No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism 9789380118352

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EDUCATE YOURSELF BECAUSE WE WILL NEED ALL YOUR INTELLIGENCE. BE EXCITED BECAUSE WE WILL NEED ALL YOUR ENTHUSIASM. ORGANIZE BECAUSE WE WILL NEED ALL YOUR STRENGTH.

  – On the first issue of Ordine Nuovo, Rassegna settimanale di cultura socialista

(The New Order, Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), co-founded by Antonio Gramsci, May 1, 1919

     

NO FREE LEFT THE FUTURES OF INDIAN COMMUNISM    

VIJAY PRASHAD        

Print edition first published January 2015. Paperback edition, with revisions, May 2015. E-book edition first published in 2016 LeftWord Books 2254/2A Shadi Khampur New Ranjit Nagar New Delhi 110008 INDIA LeftWord Books is the publishing division of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd. leftword.com © 2015 Vijay Prashad

ISBN: 978-93-80118-35-2 (e-book)

       

Table of Contents   Prefatory Remarks 1  The Necessity of  Communism 2.  The Great Moving Right Show 3.  The Collapse of Indian Socialism 4.  The Era of Populist Politics 5. The Left 6.  Communism in Neo-liberal Times 7. Indo-Communism? Epilogue Acknowledgements

  Prefatory Remarks

“Hence it may be said that to write the history of a party means

nothing less than to write the general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint.” Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince[1]



Impatience strikes at the root of periods of world history that do not favour revolutionary change. There is a desire to break through the knots of congealed power, to find a pathway through the thickets of ruling-class ideology and institutions. Can there be a detonator somewhere that would set off an explosion into the future?

Bertolt Brecht might have called these the “dark times.” But then these are also the times we have. This is our context. The excitement of the Arab Spring fades as turmoil takes over Greater Arabia. Latin America’s “pink turn” continues to provide a window into a future, but the excitement of its first dash out of neo-liberalism has lessened. Most of Africa and Asia remain between extreme poverty and excessive faith in the capacity of their locomotive states – China, India, and South Africa. If the trains do leave the station, they will take very few passengers. Austerity regimes in the Global North produced anti-austerity movements, but these seem to fade into the shadows after elections. In India, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) comes to power once more, having already been in charge between 1998 and 2004. Its return is more ominous on the surface because its leader has a history of producing pogroms and poverty. The return of the right comes as the Left suffers a historic defeat at the 2014 polls. The Communist parties take up less room in parliament, as the Maoists in the forests seem subdued. But the electoral defeat is merely what it is – a loss in the elections. It is neither an ideological collapse nor an organizational rupture. But the harm seems all the greater because of the ideological and organizational isolation of the Left. The Congress, licking its wounds, remains wedded to its drift rightwards. Its leader, Rahul Gandhi, offers a mute criticism of the style of

leadership by the BJP, but not its substance.[2] The former socialist parties retain their socialist names (samajwadi, janata), but there is little of this socialism in their programme and practice. Their natural disposition to be allies of the Left has languished as they seek alliances of power rather than of ideology. Into this breach came the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but its astonishing emergence has not manifested into anything beyond novelty. Ideological disarray and the politics of personality have dented its pretensions for charting a new politics. Such a barren landscape leaves the Left on a lonely track. It will take a great deal of fortitude to hold the line, to study carefully the concrete conditions, to plot a strategy to arise as the only capable alternative to the entire political class.

India, of course, requires such an alternative. Of its 1.3 billion people, at least 680 million live in absolute deprivation.[3] Little in the programmes of the BJP and the Congress offer solutions to the perpetual crisis of hardwork and poverty. Panaceas, driven by electoral considerations, popular struggles and tragedies (such as farmer suicides), give hope to the people. But these are of a partial nature. They are not an alternative. The BJP is programmatically committed to a tonic of cultural suffocation, economic strangulation and political authoritarianism. It has never pretended to be a social democratic, or even a liberal party. Its entire evolution has been against social democracy and liberalism. It is only because of the compulsion of its mass base that the BJP has to on occasion constrain its commitment to its shareholders, the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie. The Congress, on the other hand, was born in the freedom movement and was its leading force. It came to power in 1947 with immense prestige, which it squandered over the course of the decades to come. Jawaharlal Nehru’s anti-communism prevented the Congress from the kind of policies (radical land reform, for instance) that would have set India on a more egalitarian path.[4] Nehru’s own dance with socialism seemed a youthful dalliance, as he hardened the relationship between the new Indian state and its agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie. What might have been a pragmatic decision to ally with the big bourgeoisie became for the Congress part of its programmatic make-up. By the 1990s, the difference between the BJP and the Congress was largely temperamental, although the Congress – given its history – still harboured a self-image of being a champion of social justice. That is what allowed the Congress to pass the National Rural Employment Guarantee

Act (2005) and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009), under intense popular and Left pressure. An infrequently assessed tragedy for India has been the demise of Indian socialism, the heritage both of M. K. Gandhi, R. M. Lohia and Periyar (E. V. R.). Little that Gandhi had dreamed of has entered Indian statecraft – neither his views on decentralised political institutions nor on an economy of cottage industries. Like many major figures, Gandhi has become more icon and inspiration than ideologue. Right after 1947, scholars produced a slew of books attempting to forecast a Gandhian India – the key figure here was J. C. Kumarappa.[5] There is no comparable figure today. Most work on Gandhi is historical – how to assess his legacy, not how to learn from him for today’s reality. Gandhi is reduced to a talisman, an after-dinner quote provider. Worse are the legacies of Lohia and Periyar, whose parties have accommodated themselves entirely to the inequality of the present. One could be misled by the occasional radical speeches by Lalu Prasad Yadav or Karunanidhi, but these are merely reminders of their formative years and not reliable indicators of their political projects. There is no way to properly appreciate the isolation of Indian communism without an assessment of the collapse of Indian socialism. That is the reason why No Free Left spends a considerable time to track the evisceration of Indian socialism over the course of the past decades. Currently there is no major work on the history of Indian socialism – a sign perhaps of the lack of interest in a history of these parties that might seem embarrassing to their present incarnations. What one sees rather than a history of the tendency of these political traditions or of their parties are biographies – a large book on MGR or on Mulayam Singh Yadav. It is indicative of how these parties have become personality driven. Indian liberalism, which has not produced a political party worth its salt, but which dominates much of the scholarly space, seems nonplussed by the recent shifts in the political economy. Congenitally optimistic, historian Ramachandra Guha nonetheless admits worry about the direction toward which India is being steered by its political class. In his major book, India After Gandhi, Guha’s confident and bracing prose is not matched by any confidence of vision. It is a curious liberalism, whose forward march seems halted. There is no grand plan, no major horizon, only small horizons and a simple wish. As Guha puts it at the end of the book, so long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition and elections are held,

“India will survive.”[6] Its survival is sufficient. Sunil Khilnani, another establishment liberal, is less sanguine in his highly influential The Idea of India. Both Khilnani and Guha are Nehru’s men – he stands tall in their accounts, which cannot bring themselves to offer any robust criticism of his politics and governance. The deluge that followed his death, compounded for Khilnani by the grotesquerie of Indira Gandhi, has brought peril to India.[7] Khilnani acknowledges that the India of the 1990s and after is no longer the India of Nehruvian liberalism. That moment has passed. Now, he suggests, “economic possibilities have indeed rapidly changed for many Indians, yet the majority still find themselves waiting, some expectantly, most with no hope at all.”[8] With the admission that the current order has “no hope” for the majority of Indians, Khilnani nonetheless does not set himself askance from the ruling ideologies of our day. He takes refuge in clichés, rushing back to the seminar room from the messy street, where “the protagonists are creatures who belong to neither the modern nor the traditional world: they exist in the homeless world of modern politics.”[9]

The adjective “homeless” is perhaps used accidentally. Nonetheless, it reflects the reality of the social and political condition of large parts of the Indian population – cut off from an adequate livelihood and from a political agency that reflects in full part its needs. Most of the literature on Indian communism feels claustrophobic. It assumes that the communist movement lives on a detached landscape – its programme and political judgments have to be adjudged based on a divine standard, against perfection in other words. Most of these books look at the history of the communist party in isolation from the political economy of India and from an assessment of the objective political condition (including a close study of the potential political allies of the communists).[10] A history of communism cannot be written, as Gramsci put it, without writing a “general history of a country.” This is partly what I have tried to do in this book.

