularly
the mainstream Left, whose secular and democratic credentials
are beyond anyone's doubt have also become a part of this phoney
debate -- secularism v/s communalism -- rather than identifying
the real issues that are deeper and much larger than just communalism.
I mean, the crisis in the economy, caused due to the inherrent
contradictions thrown up by the economic strategy that was adopted
by the ruling classes after independence.
While on the one hand, the popular political discourse
in the immediate wake of independence was definitely anti-imperialist
and hence by extension required a radical approach challenging
the vestiges of the feudal order in rural India, the ruling classes,
restricted their anti-imperialism to only those areas where it
was necessary to perpetuate their own advancement and their own
self preservation. The euphoria of freedom and the inability of
the socialist groups (who were engaged in internecine quarrels
emerging out of personality clashes) to consolidate on the legacy
of the freedom struggle on the one hand and the bloody repression
that was let loose against the Communists, by the Jawaharlal Nehru
led interim Government soon after they were handed over power
by the imperialist rulers (the policy of repression of the Communists
continued even after August 15, 1947) helped the Congress to monopolise
the democratic space for at least two decades.
And in due course, the ruling classes, who could consolidate
their own positions making effective use of the ``socialistic
pattern of development'' matured into a position from where they
began shedding their anti-imperialist pretensions. The post-Sixties,
one may say with an element of certainty, was about the time when
this happened and the ``nationalist'' bourgeoisie began demanding
or seeking, what I would call, a partnership rule with Global
Capitalism. And this culminated in the ``liberalisation'' programme
announced in July 1991. The crucial element, so to say, to facilitate
this shift, which in real terms meant withdrawal of the state
from whatever little egalitarian projects it was involved until
then, had to be a distortion of the political discourse. What
better weapon or tool could have been there to achieve this than
resort to the religious idiom. In Marx's terms, the opium of the
masses.
The ``achievements'' on this front have been spectacular:
Let me present just one among this to illustrate my point.
Since 1991 and 1993 alone, food subsidies were cut substantially;
while the minimum support price for common variety of rice paid
to producers rose from Rs. 205 to Rs. 270 per quintal (by 31.7
%), the consumer issue price (for grains supplied through the
PDS) rose from Rs. 289 to Rs. 437 per quintal during the same
period. A whopping 51.2 % rise. And this was when employment levels
were falling all over as an effect of the new policy to close
down ``loss making units'', freeze on employment in the Government
sector and other such measures. And at another level, the PDS,
which in several States like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan
were reduced to means of patronage to the political class and
thus turned out into dens of corruption, hoarding and black marketing
were allowed to remain in such a state.
And despite this, the nation hardly witnessed any organised
protests on such issues. The only issue that dominated the political
discourse during this period has been communalism and secularism
and during the past few weeks whether the cause of Indian nationalism
was served best by the BJP Government's bold measures in evicting
the intruders (from Pakistan) into our side of the border or not.
The Congress(I)'s only quarrels is that it would have inflicted
a deeper wound on Pakistan had it been in power. There was hardly
any political platform in our country, including the mainstream
Left, which questioned the rationale of the war (or the war like
situation) for the cause of Indian nationalism.
And all these while, since 1947, we as a nation have got
used to looking for heroes everytime when a crisis manifested
in our civil society: In other words, what Gransci describes as
Ceasarism. Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and now Atal Behari
Vajpayee. The slogan of able leaders. I am not too sure that this
tendency is any different from what was witnessed in Europe: Hitler
in Germany or Mussolini in Italy.
Let me now conclude now by simply referring to an analysis
on this aspect made by the Communist International as early as
in 1928 where it talked about the general features of fascism:
1. Fascism constructs an economic basis for the organisational
unity of large capitalists, rural exploiters and the urban petty
bourgeoisie.
2. Fascism rapidly adopts a foreign policy of militarism
and imperialist aggression.
3. Taking advantage of the weaknesses of social democracy,
fascism mobilises an organised force of cadres from the urban
petty bourgeosie and the backward sections of the working class.
4. In the stage of siezure of power, fascism adopts populist
slogans against capitalism, but soon after it captures power,
it comes under the sway of big capital.
5. In place of liberal democracy, fascism establishes a
structure of direct authoritarian rule.
I need not elaborate any further on how these `general
features' can be traced in the post-independent political discourse
of India. Indeed, the last feature, of fascism replacing the liberal
democratic structure with a direct authoritarian rule has not
yet been accomplished in our country. But then, we have heard
such proposals in the last couple of years; an idea to replace
Parliamentary Democracy with a Presidential form (where an able
leader could take over as President); then there is the manifesto
of India's ruling combine now that promises a Constitutional Amendment
to ensure fixity of tenure for Parliament.
And that is the real threat. Communalism is only a means
to achieve the fascist objective just like Hitler raked up anti-Jew
passions to relieve German capitalism of its serious crisis, a
crisis that was its own making.
