It has been a very, very long time since I have posted here, but this was one of the things that I should post since our politics have been loudly shouting about development but it seems as if the real agenda is the eating of beef and the lynching of those who eat it, ghar vapsi (home coming) of Hindus who converted to other religions, building of world class capitals, playing on regional and parochial sentiments. This time around the voice of dissent seems to have come under threat and people seem to be becoming less and less tolerant to ideas other than theirs. Therefore, I felt it is time to write about the airy fairy nonsense that most academics indulge in and how people doggedly cling to models of explanation that have been proven to be inadequate, antiquated and sometimes downright wrong. In the past some of these models served well in some historical contexts in certain geographies but in the context of India even if they did serve a purpose at some point in time, they no longer due. The explanation for this is simple. Social reality is not static and neither are politics which operate within those social realities which are changing. Social realities change politics, which in turn change society depending upon the way in which they (the politics) are played out. My attempt is therefore to highlight the failures and fortunately there are no completely successful models that I can bring to fore.
One of the well known facts
about Indian academics is that it has always tried to use models that were used
for the explanation of social, economic and political processes by other
countries which were by default countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Not only have models have been copied but
even the proponents of the models have been lionized and almost deified. At the
time of India’s struggle for independence the models of Western socialism and
specifically Marxist communism were in vogue. After all, the Bolshevik
Revolution in the USSR had demonstrated to the world that Capitalism could be
bypassed and a society based in equality was in the process of being created.
In India, the notion of socialism, albeit Fabian Socialism was quite close to
the first PM of this country, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The Congress party had even set aside the
Gandhian model due to various criticisms from personalities such as B R
Ambedkar who called Indian Villages “Cesspools of decadence and casteist
thinking” and being educated in the Columbia University, he also threw his
weight behind the Western model of development as the blue print for the future
of India.
The dominant communist
model of thinking at that time believed that the days of Capitalism and the
State that came into being in order to support the exploitation of the workers
by the capitalists were numbered. Lenin believed that it was the duty of those
countries which had successfully accomplished the Communist Revolution to take
the word of the revolution forward and support all movements against capitalist
tormentors in their fight for freedom.
The history of the middle of the 20th Century is replete with
different parts of the world fighting for freedom from Colonialism which was
described by Lenin as the Highest and Final phase of Capitalism. India too received notional support for the
freedom movement from the USSR of then.
Pandit Nehru believed in
industrialization and called dams and industries as modern temples. India
adopted the 5 year plan model of development for the USSR and embarked upon a
programme of modernization and development.
India also developed a public sector for growth and the public sector in
its initial years was confined to what was called “mother industry”; steel
plants being the best example of the same.
It was much later that Indira Gandhi’s powder puff model of socialism
embraced the making of consumer durables by industries set up by the State and
employing more and more people at the top levels and less at the lower levels
of the industrial hierarchy. All these actions were also supported by a
socialist rhetoric which in Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s own time grew shrill.
Pandit Nehru and Indira
Gandhi’s adoption of socialism and socialist rhetoric respectively more or less
negated the necessity of the Communist Part of India (Lenin had believed that
every country should have its own communist party) but the entity continued to
exist on the sidelines. In 1964 however
there was a split in the party, the original Communist Party of India owing its
allegiance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while the splinter group
(which later became the dominant group) owing is affiliation to the Communist
party of China.
From the time that India
became independent till today the scholarship of social sciences has been firmly
rooted in the theoretical models of the Western Socialist left. From asking for
welfare measures to splitting states the model that came in handy was something
which owed its existence to some kind of leftism of the Western variety. Everyone believed that as the country
progressed more and more the traditional ways of thinking would change and new
India would emerge from the shadows of its filthy, superstitious and most
backward past. It was believed that as the country produced more social wealth
and as more people even from the lower castes and other downtrodden sections
gained access to wealth their caste identities would be wiped out and replaced
with class identities. While caste is a social identity, class is an economic
identity. The liberals who were also left leaning believed that development and
growth of the Western variety would negate all the other identities which were
a throwback to a society that existed in a primitive past. But India’s
experience with globalization and liberalization of the economy did not produce
the results that all leftists of various hues had predicted. In order to
demonstrate this I shall look into the latest round of liberalization of the
economy of India which happened in the 1990s and some of the results that it produced.