“No Free Left” is a traffic sign that refers to a prohibition to a left turn at a red light. In many parts of India this idiomatic sign can still be seen – although some clever grammarian has now changed the signs (most are now symbolic). Is this a sign of progress? Hard to say. The title of this book riffs off this old sign and suggests that the Left – in our times – does not flourish without a great deal of intellectual and practical effort. It is toward the sharpening of that effort that this book is dedicated.

No Free Left opens with a consideration of the necessity of Communism and Left Unity, offers a sense of the political economy of India’s movement rightward, goes backwards to the history of Indian socialism and communism, assesses the history of the Communist movement since 1950 – and then, provides a sense of what it means to be a communist in neo-liberal times. I hope that the book provides the kind of self-criticism that Karl Marx asked for in his 18th Brumaire, with “unmerciful thoroughness.”[11] I am obviously a partisan to the history that I write, so my mercy is toward myself as much as anyone else. I have been involved with the Communist movement in India for a quarter of a century, have in this time interviewed hundreds of communists, read thousands of pages of party documents and archival material and traveled tens of thousands of miles to watch and participate in communist activities. This book is a culmination of those years and my close study and engagement with the communist movement. Communism, Marx argued, is often defeated, often on the wrong track, but only by struggle and self-critique can it “draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic.”[12] My partisanship rests on the hope that this will indeed happen. There is no pretense of objectivity here, but there is certainly – I trust – a commitment to reality. “Philosophers,” a very young Marx wrote in 1842, “do not spring up like mushrooms out of the ground; they are products of their time, of their nation, whose most subtle, valuable and invisible juices flow in the idea of philosophy.”[13] My experiences and my commitments are across this book, but I have nonetheless stayed clear of delusions and mystifications. Or so I believe.     [1]

    Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 151.

[2] 

  Sandeep Joshi, “Modi plays drums as people suffer power cuts, price rise: Rahul,” The Hindu, September 4, 2014.

[3] 

  McKinsey Global Institute, From Poverty to Empowerment: India’s Imperative for Jobs, Growth and Effective Basic Services, New York: McKinsey, 2014, p. 40.

[4] 

  Evidence of that avuncular anti-Communism is in Nehru’s pre-independence autobiography, where he suggests that while the communists have the better ideas they are out of touch with India. “Some of the earlier communist analyses of the general Indian political situation turned out

to be remarkably correct,” he wrote. “But, as soon as they leave their general principles and enter into details, and especially when they consider the role of the Congress, they go hopelessly astray. One of the reasons for the weakness in numbers as well as influence of the communists in India is that, instead of spreading scientific knowledge of communism and trying to convert people’s minds to it, they have largely concentrated on abuse of others.” Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom. The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru, New York: John Day, 1947, p. 233. If only they behaved themselves, in other words. [5]

    J. C. Kumarappa, Swaraj for the Masses, Bombay: Hind Kitab, 1948 and Gandhian Economic Thought, Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh, 1962.

[6]

    Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi. The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, New Delhi: Picador, 2007, p. 771.

[7]

    Here is Khilnani’s harsh assessment of Indira Gandhi, “unlike her father, Mrs. Gandhi had no intellectual analysis of the domestic economy or its place in the international arena.” The Idea of India, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999, p. 90.

[8]

    Khilnani, The Idea of India, p. 11.

[9]

    Khilnani, The Idea of India, p. 60.

[10]

    An early study of post-colonial communism in India could not offer much of interest because it was trapped by its Cold War commitments – Gene Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Subsequently, in the glow of 1968 and of early Indian Maoism, scholars studied the enclaves of West Bengal and Kerala to the exclusion of the rest of India. The apposite examples are Marcus Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 and Victor Fic, Kerala: Yenan of India. Rise of Communist Power, 1937-69, Bombay: Nachiketa, 1970. Cold War emotions swept through the conclusions and damaged the otherwise useful material collected by the authors. At one point I used to think that the best thing about the Franda book is the original painting done by the artist Sunil Das. By the 1990s, only a few scholars of Indian communism tried to see the movement from its perspective. G. K. Lieten’s two volumes on West Bengal are in this category: Continuity and Change in Rural West Bengal, Delhi: Sage, 1992 and Development, Devolution and Democracy: Village Democracy in West Bengal, Delhi: Sage, 1996. The heir to the old anticommunist war-horse, C. R. Irani (Bengal: The Communist Challenge, Bombay: Salvani, 1968) did not come from the far right but from Ross Mallick, who attempted to judge Indian communism based on Marxist values. His first book, Development Policy of a communist government: West Bengal since 1977, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, provided an overview of the agricultural policies of the Left Front, but with a meager sense of the constraints on the government. His subsequent attempt to write a broad study, Indian Communism: Opposition, Collaboration and Institutionalisation, Delhi: OUP, 1994, is singularly unimpressive. I ended a 1996 review of this book thus, “Of Proudhon, Marx wrote to Annenkov in 1846; ‘He cannot

explain these facts, and so he merely invents the hypothesis of the universal reason revealing itself.’ Of Mallick’s book we might say that he cannot explain the dynamism of the communist movement (its work and its self-criticisms), so he invents a partial theory (parliamentarism) and then tailors his argument to prove his point.” Vijay Prashad, “Parliamentarianism and Indian Communism,” Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), vol. 31, no. 20, May 18, 1996, p. 1200. [11]

    Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, New York: International Publishers, 1963, p. 19.

[12]

    Marx, The 18th Brumaire, p. 19.

[13]

    Karl Marx, “The Leading article in no. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” Rheinische Zeitung, no. 195, July 14, 1842, Supplement, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress, 1975, vol. 1, p. 195.

 

1  The Necessity of  Communism

“The tomorrow in today is alive.” Ernst Bloch

  Since 1991, the Indian Left has provided the most consistent challenge to the drift of free markets and free enterprise – the promise of which has led to greater inequality and less opportunity. The Left has held fast to its final aim of socialism, despite the apparent improbability of its achievement. Steadiness from the Left has come alongside the rapid withdrawal from any commitment to socialism from its old allies – the Janata Parivar (who are in the lineage of Ram Manohar Lohia) and the left-wing of the Congress. Gone is the surety that somewhere near the Left sits its allies who are ready to form a popular front for the good of the people.

