Book Reviews: INDIA: HOTBED OF REVOLT
https://socialistaction.org/2021/06/06/book-reviews-india-hotbed-of-revolt/
June 6, 2021
By Marty Goodman
“Crisis and Predation: India, COVID-19, and Global Finance,” by the
“Research Unit for Political Economy,” Monthly Review Press, 2020
“No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism,” by Vijay Prashad,
LeftWord Books, 2015
“Crisis and Predation: India, Covid-19, and Global Finance” provides
needed background for western readers about the gigantic farmer and
worker protests and strikes in India that have erupted since November
2020. Estimated at 250 million, the November 26 strike/mobilization was
the largest in human history. (See “India Strike Wave is Biggest in
World History,” Socialist Action, January 2021.). And, the struggle is
far from over.
India is an incredibly diverse country with a 1.3 billion population,
second only to China. Yet, the Euro-centric mindset of U.S. culture has
found many of us quite ignorant of the enormous role that India has
played in history and will increasingly play in the class struggles ahead.
Near the onset of the COVID crisis, Narendra Modi, India’s rightest
Prime Minister, proclaimed openly his goal of restructuring the Indian
economy after COVID, “Turn this crisis into a big opportunity,” which
has become a mantra for India’s blood-sucking rich. The economic
tourniquet has been tightened by three farming privatization laws,
touted as ‘reforms,’ rammed through parliament by Modi last September.
The changes reduced government price subsidies for family farms and
other changes that insured that Modi’s agri-business pals control the
market. Adding to the explosive mix, are reactionary new labor laws that
were passed last fall that restrict organizing, sparking worker strikes
throughout the country, The crisis has engendered increasing worker and
farmer unity. Added to the toxic mix, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), is a party of virulent Hindu nationalism, known as “Hindutva.”
Modi, as the former Chief Minister of Gujarat, was linked to attacks on
Muslims in 2002, which resulted in some 2,000 deaths. In December, 2019,
Modi enacted a bigoted immigration law that blocked Muslim refugees from
regional nations from entry into India. The mass protests that overcame
ethnic divisions were met with brutal police repression and did not
reverse the BJP law.
India background
The horrors being inflicted by India’s ruling rich on the working masses
and the revolutionary potential for gigantic clashes make this book
essential reading for socialists. In 2019, 10,281 farmers and farm
laborers died by suicide, one of the world’s highest rates, acknowledged
as stemming from extreme economic pressures.
India was once ruled by British imperialism, a bloodthirsty, rapacious
and racist occupation that began in 1858 and was formally ended in 1947.
The forces around independence leader Mahatma K. Gandhi and the Congress
Party, then a social-democratic party, led the struggle, supported by
Socialist and Communist forces. Despite formal independence and its
so-called “non-aligned” policies, India is dominated today,
economically, politically and militarily by U.S. imperialism and the
neo-liberal global marketplace. “Income inequality in India has risen to
levels not seen since British rule and its wealth inequalities [are]
even steeper,” say the book’s authors.
Some 60 percent of India’s population own small farms or are
agricultural workers. Of that, 85 percent own less than 5 acres and are
easy prey for large agricultural firms. For decades the employed sector
was only 40-42 percent of the population, with 2017-18 showing a
dramatic drop to 34.7 percent. Industrial growth neared zero. Moreover,
back in 2011-12 and 2017-8 there was a 20 percent rise in poverty.
Between the March and August 2020, peak COVID months, 21 million jobs
were lost.
Only a decade ago India was viewed as a member of the “BRICS” nations
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), so-called ‘emerging’
countries. But even before India’s severe COVID lockdown, India had
faced a dire economic downturn since 2017.
The conditions facing the Indian masses today are truly appalling.
Misleading by a mile, say the authors, are the World Bank’s “farcically
low” stats on Indian poverty. The US-dominated WB uses $1.90 (US) of
income a day as the poverty line, but, if revised to merely $5.50 (US) a
day some 80 percent of India’s population in 2015 would be below the
poverty line!
The neo-liberal “privatization” of public institutions and the radical
reduction of services for working people, are key prerequisites for the
imperialist World Bank and international capital. Privatization in India
took off like a rocket. Since the 1980’s, for example, the privatization
of healthcare had been “exponential,” say the authors. The amount of
funds dedicated to healthcare today, despite COVID, is still only about
one percent of India’s GDP, reduced over three decades and amongst the
lowest in the world.
Privatization in India was greatly accelerated during the early ‘90’s.
India was the world’s leader in “public-private partnerships” between
2006 and 2012, providing capitalists with public wealth auctioned off at
giveaway prices. Modi’s proposed privatizations in the late 2020 are,
say the authors, “staggering” and encompass all of the key sectors,
petroleum, banks, healthcare, etc.
After the great recession of 2010-11, India turned to international
loans. Pressure from global lenders put pressure on India to curtail
spending, i.e., public services for working people, thus hurting demand
and slowing growth. 100 public assets were sold by foreign or Indian
corporations at huge discounts. Indian banks, whose loans went unrepaid,
sold the debt to foreign corporations with big “haircuts,” i.e., huge
discounts.
The COVID pandemic provided a perfect storm for advancing privatization
even more aggressively. Once a firm is privatized, the authors note,
wealth is created for private individuals, not the public. Privatization
is a “bonanza” for foreign investors and represents a vast transfer of
funds to outside interests.
