Last month India was stunned by the shock defeat of the ruling Hindu nationalists – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – in its general election. Just a few days later it was further rocked by the decision of the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi, to refuse to become prime minister. This was in the face of anti-democratic and chauvinist protests against her Italian origins by the BJP.
However, just as the dust has begun to settle, it is becoming clearer by the day that the new governing, Congress-led coalition represents no real alternative to the BJP for the Indian masses. India’s newly sworn-in prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has held out hope for India’s poor by declaring that his first priority is to “wage the battle against poverty” and bring a “human element” to economic reforms. He has talked of not selling off any more of India’s stake in the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, or GAIL India (gas distributor) – two of the most precious of the Indian state’s “nine gems". Privatisation of loss-making firms will be “decided on a case by case basis". In addition, Singh claims that his new government will keep state-run banks in state hands and spending on education will be increased to 6 per cent of GDP.
Liberalisation
Yet these radical-sounding pledges are just words. In deeds, this was the very same Manmohan Singh who, as a former governor with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and as Congress finance minister in 1991, was the architect of India’s biggest ever neoliberal deregulation programme. From 1996 until now, BJP-led coalition governments have merely continued with this globalisation agenda. Indeed, it wasn’t Sonia Gandhi’s inner voice, but the sound of alarm bells ringing at India’s money markets, that caused her to balk at becoming prime minister.
When it became clear that Congress had won the election, the Mumbai stock market fell by 11 per cent, costing investors two trillion rupees (£25 billion), and was only reassured when Singh stepped into the breach. On the news of his appointment and a promise to increase India’s already soaring economic growth rate from 8 to 10 per cent, shares bounced back, recording an 8 per cent increase – the second largest ever one day rise.
This arch neoliberal knows that this target can only be achieved through implementing a programme of ever more ruthless liberalisation, cuts in subsidies and continued deregulation and privatisation of state industries. Only measures like this will stand a chance of encouraging the vital foreign investment necessary for transforming the Indian economy to the point where it can come close to achieving the mega-growth rates of its rival giant neighbour, China.
To this end, the Indian bourgeoisie would prefer a government led by Manmohan Singh to that of the defeated BJP-led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Despite its boasts of a “shining” India, the BJP and its leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, were reluctant marketisers, while Singh is considered to be the genuine article. The NDA government’s privatisation programme was restricted to selling off only the most profitable bits of certain state companies.
Rural poor
Yet despite this, as the general election approached, large sections of the Indian ruling class and foreign investors still saw the BJP as their best bet. Furthermore, all the election pundits strongly tipped the NDA to win. But no-one took into account the plight of India’s rural poor. The BJP’s “India Shining” campaign had little resonance with the two-thirds of India’s 670 million voters who live in the countryside.
The BJP now admits that this was an error. After spending $20 million on adverts on all TV channels and a glossy full-colour poster campaign, BJP former deputy premier LK Advani now admits that the campaign hurt the BJP. “In retrospect, it seems that the fruits of development did not equitably reach all sections of our society,” he said.
India’s rural population suffered during the drought-ridden bad years that preceded the last monsoon, which itself helped trigger India’s current boom. Many rural villagers have seen little improvement in their roads, electricity and water supply. Failing crops and low prices led to a spate of suicides by farmers weighed down by unpayable debts.
The disillusionment of India’s rural population, together with the fact that one quarter of Indians still live in severe poverty, led to an unusually low 55 per cent turnout. Coupled with this, the BJP’s virulent Hindu chauvinism only served to further alienate the mass of Muslims from them. Their self-congratulatory rhetoric backfired on them in the countryside and attempts to change tack in favour of emphasising stability and continuity couldn’t, in the end, stave off electoral defeat.
Congress Party and its allies
Yet the Congress Party’s victory, with only 27 per cent of the national vote, by no means represents an overwhelming endorsement from Indian workers and peasants. The Congress coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), with 36 per cent, managed only the same share of votes as the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance. Yet, this gave the UPA 220 seats in the Indian parliament, as against the 185 for the NDA.
As a result, the UPA minority government will depend heavily on the support of its allies in the Left Front, itself strengthened by a best ever result, winning 59 seats. The principal constituent of this grouping is the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which alone achieved 43 seats. The CPI(M) has refused to join the UPA coalition. Instead, they prefer to offer “outside support” to the new government. This may allow the CPI(M) the ability to pick and choose which government policies it wants to support and could have the effect of curbing, or at least slowing down the Congress Party’s marketisation and privatisation drive.