Quietly, surely, the Left regroups. Older splits seem less essential now – although debates remain. The fragments of the Left, a very broad tradition, include:   Communist Party of India – CPI Communist Party of India (Marxist) – CPI-M Revolutionary Socialist Party – RSP Forward Bloc Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Liberation – CPI-ML Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist) – SUCI (C) Communist Party of India (Maoist)

 

Apart from the Maoists, the other constituents of the Left have begun to coordinate their forces in struggles.[1] The basis of this Left Unity is the acknowledgement that the forces of the Left are weak and require joint action to rebuild their strength. This is not the first instance of Left Unity in India. The CPI, CPI-M, RSP and Forward Bloc have worked together for

decades, and indeed have been partners in government in both Kerala and West Bengal. Perennial discussions about the merger of the CPI and the CPI-M remain on the cards – almost since the split of the party in 1964.[2] In 1996, the CPI-ML and SUCI (C) had been part of a conversation with the other Left parties to coordinate activities, but this did not germinate.[3] One of the main problems for the Left at that time was that the issue of unity was framed around the impending parliamentary elections. Deep differences in understanding between the parties over the potential role of the secular regional parties as allies and of the duplicity of the Congress prevented any conjoint electoral strategy. Such differences remain, although the non-Maoist Left has indeed worked together in the state elections in Bihar and Delhi. But the basis of the new Left Unity is now not electoral as much as political – namely, to work together to germinate and develop struggles against the rapacious Indian ruling class. The most important development in this urgency for Left Unity is in the new fraternal connections between the CPI-M, the largest Communist Party, and the CPIML (Liberation), the most important of the former guerrilla formations. United fronts of the Left not only agglomerate the strength of the separate parties, but they also put forward to the rest of the country a common resolve. The problems of India are too grave for the constituents of the Left not to work with each other.

Half of India’s 1.3 billion people live in conditions of deprivation. Government policy over the past three decades – inspired by the neoliberal policy slate – has produced a hostile environment for survival. A quarter of a million farmers and peasants have committed suicide, a direct consequence of capitalist agriculture and an adverse global trade order. The current government of the Hindu Right is not only the complete inheritor of such harsh economic policies, but it has the added disadvantage of being culturally suffocating. Attacks on freedom of expression and speech as well as a spectrum of threats against cultural and religious difference have begun to mark the social landscape. No political force apart from the Left has an alternative to this policy direction. However, despite its severe critique and its beneficial policy ideas, it does not have the power to implement these policies. It will require the growth of the Left across the country to be able to put neo-liberalism in its place and inaugurate an alternative policy trajectory for India. It will require the Left to lead mass struggles against the disorientations of the

current regime. What evidence exists for the possibility of a Left resurgence? After all, over the course of the past few election cycles, the Left’s bloc in parliament has dwindled. An underlying theme in the mainstream consideration of the Left’s electoral slide is that this defeat in the elections is a repudiation of the Left’s ideology. Would this mean that when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the spear of the Hindu Right, won only two seats in 1984, the electorate renounced its entire ideology? Far from it, because we know that the BJP’s allied organisations (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra) had dug deep holes into the social fabric. It is wishful thinking to have believed in 1984 that Hindutva had been cast aside; it is wishful thinking now to assume that Marxism has been swept into the dustbin of history. Indeed, the positions taken by the Marxist parties on several issues – social justice, death penalty – are close to the worldview of the Indian people.[4] The obituary of Marxism and communism is written frequently – and has been written acidly since the 19th century – but its resilience rescinds the eulogies. The Left, with its several million members, will not dissolve into the cracks of Indian capitalism as long as capitalism’s contradictions remain.

RESOURCES

How should the Left build its bases across the country? Important institutions of working-class power, such as trade unions, have been on the back-foot through these past thirty years. Harsh anti-labour judgments from the courts and anti-labour laws from the government came alongside a new landscape for production – now increasingly in fragmented factories with sub-contracted migrant workers. Trade union organizing is not easy in this environment.

What are the areas of potential in the present for the revitalization of working-class power? This question is at the center of discussions within the Left. No inherited strategy is sufficient. New ideas are needed; new energy is required. There are three axes along the grain of which the discussion has developed. Culture.  Neo-liberalism seeks to win the argument about its efficacy through culture – pointing to its shopping malls and its entertainment centers, its modern hospitals and its airports, even though more and more

people are disenfranchised from them. The Left’s strength is that it battles the neo-liberal policies that harm the vast mass of workers and peasants. But the Left is not opposed to “speedy trains” or modern hospitals or healthcare centres – in fact these are part of the future that the Left envisions. The problem has been to distinguish the critique of neoliberalism with some of the developments that have taken place over these two decades. That the Internet, for example, was built by the public sector is of no consequence to a public that sees it as a fruit of the free market. That young people feel like they want control over public space and their own destinies is interpreted as a consequence of corporate enterprise, and not of a secular dynamic of freedom that comes out of the social movements. This new confidence of young people and the new technologies that enhance people’s lives need to be taken in hand as part of the culture of our world, and so part of the Left’s own contribution, and not as the advantage of corporate enterprise. The complexity of these cultural advantages has the Left on the back foot. It should not. Rural.  In India, the rural is a central place of economic and social existence, as well as politics. The immense power of the new landlords and their alliance with multinational farm companies, as well as the power of mechanization to displace labour power, has put rural movements of farm workers on the back foot. But rural areas are not quiet. One of the most interesting features of the way in which rural politics works in India is that it does not run in a straight line with cultivators and landless labourers on one side and landowners and the state on the other. Fractures of caste and gender run deep, and are deepened in the agricultural crisis. Caste assertions emerge as one way that some landless labourers and cultivators have moved their agenda for dignity. This is the reason why the CPI-M has been an active participant in the temple entry movement in southern Tamil Nadu.[5] Gender questions have come to the fore in Haryana, where the khap panchayat has re-emerged as a central locus to fight a restive population made so by the agricultural crisis and the new cultural identities unleashed over the past few decades. It is here too that the Left, mainly the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has led from the front, drawing in women to fight for their dignity alongside their livelihoods.[6] The Left has to deepen its role in these sorts of “social” fights, because it is in these arenas that broad questions of rural power are being contested. These struggles against caste and gender hierarchies are the most important

social struggles of our day, which are not merely about identity but always about dignity and survival, as well as the expansion of the imagination – the elements of socialism.

Slums.  One of the most familiar effects of neo-liberal policy is the evisceration of trade unions – often through the reorganisation of industries around Free Trade Zones and around sub-contracted small manufacturing. A weakened trade union movement meant of course a weakened Left. It has been a challenge on the global stage to find ways to organise workers in the new kinds of industry, which have been designed to prevent trade union organisation. The nature of the global commodity chain, which disarticulates production across several countries, invalidates the one major political support that the workers and the Left could rely upon – the role of the State, whether to insist upon regulations that benefit workers or to utilise the policy of nationalisation to build power for their own citizenry. The new regime of the global commodity chain has made the state prone to global capital, eager to please firms that are otherwise footloose, and eager as well to attract foreign direct investment that relies upon a state’s commitment to Money over its population. Having lost one of its potential pillars of support, the workers and the Left are now thrown to the wolves. Absent a robust politics at the point of production, working class communities have thrown their rebellious energy into fights at the point of consumption. No more workers housing has meant the growth of slums, where facilities for adequate survival are simply not available. This is the reason why the fights over water and power, sanitation and safety take up the leisure time of India’s workers. A politics of the slum lands is essential for the Left to develop. As of now, the Left operates in these domains alongside their cadre and mass organisations, participating only because these are struggles that have broken out at the level of frustration of the people. It is necessary to develop an organisational theory of the slum lands and to move a precise agenda for slum politics. Workers’ movements and power might no longer grow from the factory to the community; it might work the other way round. It is essential to see these areas of struggle as vital points of reunification of the working class, fragmented by neo-liberal policy. Marxism throws itself into all struggles attempting to find breakthroughs of the working class toward greater and greater unity. Fights for the rights of women are as important as fights for a higher minimum wage, as are fights

for national self-determination and for the rights of refugees to dignity. These are equivalent fights of members of the working class toward the reinvigoration and consolidation of social movements.

One of the great resources of the Left has been its time in government in the three states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal. In the latter, West Bengal, the Left Front remained in power for thirty-four years, winning seven consecutive elections to the State Assembly (1977-2011). It is remarkable that any one formation could have been re-elected for such a long period. In each of these states, the Left produced important alternative policies that addressed land reform, tenancy rights, devolution of power, defense of secularism and minority rights. The rural agenda favoured dalits and adivasis, whose historical landlessness became the focus of land redistribution and tenancy registration. After three decades of rule in West Bengal, eighty-four per cent of its land is owned by small and marginal farmers (the national average is forty-three per cent). More than half the beneficiaries came from dalit and adivasi communities. The record is as rich in Kerala and Tripura.

REALITIES

If the record of land distribution and the curtailment of landlord power are so strong, why did the Left lose the elections in 2011 and why did Left power in West Bengal dwindle thereafter? The pressures of incumbency are not easy to dismiss. But other reasons are essential to consider:   1. The very rural achievement of the Left Front – radical land reforms – produced new rural propertied classes whose own instincts have over time moved away from the Left. In 1995, CPI-M leader Anil Biswas told me that the Left had to be cautious about the emergence of these new class realities in the countryside. It was hoped that the panchayat (local selfgovernment) devolution would help maintain the politics of the rural areas, but the result here have been mixed.

2. Perhaps the most fatal error of the Left in West Bengal has been its land acquisition policy toward industrialization. The key words here are “Nandigram” and “Singur.” Singur is the name of the town where the Left Front government tried to set up an automobile factory, but faced protest against land acquisition. Much the same in Nandigram, where there was a dispute once more on land. Few in the Communist Left have failed to recognize the perils of the industrialization policy – some will argue that the policy itself is bad, since it charts a path

toward inequality, while others will argue that the implementation of the policy was undemocratic. Either way, the implications of Nandigram have been digested. It is a penalty that the Left shall have to pay for some time to come yet.

3. The

Left also failed to chart a new, dramatic agenda for education and health – a major

political process that would deliver social goods with the same kind of panache as the Left Front conducted its land reforms. The government had modest reforms for health and education, but these polices had not become part of a major campaign. The stamp of the Left was not placed indelibly on the agenda of universal education and health care.

4. In

addition, the Left Front’s debacle in West Bengal in 2011 began to frame the problems

faced by the Left. It overshadowed the creative people’s planning exercise conducted by the Left Democratic Front in Kerala, and the successful governance of the Left Front in Tripura. The trials in West Bengal seemed to define the Left, obscuring the work of Left activists from Andhra Pradesh to Punjab, and of Left governments in Kerala and Tripura. The mainstream media has been utterly hostile to the Left, and has exaggerated each failure and concealed each success. One of the great challenges for the Left will be to make its own case to the people – unfiltered by the enmity of the media.

 

These four are important lessons. They are compounded by the violence against the Left that has been routine in West Bengal and in Kerala. The Left’s diminution in West Bengal continues largely because of the violent attacks on the Left cadre that began a decade ago and continue now with ferocity. Hundreds of cadres of the Left parties have been butchered in the byways of rural West Bengal and Kerala and thousands of supporters of the Left have been ejected from their homes and livelihood. The Left will need to find a way to rebuild its presence in an environment of extreme state hostility. Building a Left is not the same as conducting a seminar. It requires a great deal of courage to confront the congealed institutions of Power, Property and Privilege. Errors shall be natural, as will a loss of hope.

PIVOT

In 1969, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm suggested, “Each Communist Party was the child of the marriage of two ill-assorted partners, a national left and the October Revolution.”[7] Twenty years later, in 1991, these two partners died off. Left nationalism collapsed under the weight of neo-liberal pressures, which in India went by the name of liberalisation as the

institutions of the October Revolution disbanded. Into this breach, the United States exercised unipolar power over international institutions, pushing for free trade agreements that benefit the North and for security pacts that maintained Northern power for the long run.[8] Older “socialist” parties (from the UK’s Labour Party to Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi) buried their socialism and celebrated the aggressive language of free enterprise and free markets, sold to the world under the name of “globalisation.” Alternatives to these policies seemed impossible to imagine, just as the bulwarks against the power of capital broke down. Many communist parties unraveled, finding it impossible to hold fast against the pressures of the new era.[9] Others floundered, seeking adjustments in the new times. These departures often led inexorably to annihilation.

The Indian Communist movement began a long process to digest the changes and to come to terms with the new epoch.[10] In 1992, the CPI-M began a process to update its 1964 programme – to address the changed international situation and the deepening of capitalist relations in India. The new programme, adopted in 2000, directly acknowledged the failures of the Soviet experiment (“in the course of the uncharted part of building socialism,” the Soviet bloc, “committed serious mistakes”). A consequence of the collapse of the USSR and its “serious mistakes” has been the emergence of US unipolarity, with the United States “using its economic, political and military power aggressively.” This political environment drives the rise of speculative finance capital, which “spells a vicious cycle of intensified exploitation and growing debt.”

In May 1993, the CPI-M held a seminar in Kolkata to mark the 175th birth anniversary of Karl Marx. Participants came from nineteen countries, including Cuba, South Africa and Vietnam. The emotions oscillated from defiance and gloom, from bewilderment at the new order and sober sense of the need to carry forward the promise of socialism. In his opening address, CPI-M General Secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet pointed out that the Left had underestimated the resilience of capitalism and imperialism. The transition to socialism is “likely to be a far more protracted process with setbacks upon the way.” One should not flinch before the difficulties of objective reality, Surjeet noted, “falling prey neither to false euphoria nor to petty-bourgeois despair.”[11]

How should the Left struggle against the new international and national situation? The main emphasis is to build mass struggles and not to merely declaim the importance of socialism. At the Kolkata seminar, Albano Nunes, from the Portuguese Communist Party, pointed out that the new society “can only be built by the revolutionary action and engagement of the workers and popular masses, never without their engagement and much less against their will.”[12] Prakash Karat channeled this view seven years later in his explanation of the new programme of the CPI-M, “The consciousness will come from the actual experience of the movement and the struggles conducted and not by the abstract slogan of socialism.”[13] These struggles had to be along the axis of working-class grievances but also for the rights and dignity of women, minorities and oppressed castes (“The fight against caste oppression is inter-linked with the struggle against class exploitation”). The CPI-M’s reviews of its work over the next few years (studied in closer detail below) pushed the party toward more direct intervention into the fights for dignity and rights of the dispossessed. It was this slow consideration of the shifts in the world and national situation that drew out a new energy for the Indian Left. The electoral defeats are indeed a worrying phenomenon for the Left. But an important resource has been its ability to pivot away from the disabilities of 1991 and create the basis for a much more significant revival in the years to come. One piece of this revival is to lead mass struggles and build the hegemony of the Left; another is Left Unity to draw the various fragments of the political Left into alliance with each other. “The tomorrow in today is alive,” wrote Ernst Bloch.[14] But it has to be excavated. That is the work of Communism. Neither despair nor jubilation is proper. The way forward, out of necessity, must take hold of the cold steel of acknowledgment. This is what is. This is not what we want. But this is what is. What we want has to be built. It requires hard work and patience – guided by a theory.       [1]

    Why I have left the Maoists out of consideration here will become clear in “The Left.”