As is well known, India
as a country, has diversity which cannot be fully estimated and this one factor
alone is sufficient reason to argue that any proper and complete comprehension
of the country’s functioning, its governance and more importantly its politics
are played out is a task that probably defies totally clear and precise
explanation. Indian Politics keep
throwing up exceptions to any rule that might seemingly appear, thereby
nullifying the rule immediately. The
only way to beat this problem is to not believe in any kind of essentialism as
an underlying principle of the appearance of the nature of politics. In fact,
one can assert that this is probably true not just of politics but of other
areas such as business as well. It is a well-known fact that captains of
various industries making statements about the difficulty that is associated
with understanding the Indian consumer preferences and the dynamics of the
market process itself.
At the outset itself, it
would be desirable to state that politics in India can be seen in the post
liberalization of the economy phase, cannot be seen as a sequence of cause and
effect. However tempting such as
exercise maybe, it will not be able withstand stringent scrutiny and provide
sustainable answers; on the contrary the cause-effect sequencing will begin to
collapse once it is subjected to questioning. Therefore, this will be more
about the surprises that defy understanding which say was well used and
established in European countries or in the United States of America. There are myriad reasons for this and as the
arguments in the article begin to unravel so will the reasons for the futility
of comparison with other countries and their politics become clearer.
Much of what will
constitute this article will be about capitalism and what it has done in the
case of India. In fact, expressions such as liberalization, integration into
the global economy, structural reforms are all in more ways than one concerned
with India openly giving up the socialist rhetoric that it once used to
describe itself and embracing global capitalism whole heartedly. It would be prudent to insert a parenthesis
here. Usually, in India, even among the social scientists there is a tendency
to use globalization and liberalization inter-changeably. While at a very primary that may not be
bothersome, it becomes exactly that when one takes the arguments to higher
levels. Equating globalization with the economic liberalization of the 1990s
generates a false picture. It verifies in an apocryphal manner that
globalization is a phenomenon that came into being in the 1990s, which is
completely untrue and causes a huge distortion in the understanding of history
of the world in the Modern period itself.
Globalization is a process that can be seen as beginning with the
European countries looking out for new markets and subsequently new colonies.
If this is the first phase of globalization the second phase is more in
evidence in the 18th and 19th centuries where populations
could move across the world with very few impediments. The story of the USA
both in terms of the settling white population and also the black slaves by the
whites is testimony to this. The third phase of globalization is perhaps a late
20th Century phenomenon that emerged with the growth of various
forms of technology, especially technology that facilitated the rapid movement
of money, which was hitherto not possible. One saw the emergence of the term
“Hot Money” in the 1990s which signified that money could be made to move from
one market to another depending upon which market offered greater returns on
investment. The third phase is more to be seen as the easy movement of money
globally. It is in this period that India opened its economy to the world; a
process which is termed “liberalization”.
It would be legitimate to
raise a question here. Why did India
give up its socialist rhetoric and embrace global capitalism? How voluntary was this decision? Those who are in vaguely familiar with world
history and the history of India will know the answer. One of the biggest occurrences of the late 20th
Century was the collapse of the erstwhile USSR and the Unification of Germany;
two processes that happened almost simultaneously. The USSR collapsed into its original
independent sixteen republics as a result of the pursuing of the Cold War
policy of arms build race with the USA. While USA and the Western European
countries did not suffer from shortage of money, the Soviet Union and the
Eastern European allies that it had, suffered from acute shortage due to
overspend on defence technology. No
intervention from outside was required to engineer the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Many Eastern European countries also
start collapsing. Yugoslavia became Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, Slovenia,
Croatia etc. and the Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic and the Slovakia
Republic. Other Eastern European
countries such as Romania and Poland saw movements for democracy which were
successful and showed a corruption of unprecedented proportions in Romania
under Iliescu.
On the other hand Germany
grabbed this opportunity to bring down the Berlin Wall and unify itself. Capitalist Europe was so confident that it
moved on from being the European Economic Community (EEC) to the Economic Union
(EU), wherein there was the adoption of a single currency by all European
countries (exception being the UK) and travel in Europe no longer needed visas.