But, if their record in state government is anything to go by, Manmohan Singh should have little to fear from the CPI(M). It may be a communist party in name but, as the bosses’ house journal, The Economist, says. “they should be judged by what they do, not what they say". This is as good a motto for Marxists as it is for the bourgeoisie, particularly when applied to the CPI(M). In the Indian provinces these so-called communists have embraced wholesale privatisation. The state government in West Bengal has been controlled by the CPI(M) since 1977. There, 15 state-owned enterprises have been sold off, and IT companies have been designated as ‘strategic’, which means that their workers are banned from striking!
Despite their stated differences with Congress on economic policy, and their new-found ability to ‘pull-the-plug’ on the new government, the CPI(M) may be persuaded to toe the Congress Party’s neo-liberal line. Their provincial interests could be used to gain their support for privatisations in return for some of the spoils being invested in the CPI(M)’s local strongholds.
Whatever happens, the masses of India have been given fair warning that this Congress-led coalition government will put the strategic interests of the Indian capitalists first. The CPI(M) has also shown that they cannot be relied upon to uphold the interests of workers and poor peasants and, when in a position of power and influence, will do the opposite.
Secularism
Even so, in this election, millions of ordinary Indians turned away from the BJP. Not least, because of its obnoxious record of whipping up Hindu chauvinist hatred against India’s Muslim population. Many will remember the massacre of 2000 Muslims in Gujarat, a state governed by the BJP, in 2002. No action was ever taken against Narendi Modi, the BJP’s then chief minister, who was complicit in doing nothing to prevent the pogrom.
Consequently, Indians still look to the Congress Party as upholders of secularism, committed to uniting Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs across the whole country. Yet this belief is not borne out by Congress’s record in power. Indeed, it was 20 years ago in 1984 when Indira Gandhi, the then Congress prime minister, sent troops into the Punjab to ransack the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and bloodily put down a Sikh uprising calling for an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. Similarly in Kashmir, in the name of Indian unity, Congress governments have consistently ignored calls for self-determination. Instead, they have gone to war with Pakistan over control of the region and have turned Indian-controlled Kashmir into a police state, viciously putting down insurgent movements fighting for Kashmiri freedom. Even in this election, the Congress Party offered no clear alternative to the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP. In the state of Gujarat, they felt so confident of the Muslim vote that Congress fielded very few actual Muslim candidates. This has led to accusations against them of being the ‘BJP’s B-team’.
Utopian
Neither does the Congress Party fare any better by its claim to stand up for the interests of India’s poor. 320 million Indians still live below the poverty line today, almost as many as the entire population of India in 1947. The reality, since independence, is that Congress has only ruled in the interests of the Indian capitalist class. Even in this, its attempts to develop India into a world power commensurate with its huge population have all failed for two reasons.
Firstly, because of the retarding effects of British colonial rule, India’s bourgeoisie has always remained relatively small. This has stunted the growth of Indian capitalism and partly explains why one powerful bourgeois family – the Nehru-Gandhis – has dominated the last 60 or so years of India’s history. The second point is that the measures adopted to compensate for this backwardness have been inadequate to the task of breaking through India’s economic subordination to western imperialism. The policy of state investment in, and nationalisation of, key sectors of the economy was the Congress Party’s response to this, rather than their pursuit of some socialist ideal. However, this approach was just as utopian, initiated by the first Congress Party government of Jawaharlal Nehru and continued by his daughter Indira Gandhi in the 1960s and 70s, in that it was always going to be insufficient to allow the economy to make that qualitative leap forward.
Indeed, by the 1980s even Indira Gandhi’s last government could no longer afford the level of state support necessary to keep the Indian economy going. She began the switch towards deregulation and opening up the economy to market forces and foreign investment. All subsequent governments have gone further down this path.
Revolutionary alternative
It can only lead to a massive increase in the rate of exploitation of Indian workers and peasants. One look to their neighbours in China shows that this is the necessary price for economic growth under modern globalised capitalism.
The only realistic alternative for the Indian masses is to fight now to build a party that can lead them to the revolutionary overthrow of that capitalist system that breeds super-exploitation, starvation levels of poverty and communal hatred. The only counter to the threat of continued imperialist domination of the region is the fight for a socialist federation of the entire Indian sub-continent.