[2]

    Harkishan Singh Surjeet, “On the Question of Communist Unity,” The Marxist, vol. XII, no. 1, January-March 1995.

[3]

    Vinod Mishra, “Left Unity: Some Unanswered Questions,” Liberation, January 1996 and Prakash Karat, “The CPI-ML/IPF: Quest for a Left Role,” The Marxist, vol. VIII, OctoberDecember 1990.

[4]

    Forty per cent of the Indian public favours an end to the death penalty, a position taken only by the Left. Prakash Jha, “Many against death penalty,” The Hindu, July 24, 2013.

[5]

    P. Sampath, “Experiences of Struggles Against Untouchability in Tamil Nadu,” The Marxist, vol. XXVI, no. 1, January-March 2010 and S. Vishwanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on Anti-Dalit Violence in Tamil Nadu, 1995-2004, Chennai: Navayana, 2005.

[6]

    The clearest articulation of the role of AIDWA in these struggles is Elisabeth Armstrong, Gender & Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalisation Politics, New Delhi: Tulika, 2013.

[7]

    Eric Hobsbawm, “Problems of Communist History,” New Left Review, I/54, March-April 1969, p. 85.

[8]

    Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2013.

[9]

    One example was the Italian Communist Party, whose travails have been recorded by Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm. Communism in the Twentieth Century, London: Verso, 2011. Another parallel example, of Spain, has a history of collapse that predates 1991. Juan Antonio Andrade Blanco, El PCE y el PSOE en la Transición, Madrid, Siglio XXI de España Editores, 2012.

[10]

    Evidence of the debate around the USSR’s collapse can be found in The Marxist, vol. 9, nos. 34, July-December 1991, which carried forthright essays by CPI-M leaders Sunil Maitra (“Some Aspects of the Historical Experience of Socialism in the Soviet Union”), P. Ramachandran (“Ideology: How the CPSU Leadership Abandoned Marxism”), Sitaram Yechury (“Economy: Reforms for Restoration of Capitalism”) and Prakash Karat (“The Gorbachevian Reforms: Dismantling the Communist Party”).

[11] 

  Contemporary World Situation and Validity of Marxism. Proceedings of International Seminar of Communist Parties Marking the 175th Birth Anniversary of Karl Marx, Delhi: CPI-M, 1993, p. 31.

[12]

    Contemporary World Situation, p. 249.

[13]

    Prakash Karat, “CPI-M Programme: Basic Strategy Reiterated,” The Marxist, vol. 16, no. 3, July-December 2000.

[14]

    Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Cambridge, MA., 1986, p. 1374.

 

2.  The Great Moving Right Show

“I do not minimise the difficulties that lie ahead on the long and arduous journey on which we have embarked. But as Victor Hugo once said, ‘No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide-awake.

We shall prevail. We shall overcome.” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, July 24, 1991

  Old India, like old anti-colonialism elsewhere, has vanished. Vestiges of Gandhianism remain in the margins of the cultural world, but they are nowhere near the center. The Congress Party’s turn to liberalization in 1991 culminated a long process led by Rajiv Gandhi and his coterie of neo-liberal thinkers – Sam Pitroda, the telecommunications engineer from Chicago, who, in 1984, dazzled Mrs. Indira Gandhi and then her son, Rajiv, with his impatience to modernize India’s telecommunication industry; P. Chidambaram, a lawyer and politician who became close to Rajiv Gandhi over their commitment to liberalization. Rajiv Gandhi famously liked to travel with his personal computer (a Toshiba T5200), which was to the liberalisation period what Mahatma Gandhi’s spinning wheel was to the freedom movement. In a glass case at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum in New Delhi sits this laptop – large, clunky, a reminder of Rajiv Gandhi’s ambitions.

The key figure in Rajiv Gandhi’s circle was Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who returned to India in the 1980s from his post in the World Bank. Ahluwalia, who would play a central role in Indian economic policy making for the next two decades, went head to head with Gopi Arora, a leftleaning mandarin in the Prime Minister’s Office. Rajiv Gandhi agreed with Ahluwalia, but he recognized from Arora that the time to push full-throttle for liberalization had not come. Nevertheless, the party of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had long since disavowed the temperament of those leaders, let alone their views.[1]

Early into his tenure as PM, Rajiv Gandhi went to a Planning Commission meeting and excoriated his advisors as a “bunch of jokers” (Dr. Manmohan Singh was in the pack as the Deputy Chair, the head of the commission). Rajiv Gandhi was not driven by rural development or the problems of black money – concerns of the Planning Commission in those days (these residual problems would resurface during the tenure of such old-style socialists as Madhu Dandavate and Mohan Dharia, deputy chairpersons into the 1990s). Under the advice of his neo-liberal advisors, Rajiv Gandhi wanted to turn India into an American suburb with the “construction of autobahns, airfields, speedy trains, shopping malls, and entertainment centres of excellence, big housing complexes, modern hospitals and healthcare centres.”[2] Rajiv Gandhi could not fully move the agenda; the as yet strong agricultural and public sector blocs blocked him in his party and in parliament that remained alive to the complexity of India’s social development. On August 12, 1989, Rajiv Gandhi addressed an international seminar at Vigyan Bhavan on public service education. “When I tried to change the system to push it to deliver,” he said plaintively, “I came up against vested interests which just wouldn’t let go. Every time I thought I had identified a solution, I couldn’t convince those at the highest levels, whether in politics or in the administration.”[3] Later, Manmohan Singh would say, “In many ways, the seeds of reform were sown by Shri Rajiv Gandhi during whose Prime Ministership fresh thoughts and ideas seeped into our thinking in government.”[4]

By the late 1980s, a social basis for Rajiv Gandhi’s views emerged out of the advantages given to the newly moneyed middle class, although not more than six per cent of the population.[5] The advantages of the “green revolution” put money into the hands of rich farmers, the 1973 Pay Commission increased the salaries of the government servants, and remittance workers sent the fruit of their earnings to their families across India: this influx of money created a constituency for Rajiv Gandhi’s view. They were not, for demographic reasons, to be the standard bearers of this new culture. That was to come from two related sources: Capital and its Media. CAPITAL

The Indian capitalist class had since the 1930s accepted the shackles of the license-permit Raj and of import-substitution. The National Planning Commission (set up by the Indian National Congress in 1938) entertained a variety of proposals for Indian development policy. The one that was hastened to the margins was the Gandhian plan developed by Sriram Narayan (later to be one of the key figures in the 1954 Committee on Panchayati Raj). Its ideas seemed quixotic to a leadership that was committed to the development of an agrarian bourgeoisie and an industrial bourgeoisie – to capitalism, in other words. The other plan that was quickly dismissed was proposed by the mercurial communist M. N. Roy. Roy’s People’s Plan sought to move an agenda for the reconstruction of rural India prior to a full-scale industrial policy. Roy worried that if industry was favoured over agriculture; it might prove “considerably harmful to start with half-filled bellies and half-clad bodies thinking in terms of automobiles and aeroplanes.”[6] None of these plans made an impact. The one that settled matters for Indian state policy in its early decades was the 1944 Bombay Plan, formulated under the eagle eyes of the big bourgeoisie – G. D. Birla, J. R. D. Tata, Dr. John Matthai, Shri Ram, Thakurdas and Kasturbhai Lalbhai.

The Bombay Plan had a simple objective – to ensure that the new Indian state would protect the interests of the big bourgeoisie. It enjoined the state to provide a suitable atmosphere for industrial development. Unwilling to pay for infrastructural developments, the authors of the Bombay Plan wanted the state to use its limited resources to fund the groundwork for largely private industrial expansion. The Bombay Plan also wanted the full legal apparatus of the state to protect Indian commerce and industry from the stronger industrial houses of the West.[7] Close ties with the State allowed these private firms to ensure monopoly control of contracts. The tentacles of modern development would enter rural India, but only tentatively. Land reform had to be conducted without a challenge to an idea sacrosanct to the big bourgeoisie – namely private property. That is the reason why the land reforms shrank under the power of Article 31 of the Indian Constitution, with its generous defence of private property rights; Article 31A and 31B were the shields against any radical move for redistribution of agricultural land.[8] The great defender of private property in the parliament was the BJP’s ancestral party, the Jana Sangh (and its

leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee who warned that the government could not treat the private property defending Constitution as a “scrap of paper”).[9] Rather than increase the production of food-grains by the transformation of rural relations, the state adopted the Green Revolution – under the expert management of Western agronomists and the IMF, technological inputs (irrigation, fertilizers, and high-yield seeds) rushed into Indian agriculture, increasing production but at the same time further polarizing rural classes. State resources went toward the industrial sector (including agro-industry), allowing imports of food grains through the US PL-480 scheme to cover the shortfall.[10] By 1961, Prime Minister Nehru recognized the failure of the development strategy,   Large numbers of people have not shared in [in the increase in the nation’s wealth] and [they] live without the primary necessities of life. On the other side you see a smaller group of really affluent people. They have established an affluent society for themselves, anyhow, although India as a whole may be far from it. I think the new wealth is flowing in a particular direction and not spreading out properly.[11]



Nehru’s “anyhow” is disingenuous. It was already clear to his own government that the policy framework developed for economic growth favoured the big bourgeoisie. Five years before he made these comments, his own government noted that this big bourgeoisie had made disproportionate gains despite the fact that it did not dominate vast areas of the very large Indian economy,   The main points to be noticed about this field of economic activity [private firms] is that though in relation to total occupied numbers and total numbers of economic units and establishments the constituents of this field are small, they are by far the most dominant in political, economic and social terms in the country today.[12]



That was in 1956. The Monopolies Commission of 1965 revealed some stark data: seventy-five business groups owned 47 per cent of the assets of all non-public companies.[13] The tendency was toward concentration despite the socialistic policies of the Nehru government – in 1951, twenty family houses controlled 29 per cent of total private capital, by the end of the decade their share rose to 33 per cent.[14] Subimal Dutt’s Industrial Licensing Policy Inquiry Committee (1969) revealed an

extraordinary fact – that the License Raj set up to plan the economy had resulted in full-scale concentration of wealth for a small percent of the population. The twenty large industrial houses obtained licenses at a rate only “slightly higher” than others, but the disproportion “is observed only in the case of a few, the most prominent among them being Birla.” Why was this favouritism the case? The Birlas, and others like them, had “understood the mechanics and the weaknesses of the licensing system,” namely they could see how to use political influence to their advantage. As the Report noted, these houses “organized themselves effectively for that purpose.”[15] The Report led to the enactment of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (MRTP), a bill that the business houses sought to repeal almost immediately. Rather than face the chopping block right after 1991, the Act was whittled away through the 2002 Competition Act and the 2007 Competition (Amendment) Act. In 1969, the communists and the Congress’s left flank saw the MRTP as a compromise. They wanted Indira Gandhi to push her nationalization of banks further, and nationalize the big industrial houses. This was never on her agenda. Nevertheless, bank nationalization did prevent the Indian economy from being drawn into the vortex of the worldwide financial crisis in 2008. The policy set by the Indian government after 1947 incubated the power of the big bourgeoisie, which would by the 1960s be able to throttle any attempt to shift course. This was clear in 1966, when in reaction to a catastrophic drought, the Minister of Planning (and former Congress Socialist Party leader) Ashok Mehta tried to move an agenda for taxation of the rural bourgeoisie, and the use of those funds to provide rural credit to those who work the land. Indira Gandhi’s cabinet knocked down this proposal and adopted instead that of Agricultural and Food Minister C. Subramaniam on February 12, 1966. Subramaniam wanted to introduce modern scientific methods of cultivation (namely high technological imports) to break agrarian stagnation. He was not keen on land reform as the lever for increased productivity on the land. What this meant was that the cabinet allowed precious foreign exchange to be used for import of expensive fertilizers and high-yield seeds. This strategy – the classic Green Revolution model – neither created employment nor did it encourage agroindustry. It drained the foreign currency exchequer and dampened demand in the domestic market. This was a strategy that was good for the agricultural bourgeoisie but not for those who worked on the land.

Not long after the Green Revolution began, the Indian Home Ministry quite rightly worried about the social and political consequences of deepening rural inequality. They worried, as Home Minister Y. B. Chavan put it, that the Green Revolution would likely morph into a Red Revolution. The report that his ministry produced had a lucid assessment of the problem from a bourgeois point of view,   Firstly, [the new strategies of the Green Revolution] have rested by and large on an outmoded agrarian social structure. The interests of what might be called the agricultural classes have not converged on a commonly accepted set of social and economic objectives. Secondly, the new technology and strategy, having been geared to goals of production, with secondary regard to social imperatives, have brought about a situation in which elements of disparity, instability and unrest are becoming conspicuous with the possibility of an increase in tension.[16]

Indira Gandhi’s “socialism” was not that of Mehta’s “new socialism” for the countryside, but the “socialism” of big business and agro-business. It is precisely the kind of policy that intensified rural class divisions and created the kind of work that the Home Ministry preferred to avoid, namely to tackle rural insurgencies (the “complex molecule” of the Indian village, wrote the lyrical authors of the 1969 Home Ministry report, may find itself with an organized peasantry and “may end in an explosion”).