For a change it was traditional rivals Germany and France that played a pivotal
role in the creation of the EU. In fact,
many scholars of International Relations argued that Europe was building itself
as a rival power to the USA and some of these theories which looked like
conspiracy theories were later found to have some basis when the EU’s attempt
to creating an alternative OIL BOURSE with Iran came to light. The Europeans
were aware of the strength of the Petro-dollar since it was the de jure and de
facto currency for oil trading. In Russia the situation was the opposite with
inflation at one point rising 1500% and people having to stand in lines for
hours together to “buy” a loaf of rationed bread. The story of Eastern European
countries was not very different except that it had the additional component of
Serbs slaughtering non-Serbs.
The Indian story is similar
but different. India’s ambitions were not to become a Superpower and though it
had its own small problems with Pakistan and China and a certain amount of over
spend on military hardware, its main problem stemmed out of a total
mismanagement of its economy in the name of Socialism. During the time that Jawaharlal Nehru was the
Prime Minister of the country, he showed a vision of what the future of India
would be like and how the country would be self-sufficient and not depend upon
imports. Nehru borrowed the five year plan idea from the USSR and set goals to
be reached. He also emphasized on
industrial development and adoption of modern methods of agriculture and he
called industries the “Temples of a New India”.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Nehru most definitely laid the
blue prints for the India of the future and whatever development we have today
is in more ways than one a result of the Nehruvian Vision. There are people who
oppose this but the opposition to this theory while not without substance would
do injustice to Nehru and his efforts.
This was the time that
the Indian National Congress party was functioning without a viable opposition
and the country could perhaps be said was being ruled by “Oligarchs”. Usually, the people thus represented were
Nehru himself, Vallabh Bhai Patel, Babu Rajendra Prasad and some eminent
jurists as well. While the term oligarchy carries negative connotations,
especially in the context of a democracy, it should be understood that since
the figures identified above were true patriots with hardly any personal
agendas, the oligarchy worked reasonably well for India. In fact, it was the passing away of this
generation of “freedom fighter oligarchs” that set the tone and tenor for the
degeneration of Indian politics into murky strategies and the descending of
Indian politics into those very quagmires from which it was trying to ascend. The
death of Jawaharlal Nehru post India’s loss to the Chinese in the war of 1962
had showed the first chink in Nehru’s planning.
Nehru, ever the idealist, did not desire to spend money on defence, a
decision which ultimately led to the defeat of India in the war with the
Chinese.
Nehru’s death is
attributed to his depression and disheartenment due to the defeat to the
Chinese. Whatever the reason maybe,
India’s problems perhaps started after his death. His successor Lal Bahadur
Shastri, a man of slight built but immense courage, fought a war with the
Pakistanis and defeated them totally. Then came the peace talks at Tashkent at
the behest of the USSR and it was in Tashkent that Shastri breathed his last,
after having been Prime Minister for a short period. Shastri was not an
oligarch. He was a simple man who had just a few thousand rupees as his
possession. He had no land, house or motor car. He brought into focus the
necessity for monetary austerity and the necessity for moral courage, but the
shortness of his reign meant that these could not be ingrained into the psyche
of the people. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s
death also inaugurated a new phase in Indian politics; one that relied on
manipulation, deception and amorality in order to stay in power. The Congress party also became a house to a
number of factions each trying to overthrow the other. This peculiar phenomenon
was mainly due to the fact that there were no opposition parties that could
stand up to the might of the Congress party.
The understanding of
factions and factionalism is a categorical imperative when it comes to
understanding Indian Politics. When the Indian National Congress Party still
had the towering oligarchs who were seen as being selfless and dedicated to the
growth of the nation, opposition to them or their leadership was negligible;
this in spite of the existence of disagreements. Usually the party relied upon
using the services of senior leaders to broker peace and bring “unanimity” in
decision making. After the death of Lal
Bahadur Shastri, the vacuum created due to the absence of leaders who were
considered to be above selfish agendas, the Congress became a party of
squabbles among different leaders. Claimants to the chair of the Prime Minister
became many, prominent among them being Morarji Desai. At this time Kamaraj
Nadar formed what is today called the Syndicate and sometimes also as the
Kitchen Cabinet in order to prop up, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi as the
Prime Ministerial candidate. While Kamaraj Nadar saw Indira Gandhi as a pawn
that could be moved around by the Syndicate, the lady herself had a different
ambition. She wanted the Prime Ministership with all the powers in her hand.