Prime examples are the media giants Google and Facebook, who have
invested billions in India and have used their personal relationship
with Hindutva bigot Modi to promote his election (see The Wall Street
Journal’s expose of Google and Facebook in India starting Aug. 14,
2020). Modi supporter and Indian media billionaire, Mukesh Albani,
called Google and Facebook’s role in India “data colonization.”
Growing Role of U.S. Imperialism
The U.S. has consistently discouraged India from trading with its
imperialist rival China, but added to economic penetration and market
manipulation there is, of course, U.S. military might. As Kenneth
Rogoff, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, an
arm of the World Bank, astutely observed, “(U.S.) Military dominance
…has been one of the lynchpins of the dollar.”
In recent years the U.S. has pressed the imperialist NATO military
alliance to focus on China, long a diplomatic and sometimes military
adversary of India along their contested border. As a result of Obama’s
“tilt toward Asia,” U.S. arms sales to India have increased five fold
between 2013 and 2017. U.S. military training has been increased and, in
May 2018, the U.S. announced that the Pacific Command was being re-named
as the “Indo-Pacific Command.” The book’s authors cite a U.S. War
College study that asserts that it’s essential that India be convinced
of its ‘manifest destiny’ and “for it to act forcefully” and to obtain a
nuclear force. Modi’s 2014 visit to the U.S. resulted in a ten-year
extension of a defense treaty.
“No Free Left”
While “Crisis and Predation” does not extensively examine forces on the
Indian Left, another book, “No Free Left, The Futures of Indian
Communism,” by Vijay Prashad, (LeftWord Books, 2015), gives us more of
an overview. Prashad’s look at the Indian Left is a useful guide,
especially for Western leftists, but not necessarily a revolutionary one
in my view.
Two Left parties dominate the terrain in the workers movement: The
Communist Party of India (CPI), the pro-Moscow Stalinists, and its 1964
split-off, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M), once a
pro-China Stalinist variant and today the larger of the two. A smaller
tendency, the CPI-M- L (Liberation), i.e., “Marxist-Leninist,” at one
point engaged in armed struggle, but has won some recent elections.
Prashad mostly cites the role of the CPI (M), probably out of his own
convictions, when he describes struggles within and without of its home
bases in the important states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The
CPI (M) has enacted meaningful agrarian reforms, but Prashad cautions us
that India’s capitalist constitution prohibits states from engaging in
large scale expropriations, a legal barrier against revolution that
makes exploitation sacrosanct in India – as capitalist laws do everywhere.
To their credit, as Prashad explains, the CPI (M) has engaged in
physical battles against the violent anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim forces of
Modi’s BJP, while it has also championed the rights of the Dalit and
Adivasi castes, i.e., the untouchables. But, as Prashad notes, the CPI
(M) prioritizes ‘class struggle’ over the fight for the rights of
specifically untouchable castes, a mistaken counter-position.
In the many struggles since last fall, I get the impression that the
mobilizations of farmers and workers saw the major Left forces as
participants, but not particularly as initiators. True or not, the
strategy of the parties cited above is to seek electoral and
parliamentary voting blocs with capitalist parties, such as the Congress
Party, to defeat far-right forces, such as the BJP. Such alliances – a
cornerstone of Stalinist mis-leadership – have historically tied the
workers movements to reformist capitalist forces that will block or
betray workers’ power.
May 26th was declared, “Black Flag Day,” a call to action by the SKM
(Samyukt Kisan Moreha), a key organizing coalition which represents over
40 farmer groups and is supported by the Central Trade Unions, 12 major
opposition political parties, and numerous class and mass organizations.
The day marked six months of mobilizations against the BJP’s anti-farmer
and anti-worker laws. The Black Flag was displayed in the millions
throughout India in a day of mass strikes and protests.
That this level of mobilization could be sustained despite the raging
COVID pandemic is truly astonishing. COVID has officially claimed the
lives of 300,000 in India – but it’s likely far more.
I’ve visited India a couple of times and feel that I gained much from
these valuable books. My hope is that they will encourage us in the U.S.
to build an India solidarity movement as the struggle there unfolds.
But, from what I saw on the ground in India, without the building of a
genuinely revolutionary socialist party the misery of Indian society
will ultimately remain, an alternative Prashad sadly does not address.
Related Articles
From the River to the Sea: Free Free Palestine! – Join Us for a
Livestreamed Webinar May 26th
May 19, 2021
Live Streamed on Socialist Action YouTube Facebook Event Wednesday, May
26th – 5:30 pm PT/7:30 pm CT/8:30 pm ET The world is watching in horror as
Israel-Palestine: The Missing Link… The Solution to the Nakba (Catastrophe)
May 19, 2021
By Jeff Mackler – May 15, 2021 In great detail the unfolding Palestinian
freedom struggle against the racist, Zionist, colonial, apartheid
settler capitalist state of
Missing Persons Report – No Solution for Toronto’s LGBTQI Community
May 16, 2021
by John Wilson “Review Lays Bare Police Failings” topped page 1 in the
Toronto Star of April 14, 2021. The Independent Civilian Review of
Missing Persons Investigations
--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept