India is often projected as a modern state yet in the midst of the high-rise buildings and corporate plazas, huge swathes of shanty towns go on breeding misery. Millions live in extremely unhygienic and filthy dwellings. The artificial glitter and facade of selective modernity fails to conceal the primitive social and economic conditions that prevail across India.
This socio-economic pattern of growth is also reflected in politics. The general elections are being held in nine phases from April 7 to May 12. The most probable outcome, if one goes by surveys, is BJP’s victory. The BJP and its chauvinist mascot, Narindera Modi, will supposedly complete the modernisation of India. This is indeed an ironic contradiction.
Yet inspite of the forgone verdict by the national and the international media regarding Modi’s victory, the vast majority of the electorate does not really entertain any hope and illusion in these elections or the democratic process itself.
In an opinion poll recently released by the Pew Research Centre, more than 70 percent expressed dissatisfaction with India’s prospects and eight out of ten had bitterly gloomy outlook regarding economic prospects. Bruce Stokes of the Pew concludes, “Everything is a problem for the Indian voter.”
Whereas the vast majority has no hope in the future of India under capitalism, the Indian billionaires now outnumber those in Japan. They are frantically desperate to get Modi into the prime ministerial slot. In another opinion poll conducted by the Pew, a few months ago, seventy-four out of hundred richest Indian corporate bosses preferred Modi over other leaders.
The Indian corporate elite thinks a gruff and grumpy Modi will give even more concessions to the business class while deregulating labour laws besides cutting subsidies and the hard won rights of the Indian proletariat. He will resort to Pakistan bashing, whip up national chauvinism and Hindu fundamentalist frenzy. After the November 2008 Mumbai attack and carnage by Pakistani-based terrorists, Modi had mocked the Congress. In a recent article in the GuardianAditya Chakrabortty writes about Modi’s venal attitude regarding Muslims, “Modi bears a responsibility for some of the worst religious violence ever seen in independent India—but there’s nothing like looking a winner to attract apologists… Modi said a couple of years ago that he felt the same painover the bloodshed (in Gujarat in 2002) as a passenger in a car that has just run over a puppy. He referred to the refugee camps set up to shelter some 200,000 Muslims who lost their homes as ‘baby-making factories’.”
The mantra of Gujarat’s economic model of growth has been assiduously touted as the feather in the cap of Modi’s success story in the corporate media. Now entire India is being prepared for the same medicine. However, the reality of this high growth has been painful for the masses. The corporate houses in Gujarat have amassed huge profits while the toiling masses have suffered at the hands of this high growth rate. According to the official figures there has been no improvement in the health, infant mortality, education and workers wages.
Modi’s aggressive neoliberal policies have contributed to workers’ misery. In 2006, there were more undernourished children in Gujarat than 1993. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General, “His (Modi’s) administration has sold off public land dirt cheap to industrialists, provided companies with energy at below-market prices and given them loans at an interest rate of 0.1%. They in return have provided him with sponsorship and rides on their private jets.” Atul Sood of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi writes, “The governance model of Gujarat is all about aggressive implementation of development on behalf of the big private investor. It is a model that works for the rich and against the poor.”
Meantime, the performance of the Congress has been dismal and awesome. It is not merely the corruption that has rendered the Congress government unpopular. The price hike, unemployment and sharp rise in poverty ---inspite of the high growth rates--- have been the actual causes. However, like all the BRICS or the so-called emerging economies, growth rate in India has lost steam and the fragile nature of these uneven capitalist economies stands exposed.
Beyond the Congress, there are regional parties. These so-called regional parties use all sorts of nationalist, ethnic and racial prejudices to gain votes and an access to power [hence, a share in pilferage and plunder]. After the unleashing of free markets economics by the Congress government [Manmohan Singh as the architect] in the early 1990s, there was a backlash and the communist parties got the their best election results in 2004. Unfortunately, the left leadership carried out similar policies against which the masses had turned towards the left. This led to a disastrous election result for the Communist Parties in the 2009 elections. But the leaders have not learnt the lesson. Instead of going for the jugular of this rotten system, they play with superficial issues of secularism and democracy while abandonng the perspective of a socialist revolution. This has destroyed their parliamentary politics too, a politics they had adopted abandoning the revolutionary path with their false theory of ‘two stages’.
Likewise, the Aam Aadami Party (AAP) is no substitute. It advocates same policies as the Congress and the BJP albeit with different colourations. Meantime, according to official figures, out of a population of 1.2 billion, 810 million Indians are food stressed. The arch mouthpiece of world capitalism itself,The Economist, sums up the prospects of Indian capitalism, “The country is teeming with problems. The growth has fallen by half, too low to provide work to the millions of young Indians joining the job market each year. Reforms go undone, roads and electricity remain unavailable, and children are left uneducated… The business of politics, Indians conclude, is corruption.”
This is a slap on the face of the Indian ruling class. Not only they have failed to accomplish the national democratic tasks, but their reactionary nature is exposed by their support for the Hindu fundamentalists. This historical failure of the bourgeois lays bare the doomed nature of Indian capitalism. In a remorseless chorus of such cliché as the “biggest democracy in the world”, they try to conceal the fact that India has also the largest concentration of poverty. This misery and suffering is not the destiny of the India’s working classes. They have magnificent traditions of struggles and masses revolts. They cannot be kept in the chains of capitalist coercion in the name of democracy and nationalism for long.