It was this ambition that
led to the inauguration of populist policies and emphasis being laid on
“socialism” which was perhaps the first big transformation in Indian Politics.
Mrs. Gandhi took up programmes such as Nationalization of Banks, easy and low
interest based credit to farmers, launching of schemes of daily savings by the
poor and increasing employment by expanding the public sector undertakings and
opening new ones as well. Though the nationalization of banks was well
received, the problems began with many farmers being unable to service the
loans that they had taken and Indira Gandhi taking up loan waiver schemes. The
employment in the public sector also increased but the patterns of employment
saw more people employed in the upper echelons of companies rather than in the
lower echelons. Line workers were far
fewer than staff supervisors and this meant that most of the public sector
companies had become top heavy and over a time were primed to collapse.
The realization that the
top heaviness of the public sector companies and their being ready for collapse
was noticed by Rajiv Gandhi who became the Prime Minister post the
assassination of his mother. Rajiv
Gandhi was young, dynamic and also had a vision of the future for India. He was
also the first to usher in economic reforms in a limited manner by opening up
some of the sectors of the Indian economy. The sale of badly managed public
sector undertakings was also mooted and investment up to 49% by foreign companies
was allowed in some of the sectors. This process was slow, since Rajiv Gandhi
faced opposition within and outside his party for allowing the entry of foreign
capital and sometimes the pushback was so severe that forward movement slowed
down to a snail’s pace. Unfortunately, this also became a time when the verdict
was delivered in the Shah Bano case saying that a woman who was a Muslim was
entitled to alimony and maintenance. The
Muslim leaders within the party cried foul and said that this went against the
spirit of the constitution which gave room for a separate Muslim Personal Law.
Rajiv Gandhi yielded to the pressure and this led to the right wing parties
like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mounting pressure on Rajiv Gandhi to
introduce a uniform civil code. The net result of this was that Rajiv Gandhi
went from hero to zero and his party, the Indian National Congress lost the
elections in 1989.
In more ways than one the
year 1989 is very significant for Indian politics. India ushered in the era of
coalition governments with coalitions being formed after the electoral verdict
was delivered. One of Rajiv Gandhi’s
trusted lieutenants Vishwanath Pratap Singh who had abandoned the ranks of the
Congress to join the newly formed Janata Dal became the Prime Minister.
Unsurprisingly, the first statement that he made to the people of the country
on State Television was that the “government coffers were empty”. He was
ridiculed by many an economist on the grounds that he was using a non-existing
situation to describe an existing one. It was argued that coffers was not
something that could be talked about in that day and age, since most
governments functioned on the principle of accumulating foreign exchange. However, Singh was doing exactly the same
thing but used an archaic term that was better understood by the people. V P
Singh had to deal with not only the problem of forex reserves but also with the
rising ambition of his deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal. Devi Lal was keen to wrest the Prime
Ministership from V P Singh on the grounds that the latter was a Congressman
and that he himself was always the main opposition.
Devi Lal’s party was
called the Bharatiya Kisan Dal and Devi Lal embarked upon a tour of many parts
of Rural India (especially in the North) rousing the passions of the farmers
and highlighting the fact that farmers were getting a raw deal under V P Singh.
When it began to look as if the sentiment against V P Singh was reaching the
critical mass, the coterie that advised V P Singh asked him to counter Devi Lal
by introducing the Mandal Commission based OBC reservations at the National
Level. It must be stated here that only Tamil Nadu and the erstwhile undivided
Andhra Pradesh (under the leadership of N T Rama Rao in 1985) introduced OBC
reservations. Interestingly enough OBC stood for Other Backward Classes but in
usage it was just BC or Backward Caste. It is well known that while class is an
economic category, caste is a social division. Tamil Nadu and the undivided
Andhra Pradesh were implementing the system on the basis of caste and V P Singh
also decided to take the same route. Though it was being called OBC for all
practical purposes it was BC.