If state policy – in the name of socialism – was geared toward the protection and enhancement of the interests of industry and agro-industry, state force was used toward those ends. In the Bombay Plan, the industrialists suggested that for their vision of the future “some measure of compulsion appears desirable.”[17] It is to be expected that the big bourgeoisie would have no compunction about the use of force to protect its interests, for it is through force that capital is able to maintain its authority over the production process.[18] Nehru was not far from this sentiment, writing in 1936, “everything that comes in the way [of progress] will have to be removed, gently, if possible, forcibly if necessary. And there seems to be little doubt that coercion will often be necessary.” This force, often necessary, must not be used “in a spirit of hatred or cruelty, but with the dispassionate desire to remove an obstruction.”[19] The consensus on violence between the liberal leadership (Nehru) and the big bourgeoisie has held right through all the changes in development policy. Rural power remained with the old social classes, Charan Singh’s people, who drew on

their own forms of social power (via the vectors of caste and gender). The stick remained in the air, wielded in turn by the rich peasant’s lathiar and the policeman, hanging over the agricultural workers as both threat and incentive. The atmosphere of imminent violence in the Gangetic plain is captured brilliantly in the IAS official and novelist Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (1968). Bad crop years of 1965-66 and 1966-67 damaged the confidence of the managers of the economy. In the aftermath of these two difficult years industrial growth dropped significantly. Fixed capital formation in the public sector, for example, grew at an annual rate of 11.3 per cent between 1950-51 to 1965-66, but dropped to 5.5 per cent between 1966-67 (at 197071 prices).[20] Joined by the oil crisis of the 1970s and unreconstructed rural production relations, the food-shortages and inflation tore at the heart of the state’s fragile liberalism. Growth rates in India would settle around 3.5 per cent, the “Hindu Rate of Growth,” joked Raj Krishna in 1978 from his perch on the Planning Commission. Signs of Congress impatience with political protest came in its dismissal of the Communist government in Kerala (1959), the crackdown at the Communist-led food movement (1965) and the immense violence to be visited on the railways workers (1974). These are the dramatic instances. Less spectacular, but no less important was the use of state power to shut down worker unrest and peasant insurgency – signs that the Congress regime had drained the goodwill it earned from the freedom movement. The Emergency (1975-77), during which Indira Gandhi’s government suspended the Constitution, marked the moment of frayed Congress hegemony. The serious consequences of the inflationary years (1965-74) produced many anti-Congress political projects, including the Communistled food movement, the Maoist Naxalite movement, the Bihar student-led agitations, the United Women’s Anti-Price Rise Front and the Nav Nirman movement, as well as the Railway Strike of 1974. These radical challenges oscillated between antipathy to the Congress and to the Indian state. Strike action had also begun to pick up, with 43 million workers on strike in 1972 as a bellwether of strikes to come. The government’s reaction to the 1.8 million rail workers strike in 1974 revealed something of its class bias, despite its language of “socialism.” On May 1, 1974, the government arrested twenty thousand workers and raided the homes of twenty-five thousand others. Among those arrested was the Socialist leader George

Fernandes, who said, “when the government has come to a point where it felt that if the railwaymen could become the vanguard of a powerful movement of the left in the country, and their emergence into the vanguard was a distinct possibility, then it was necessary to see that this movement did not emerge, that it was suppressed.”[21] The Emergency that was declared a year later had already been in full force for Indian workers. The yoke of the Essential Services Maintenance Order lay fully on their necks.[22]

The Emergency came with the bells and whistles of “socialism,” but its actual policies hastened the transition of Indian capital from the Bombay Plan to the era of liberalisation. On July 1, 1975, Indira Gandhi announced the 20-point programme of the Emergency. It was to direct the animus of the state against two enemies: petty smugglers and hoarders of money and goods. The bulk of the programme was designed to draw in the industrialists, the poor and landless peasants, the urban middle-class and the students into the arc of the Congress. For the students, the régime promised essential commodities and books at controlled prices as well as apprenticeship schemes. The urban middle-class was offered income-tax relief and an extension of state housing. The poor and landless peasants received the most attention: the régime promised to tear them away from feudal forms of exploitation (bonded labour, ancestral indebtedness), to introduce them to an agricultural minimum wage, to allow them to work on smaller plots of land which were not to be owned by them (the land ceilings provision did not specify who was to get the land) and to offer them a farm full of sophisticated technological inputs (notably irrigation on an industrial scale). These were the grand gestures of state charity. Few of these would be enacted. They were a way to draw in classes that had grievances and had previously lost their faith in the Congress. The real beneficiaries of the Emergency were the class of industrial capitalists. The state now renewed its commitment to infrastructural development (including an increase of power capacity) and toward a “liberalisation of investment procedures” (14th Point). On the last point, I. K. Gujral (Minister of State in the Ministry of Planning) offered this statement to the Lok Sabha on January 7, 1976:   1. Investment by small and medium entrepreneurs in 21 major industries has been totally exempted from licensing procedures.

2. Undertakings

in 29 selected industries have been allowed to fully utilise their installed

capacity even if it is in excess of their licensed capacity.

3. Diversification

of production has been permitted in certain industries within the overall

licensing capacity.

4. Procedures

for regularisation of additional capacity arising from replacement and

modernisation of equipment have been simplified. Similar action has been taken in regard to grant of licences to small and medium entrepreneurs based on the results obtained by their own R & D efforts.

5. In order to boost exports units in the engineering industry have been allowed to automatically increase their capacity by 25% during a 5-year period.

 

The Emergency driven industrial policy had increasing exports as its main goal. This was a departure from the Nehruvian policy to produce an economy sustained by its own requirements rather than by the whims of foreign trade. The Minister also pointed out, “Further steps to encourage investment by non-resident Indians have also been announced.”[23] Industrial and financial capital benefited handsomely from the Emergency. During the first year of the Emergency industrial production increased, for reasons that exceeded the newly laid out opportunities to capital; but nonetheless, the trend line allowed the bourgeoisie a new confidence:  

  

 

 

1974-75 (million tonnes)  1975-76 (million tonnes) 

 

 

 

Coal 

 

   88.0

 

 

Steel 

 

   5.5

     14.5

 

   17.0

 

Fertilizers 

 

   6.0

 

Cement 

 

   98.0

   1.5

   1.8

 

Industrial and finance capital were not averse to allowing the new, undemocratic ruling clique to fashion a new social peace. This “peace”

would be founded on an economy reliant upon exports and not importsubstitution as well as on a weakened workers’ movement. Between the Emergency regime (1975-77), the Janata government (1977-80), and then the return of Indira Gandhi in 1980, the one constant feature was the orientation of the liberalisation policy, whose consequence was a crackdown on the workers and their unions. In July 1981, when the dust of the Emergency had vanished from the scales of Indian liberalism, Indira Gandhi’s government passed an act which made it illegal to strike in “essential services,” namely railways, electrical services, the telephone system, the post office, ports, airlines, banking, petroleum production and refining, hospitals and defence. As the CPI-M leader B. T. Ranadive, head of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions put it at that time, “This is nothing but the resurrection of the provisions of the Emergency period.”[24] It was worse. It was that and it was a harbinger of what was to come. At no point in India’s independent history has the big bourgeoisie not been able to drive its stake into the heart of Indian policy making. Early in its career, the big bourgeoisie sought training wheels in the importsubstitution and license raj policy. When it had made the most of these supports, it turned against them – turned against them with vehemence, making the case that they had always been against these policies. This is of course untrue. The advantages gleaned from those earlier policies had run their course. By the 1980s, the rate of profit – even on monopoly prices – had declined; anachronistic factories and strong unions had put pressure on capital to increase investments, which they were not willing to do. J. R. D. Tata, head of the Tata Group of Companies, admitted in 1981 that the “performance of the Indian economy from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties reflected the soundness of the mixed economy as originally conceived.” But the slowdown from the 1960s led to a wave of nationalization that had, to his mind, deleterious effects. Instead, Tata urged the government to “free the economy and see the difference.” He wanted to see India go the way of the East Asian Tigers, since these “newly industrializing countries rely mainly on private enterprise [which] their government’s economic policies are geared to encouraging and supporting.”[25] It is what had already begun to happen. The capitalist class’ political commitment to the Congress-run consensus withered as the party’s monopoly on power frayed. An earlier capitalist party – Swatantra – had failed to make a breakthrough between

