July 2, 2004
Election upset in India
by Helen Gilbert, Seattle, United States
In May 2004, India had a federal election that caught everyone by surprise. A traditional bourgeois party, the Congress Party, decisively defeated a far-right party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian People's Party), which had held power for six years and was believed to be invincible. Parties on the left also registered gains in the election. But that was just the start. Even more unexpectedly, a few days after the election, the Congress Party leader, an Italian-born Indian citizen Sonia Gandhi, renounced her claim to be prime minister after nationalist protests against a "foreigner" heading the Indian government caused a near collapse of the Indian stock market. Gandhi's decision was generally attributed to her having unstated "personal reasons" for not taking office - after all her husband Rajiv Gandhi and mother-in-law Indira Gandhi were both assassinated when they were prime minister.
Neoliberalism rejected at the polls
With more than a billion people, India is the second most populated country in the world after China. Its average population density is more than twice that of China. Even today, with China's deteriorating conditions, India lags far behind it in per capita income and social conditions. Two-thirds of the population is tied to rural agriculture, where elec-tricity, phones, sewer systems and clean drinking water are virtually non-existant. The country has 40 million unemployed. Thirty-five percent of the people live on less than a dollar a day. Over half the women are illiterate - with a 40% illiteracy rate among adults as a whole. There is still great brutality and discrimination against women and against the Untouchables, who call themselves dalits - meaning, "the oppressed."
India is an incredibly complex society. Eighty-three percent of the people are Hindu; 12% are Muslim who mostly live in concentrated areas in Northern India. Three percent or less, but comprising millions of people, are the Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Zorastrians, who also live in concentrated areas and have distinct cultures. There are also more than 300 indigenous tribes. There are 18 major languages, and more than a thousand minor languages and dialects. What held the country together in the decades after independence was a commitment to secularism. Nevertheless, there has continued to be inter-ethnic/religious hostility. In India this is called "communalism" - meaning, pitting one's own community against other communities.
India is touted as "the world's biggest democracy" and a model of economic growth due to a booming technology industry. It is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But this is highly illusory. The investment bank Goldman Sachs has observed that India contains "nearly a third of the world's software engineers and a quarter of the world's undernourished."
After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, it established a highly regulated and nationalized form of capitalism. India was unaligned politically during the Cold War, but the USSR was its major trading partner. With the downfall of the Soviet Union, conditions for the poor have worsened. In order to trade with the West, India has had to chip away at publicly owned assets. Neoliberal policies of privatization, reduced so-cial spending, and encouragement of foreign investment began under the Congress Party in 1991 (the party which is now back in power).
Not surprisingly the neoliberal policies of the early 1990s provoked a backlash. This took the form of Hindu supremacism as expressed by the BJP and its even more far-right fascist allies. BJP leaders used nationalist rhetoric to denounce foreign investment, while at the same time continuing neo-liberal reforms and taking credit for enriching the few bene-ficiaries of the technology boom under the slogans "Shining India" and the "Feel-Good Factor." Leaders of the BJP have openly expressed their admiration for Hitler and are be-hind numerous anti-Muslim pogroms that have killed thousands. The most recent out-pouring of BJP-linked violence against Muslims was in the state of Gujarat in 2002: over a two-week period 2,000 Muslims were killed, 100,000 were forced into refugee camps, and there was widespread gang rape, looting and arson.
The election "corrected" or democracy undone
The elections were a significant rejection of the BJP's racist politics and neoliberal economic policies. The BJP lost 44 seats - retaining 138 of the total 545 seats in Parlia-ment. The Congress Party gained 32 seats to take the lead with 145 seats. Unfortunately what the Congress Party is likely to give India, is merely a steady diet of neoliberalism and "fiscal discipline," to quote an approving New York Times article.
When Sonia Gandhi and the Congress Party first won, the BJP whipped up such anti-foreigner hysteria that industry feared it would destablize the economy. It appeared that only the Communists would take part in a government with Gandhi as prime minister. The establishment feared that the Left would sabotage the advance of privatization and foreign investment.
In reality, they had little to fear. The largest communist party, the CPM - Com-munist Party (Marxist) - has governed the state of West Bengal for the last 26 years and has done a great job making peace with imperialism. The CPM sees capitalism as tempo-rary situation that must be accepted and used. It has hired American consultants to help attract foreign investment including Pepsi, Mitsubishi, and IBM. (The portrayal of the ma-nipulative, unprincipled Communist Party representative in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things has the ring of truth.) Given India's previous economic relationship with the USSR, Indian CP bureaucrats must have been even cozier with the powers-that-be than in the U.S.
The elections raised the slate of united Left parties from 41 to a total of 62 seats in the 545 member parliament. This is the highest Left representation ever and is enough to allow them to block measures from going through. However, the CPM and the three other parties in the Left Bloc are merely calling for restoring secularism in government, no sales of profit-making state industries, and opposing imperialist influence - a demand that can't be taken seriously given the CPM's record in West Bengal. As the Indian stock market was crashing, a senior CPM leader stated, "We would like to appeal to all those who have any doubts that we are for stable economic growth."
There must have been quite a huddle right after the elections where things were sorted out to the satisfaction of the capitalists - overriding the votes of the "world's big-gest democracy." Under India's parliamentary system, the leader of the party with the big-gest majority is always appointed prime minister. This is the first time that someone else has been chosen for prime minister. The replacement prime minister is Manmohan Singh - who, as finance minister under the previous Congress Party government, is considered to be the father of economic liberalization. In case Singh proves to be soft, the new finance minister is a hard-nosed Harvard Business School graduate, who in a previous stint as fi-nance minister reduced corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, and lowered tariffs. To further allay fears, the Communists have politely abstained from participating in the gov-ernment. With these adjustments, the Congress Party will be able to rally support from other groups besides the Left. The stock market is back to normal.
It seems clear that Gandhi's decision to give up the role of prime minister was not saintly humility or concern for the safety of her family. It was a coup by the capitalists and imperialists, with Gandhi's complicity, to ensure that India's "economic miracle" would not be disturbed.
Revolutionary leadership needed
To avoid people from turning back toward the far right, India needs a revolutionary socialist party that opposes privatization, confronts the religious fundamentalists, champi-ons women and lower caste people, and builds alliances between workers and the urban and rural poor.
What happens in India is important because of its size and position between Asia and the Middle East. In addition, the U.S. has a quickly growing South Asian population which will be greatly affected by what happens at home. And with India and Pakistan - two nuclear powers - in a perpetual standoff, a socialist solution in South Asia is one of the essential ingredients for global peace.