It can argued as SC
leader Chandra Bhan Prasad did that there was a consensus among the people of
India about the necessity for those low caste people who once were untouchables
and were deprived of all the social goods that were available to others. But
the creation of reservations for OBCs (from now referred to as BC or Backward
Caste) disrupted the consensus. This disruption happened for a good reason.
Unlike the Scheduled Castes or SCs, many of the BCs were not deprived of social
goods. In Tamil Nadu, the Mudaliars and the Nadars are quite powerful, as are
the Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka. The Yadavs and the Gouds in
Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are also powerful enjoying the patronage
especially of the Telugu Desam Party but also that of the Telangana Rashtra
Samithi and even the Congress Party. In Northern India despite the existence of
dominant Brahmins (called Bhumihars) decades the Yadavs and the Khurmis are
becoming more powerful than the Brahmins and Rajputs. Toee go back to the
argument of the disruption of the consensus on reservations, the anti-Mandal
commission agitations that spread across the length and breadth of the country
with many students immolating themselves. This was countered by the BCs and the
country’s education system came to a stand still for a few months while both
the sections sparred with each other. What is important to be noted here is the
abandoning of categories such as farmers, factory workers, north Indians, south
Indians, Aryans, and Dravidians which were used to essentially to camouflage
the language of caste. Now caste came
out into the open and political groups and parties started to be formed along
caste lines.
The most obvious part of
this exercise (probably better described as the nadir of Indian politics) is
when the V P Singh government was forced to face a no confidence motion, one of
the MPs Ram Vilas Paswan gave a clarion call to members of the Lok Sabha not to
vote along party lines but along caste lines. This was also the time when the
BCs decided that like the SCs they too required an icon around whom they could
rally. B. R. Ambedkar was the leader of the SCs and starting with Maharashtra
and going on to many of the southern states, Ambedkar was deified. This
deification of Ambedkar led to the usage of the term Dalit (a Marathi word
signifying the oppressed) to describe the SCs. Around this time some of the BC
intellectuals dug out the history of Joti Rao Phule and found that he had
worked for unity of all people through his Satya Shodhak Samaj and strove for
the creation of a “Bahujan Samaj” or society comprising of different people all
of whom enjoyed equality. When the
Maharashtra Government included the caste that Phule belonged to in the list of
BCs, the BCs made Phule a BC icon and started calling themselves “Bahujans”.
In Uttar Pradesh, Kanshi
Ram who was a small time leader started the Dalit-Bahujan Party which was
supposed to be a show of unity of the BCs and the SCs. This unity really did
not happen but Kanshi Ram’s protégé Mayawati an SC woman became the Chief
Minister while the Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh came together as Samajwadi Party or
Socialist party and in Bihar the Yadavs united under the banner of Rashtriya
Janata Dal which again was a party led by Lalu Prasad Yadav. Both UP and Bihar came under the leadership of
the so called BCs; the Yadavs. It is time yet again to insert another
parenthesis for clarity since there was a parallel development happening in the
northern part of India with an otherwise fringe political party called the
Bharatiya Janata Party using an opportunity to build itself into a viable
party. Later history has shown that the BJP did succeed in this endeavour. The
success of this endeavour is more to be attributed to V P Singh and his cohorts
rather than the BJP itself. So here is the parenthesis.
While
this was the main act, a side show also was being enacted by one of the small
but deadly players in Indian Politics. The CPI-ML groups (also called the
Naxalites since this group took its birth in a place called Naxalbari) believed
in the violent overthrowing of the Indian State which according to them was “semi-feudal;
semi-colonial”. This rather unusual description was due to the fact that the
CPI-ML groups (now called the Maoists since the palace coup in Nepal which was
supposedly engineered by this group and in India all the different CPI-ML
(Marxist, Leninist) groups came under this one banner of Maoists) attributed
private capitalism to those who were in cohorts with multinational capitalism
and therefore they were called colonial and the northern parts of the country
where feudalism was rampant (according to them) made the Indian State
semi-feudal; semi-colonial. This
needless to stay is a description that cannot stand any serious scrutiny and
therefore would be as meaningless as saying “this also; that also”. Yet a mention
of this has been made albeit in the form of a parenthesis for a reason. Even
during the pre-Independence times, specifically in the 1930s Indian Marxists
like Rajni Palme Dutt, who was the maternal uncle of assassinated Swedish Prime
Minister Svend Olaf Palme, had argued that the most important category of
social analysis in India was caste, since it was not only unique to India but
it also lent itself to being used in conjunction with other categories. For
example upper caste also signified being the more moneyed segment of society,
more educated segment of society and being the dominant or ruling segment of
society. D. D. Kosambi famously argued as did his followers that Caste in India
plays the role of a Class. But the actual politics on the ground were veiling
caste with some other name. It could be race, colour or region. The CPI-ML
groups were claiming that some of the upper castes had become capitalist and
therefore friendly with colonialism the highest form of capitalism (as
described by Lenin) and some of them remained rooted in feudalism and therefore
semi-colonial; semi-feudal had to be seen as upper caste dominated society.
However
coming back to the 1990s V P Singh’s famous Mandal Commission based
reservations for the BCs it can be said that not only did this act bring caste
into the limelight and without any camouflage but it also strengthened the
notion of Hindutva of the BJP which sought to construct Hinduism as a religion
or an overarching structure which had smaller components which were the various
caste groupings. In reality however,
Hinduism is really not a religion nor are the caste groups its components. Hindu is a Persian/Arabic term that was used
by the Persians to describe the people who lived on the other side of the Indus
(Latin), Sindhu (Sanskrit) and Hindu (Persian). In fact, the landmass which is
called the Indian Sub-continent was called Hind by the Persians. The name India
was derived from Indus. What has been called Hindu was actually a Cosmology,
one of many in the world but perhaps more advanced than any. It was in the 19th
Century that Hinduism was formally designated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy though he
saw it as perverted due to the existence of caste hierarchy and therefore set
up the Brahma Samaj to rid Hinduism and Hindu Society of its perversion. Mohandas Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi was more
charitable. He saw this Sanatana Dharma (ever unchanging Dharma) and as a
cosmology and called the Varna or caste “a person’s natural calling. He argued
that one family could have members from all the four varnas and this argument
has been strengthened by Indologists such as Patrizia Nouvolari who claim that
a person’s varna was decided by his horoscope and not by parentage. Gandhi argued that it was the intervention of
Brahminism that perverted Sanatana Dharma and made parentage the deciding factor
for one’s caste and also that Brahminism created a hierarchy among castes.
Perversion it maybe but this is the model that is accepted today and the BJP
was quick to latch on to it.
The
V P Singh strategy to survive in power was to talk of SC, BC, ST and Muslims as
being those that were deprived of power (a revival of an argument that Ambedkar
had originally made) and that they had to come into power in order to
experience the goods of democracy. This strategy instead of strengthening V P
Singh led to his downfall and gave impetus to the BJP that was arguing that
Hindu were all one and problems of caste could be tackled within the family.
The BJP was emphatic that Muslims were outsiders and suppressors of Hindus for
centuries and therefore the idea that all these people could come together was
preposterous. The ground reality of the SCs and BCs also was very different.
BCs had proximity to power if not power itself, something which the SCs who
were always the heathen never had. The BCs were not very happy to be lumped
with the SCs. The fascinating part of the caste system is that its logic runs
through the hierarchy where everyone believes that they are superior to someone
else. The BCs see themselves as superior to the SCs and even within the SCs the
Mahars see themselves as superior to the Chamars.
The
BJP coopted the BC groups into the important areas of the structure of the
organization and was thus able to break the model that V P Singh had created. V
P Singh was out of Indian politics for good and the BJP was suddenly a
contender. The elections that followed the fall of the VP Singh government
after an extremely short tenure saw that no party had the required majority and
the Congress with 240+ seats and with some support of smaller parties formed a
minority government in 1990, with P V Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister. After a
very long time someone from outside of the Gandhi-Nehru family became the Prime
Minister of India. In his appearance P V
Narasimha Rao looked like a mild man who could possibly not be assertive. In
reality however, the man proved not only to be assertive but also someone with
gumption. When he took over the forex
position of the country was in doldrums with reserves just about sufficient to
last a few weeks. Narasimha Rao pulled out Prof. Manmohan Singh from his
position as the Chairman of the University Grants Commission of India and made
him the Finance Minister of the country. Manmohan Singh was a renowned
economist whose economics tended to lean towards those of John Maynard Keynes,
but he set aside ideologies and opened up the Indian economy to foreign
investments. Narasimha Rao’s greatest achievement is the fact that he was able
to, with the help of Manmohan Singh, to run a minority government which pulled
the country out from the economic quicksand that its various previous
administrations had slowly dragged it into.
Narasimha Rao completed the full 5 years of his tenure and by 1995, the
country was well out of the problems and on the road to not just recovery but
to development as well.
India
has been criticized for the size of its population but ironically enough from
the 21st century’s beginning onwards, it has been China and India
(in that order) that have become prime drivers of the world economy. The
disappearance of bipolarity and the appearance of India as one of the important
economies in the world, also changed the way in which global politics were
played out. Till the disappearance of the USSR the world was being seen from
the vantage of geo-politics, but with the disappearance of the USSR and the
ideology of communism and the creation of an economy based in capitalism
globally, what came to the fore was geo-economics. It is here that the vision of Nehru and his
grandson Rajiv Gandhi stood India in good stead. Nehru’s emphasis on
modernization and Rajiv Gandhi’s emphasis on computerization along with the
fact that India has the second highest English speaking population in the
world, gave it a competitive edge to deal with the problems associated with Y2K
bug and this made the country virtually the service industry for all big
corporations. The Americans with the help of George W Bush the President and
Mitt Romney were successful in moving jobs to India so that even large
corporations could benefit ensured a windfall of employment for Indians not
just in India but in other countries as well.
The
politics of the country defied this logic and with good reason. After 1995 when
the Congress under Narasimha Rao lost the elections and the NDA or the National
Democratic Alliance came into power, one saw the rise of white collar crime
rising and cases such as the Harshad Mehta case where the Bombay Stock Exchange
was manipulated by the stock broker with a little help from his political
friends, were increasingly frequent. In the absence of a strong and powerful
Union Government regional parties assumed national significance and the then
Chief Minister of the Undivided Andhra Pradesh, N Chandra Babu Naidu was taking
loans from the IMF and soon his example was followed by Karnataka and Tamil
Nadu as well. Naidu in particular inaugurated a new form of corruption wherein
someone from within the ruling party would buy out huge tracts of land at cheap
prices and after sometime the government would then announce projects in those
areas wherein the prices went up from Rs. 5000 per acre to Rs. 50 lakh per
acre. The federalism component of the country was to be built on the principle
of cooperation but ultimately it turned out to be competitive federalism which
in its wake brought newer and more difficult to detect forms of corruption.
The Southern States had
the wherewithal to compete with each other and the manufacturing and service
sector grew in them and in the Western State of Maharashtra. The Northern part
of the country just did not have the human resource to compete with these
states and therefore were falling backwards. In the days of cooperative
federalism the north Indian states reaped most of the benefits but when it
turned competitive they simply did not stand a chance. This led to the widening
of the gap in developmental terms between the North and the South and the
Southern part was and is way ahead of the northern parts. In all this the old
problem of capitalism aptly described by Jean Jacque Rousseau as the problem of
“poverty amidst plenty” came to the fore for the first time in India, since by
now India had become a completely capitalist country. The election results of
2004 showed that while the stock exchange was booming the lower echelons of Indian
society were whimpering and refused to vote the NDA back into power. The
expanding gap between the rich and the poor ensured that the United Progressive
Alliance would come to power. The second term of the UPA was a disaster
characterized by policy paralysis and it culminated in the loss of the UPA in
2014. Interestingly the BJP was able to
get a majority of 272 seats on its own but continues with the NDA. Whether this
is a one-time exception or a future trend, only time will tell.
As things stand today there
is a clear division between social and political processes in India. Socially, there is a reduction in the
importance attached to caste but politically there is a greater divide along
caste lines. But there is no universality to this principle either. In the
north where levels of education are very low and prospect of employment still
tied to the UPSC, the emphasis on caste is firm both socially and politically.
In the south there is a movement away from government employment to work with
multinational corporations who have dropped anchor in cities like Bengaluru,
Hyderabad and Chennai. In the West apart from the traditional commercial hub
Mumbai, Pune has also started emerging as a manufacturing hub. Narendra Modi
has been doing his best to attract investments to Gujarat. Does this mean that caste is not an important
factor socially and politically in the south? The unfortunate answer is that it
is still very important. Local businesses and industries are still the preserve
of caste groupings and the desire to possess political power is very much
steeped in caste though now like in the past the caste name is replaced by say
a name of region like in the case of Telangana.
Telangana has always been the fiefdom of the Reddy and Velama castes but
with the rise of Kamma (from coastal Andhra) caste in the business sector the
Reddys and Velamas have found themselves dispossessed of the power that they
once held. The separate Telangana agitation therefore signifies the desire of
the Reddy and Velama caste groupings to repossess the power that once belonged
to them. What helped them here is that this was a backward region with huge
unemployed population that could be manipulated in the name of providing them
employment.
This brings us back to
the question so is there a possibility of establishing cause-effect sequencing
in identifying and underlining politics and political processes that came into
being in the last 25 years of liberalization. The answer cannot be a firm yes.
Given the nature of social, economic, geographic and political diversity of
India it is impossible to construct a narrative about politics around one or
two issues. In fact most narratives are continuous with the history of the
country which again has many constructs. It is possible to see the involvement
of corporate money power in Indian politics today, and that perhaps is the only
take away from the story of economic liberalization. Other more complicated
processes may have nothing or very little do with the liberalization process
directly. And given that process are enmeshed over a long period of time, it is
impossible to see which strand is effected by liberalization of the Indian
economy. Therefore Indian politics if
seen as before and after, show very little difference between before and after
liberalization in terms of the social structures changing form but more or less
retaining the substance, something which can be described by a German word
which was used by Hegel “aufheben” and the process as “aufgehoben” and the
English equivalent which is roughly put as “sublation”.
In this endeavour of mine
I have tried to show a glimpse of the history of Indian politics from the time
of the freedom movement till the recent example of liberalization but I have
focused on the post 1990s period so as to establish that the political theories
of the West in their left liberal or communist left have not been successful in
characterizing Indian politics successfully and explaining the reasons for why
Indian society and politics function the way they do. Given the enervation of
Western derived political thinking or for that matter even the Chinese derived
theories of the CPI (M) it is time to give up this models and theory which has
failed in either characterizing or changing Indian society, there can be no
better case and an argument for the creation and application of a theory or
theories which can understand and change the politics and society of India.
However what I seek is
not easy task. In fact, it is not a task that can be achieved even by a group
of people. The biggest hindrance to this process is that those who work for
change will have to face very stiff resistance from various quarters. We have deified some leaders like Ambedkar.
If any lacunae in his theory are shown that would itself lead to a problem of
gigantic proportions. Gandhi is probably the only person who can be walked
over, what with even Markandeya Katju calling him a British agent. The problem
is for decades both academics and the general population have been viewing the
country with tinted glasses that show colours that do not exist. To get these
people to take off the tinted glasses and see reality for what it is, is no
easy process. It is a road which has land mines and snipers at every given
place. Nevertheless, it is a road that has to be taken. It is imperative to tell people that what has
been achieved in the name of demystification of Indian society and Indian politics
is actually a re-mystification, meaning moving from one set of existing
mysteries to newer ones and in the process completely obfuscating reality
completely.
I hope that those who have read this piece can see the pitfalls of imposing models and frameworks upon realities and then selectively picking examples or incidents from history to legitimate their arguments. This is an art that we academicians have perfected. I believe that what is required is an honest, non-egoistic and sincere attempts on the part of academicians of all hue to first start discussions verbally rather than publishing their points of view as articles for that process is deeply entrenched in the culture of rebuttals and their rebuttals ad infinitum. Brain storming sessions between those who belong to different ideologies conducted with open minds and in non-combative ways is what is required. Will we ever do it? I don't think so. Then why post? Only to show why we set out to find solutions to problems and end up producing problems to solutions.