1959 and 1974 because of Congress hegemony.[26] By the 1980s, the BJP had absorbed sections of the Swatantra ethos, and the Congress itself had incubated elements eager to break with the national development path. The Emergency gave the Indian capitalist class its first taste of liberalization. Industrial production increased rapidly during the Emergency years, partly as a result of the policy advantages given the Indian capitalist class. When the Janata government came to power in 1977, railway leader George Fernandes took the Industry Ministry and began a high-profile fight with Coca Cola and other multi-nationals over their violations of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which led to the spectacular departure of Coke from India. But behind the scenes, and more importantly, Finance Minister Haribhai Patel cut tariffs on imports, sliced subsidies to Indian production and liberalized the entry of foreign investment. His silent mode of operation can be measured by the fact that of all India’s annual budget speeches, his in 1977 was the shortest. Out of his words stepped the future of the Indian poor: deprivation and violence. Most of the work of the Indian capitalist class was done behind the scenes. The agrarian bourgeoisie would also get its just desserts. Raj Krishna, a member of the Planning Commission during the Emergency, bemoaned the attitude toward land and agricultural work. “The central cabinet is not keen on land reforms and redistribution,” he told political scientist Atul Kohli. “Neither Morarji [Desai] nor Charan Singh are interested.” It was not that the mechanisms or resources were not at hand. “Poverty can be removed in ten years,” he said. “This is technically possible. Less than one-fourth of the total public outlay can remove poverty. Policy packages, including some land redistribution exist, but they will not be delivered.”[27]

By 1991, the bourgeoisie was much more confident and impatient. It walked with deliberate steps on the grave of the Bombay Plan. It is perhaps appropriate that Montek Singh Ahluwalia would be invited to deliver the First Raj Krishna Memorial Lecture in 1995 on the topic “Economic Reform for the Nineties.” No land redistribution (or even land) in Ahluwalia’s lecture, but of course lots of talk of high growth rates – the mood of reform for the Nineties. MEDIA

Business elders of the old major houses (Tata, Birla) had a cult-like status in the Indian media since the 1940s. They were treated almost like freedom fighters, with J. R. D. Tata and G. D. Birla portrayed in such a light that it appeared as if they themselves had built Indian industry. It helped that they owned several major outlets – the Tatas owned the Statesman, the Birlas owned the Hindustan Times, the Camas owned the Bombay Chronicle, while the Sahu Jain group owned the Times of India. These papers set the agenda of the day, mirrored in the presses of other Indian languages. During the colonial era, the main Indian nationalist news service – the Free Press of India – was “run by a coalition of Bombay industrialists and journalists,” with the former pulling the strings.[28] The Currency League, the Millowners Association of Bombay and individual capitalists subscribed to the Free Press of India, to create “a first-class businessman board.”[29] Capital had a firm grip of the Indian press – first British money, and then, by the 1920s, Indian money. This money purchased favourable coverage for the “captains of industry.”

Along the grain of capitalist policy, the “captains of industry” supported the Congress and championed the Bombay Plan consensus from the 1920s to the 1970s. Tata flying an aircraft, Birla conferring with Gandhi – this was the image of the big bourgeoisie. Not as strike breakers, or indeed as cynical users of social difference for monetary ends. The example here is G. D. Birla, close ally of Gandhi and a titan of modern India. The year after the 1928 mill workers’ strike, a riot broke out in Bombay – it resulted largely from deliberate use of Muslim casual workers against a workforce that was largely Hindu. “One likes to see the strike ended,” wrote G. D. Birla to Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas (both later authors of the Bombay Plan), “but I am a bit upset by the way in which the communal tension has been utilized by the Millowners for ending the strike.” But how did Birla see the problem? He bemoaned the “excesses committed by the Mohammedan mobs on the innocent Hindus in the last riots in Bombay,” and warned, “And God help the Hindus if the peaceful Hindu labour were kicked out of Bombay and replaced by Mohammedan hooligans.”[30] That Birlas’ confederates had engineered these divides was of no consequence to him. It is what led Birla, in 1942, to suggest to Gandhi’s secretary Mahadev Desai, “You know my views about Pakistan. I am in favour of separation, and I do not think it impracticable or against the interests of Hindus or of India.”[31] The press sought out Birla as the oracle of business – not as the

engineer of social difference for private gain. Even though these documents that are cited here are in the public domain they made no impact on Birla’s reputation for probity and sincerity. It is the great advantage of being in command of the written word. Capital’s tussle with the state over the freedom of the press is a stark reminder of the shallowness of its commitment to genuine press independence. With the Emergency in full throttle, the media barons largely conceded to the state and colluded in the creation of a façade of press freedom. Industrialist Ramnath Goenka, owner of the Indian Express, had clear sympathies with the Jana Sangh and the RSS. In the lead up to the Emergency, he had instructed his journalists to attack Indira Gandhi and support the movement against her. During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi seized control of his paper and handed it to her ally, industrialist K. K. Birla (close friend of Sanjay Gandhi and owner of the Hindustan Times). Goenka’s principles were nudged aside in what became a fight between two industrialists rather than a fight of high principles. Goenka even asked Khushwant Singh, a close supporter of the Emergency, to become editor of the paper as a compromise – but this did not work out.[32] Meanwhile, the Times of India, which had been taken into government control in 1964 when Shanti Prasad Jain was found guilty of selling newsprint on the black market, was handed back to his son Ashok in 1976 – during the Emergency. These media barons paid no political or business cost for their support of censorship. Indeed, the Emergency allowed two advantages for corporate control – it allowed the business houses to fully throttle independent editors, and it allowed business houses to push back against “government control” and for their freedoms. Press freedom, in time, came to be the freedom of the corporations to determine the compass of journalism. Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar’s grumpy verdict about Indian journalism of the 1970s is worthy of note,   My feeling is that virtually the entire tribe of journalists had been spoilt by the attention they received from the establishment and the corporate sector. It was well known that at selected press conferences they were doled out suit lengths and promoters’ shares. Any sense of independence had been corroded. Some of them in fact had no real commitment to the profession. The truth was that the press was already too nice, and too refined, and only too willing to “accommodate.” The ground was therefore fertile for the imposition of censorship.[33]



If things were bad then, they would get much worse by the 1990s. The old ethos of the newspaper as a serious media for debate over policy and performance of political leaders began to fall into the pig’s swill. Ashok Jain’s sons Samir and Vineet cavalierly scoffed at older ideas of media integrity, saying, as Vineet did in 2012, “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business.”[34] Veteran journalist Inder Malhotra recounted, “senior journalists were made by Samir [Jain] to sit on the floor in his room to write out the names of invitees on cards sent by the organization.” When this and other complaints went to Ashok Jain, he said that he could hire many editors, but he could not find another person like Samir.[35]

By the 2000s, paid news has become the order of the day. A 2009 report by the Press Council lays out the contours of endemic corruption in the media,   In recent years, corruption in the Indian media has gone way beyond the corruption of individual journalists and specific media organizations – from planting information and views in lieu of favours received in cash or kind, to more institutionalized and organized forms of corruption wherein newspapers and television channels receive funds for publishing or broadcasting information in favour of particular individuals, corporate entities, representatives of political parties and candidates contesting elections, that is sought to be disguised as news.[36]

 

Rhetoric of a “free press” abounds, but the evidence is sparse. The paralytic hand of money dips into the pockets of the media, inventing new words – advertorial – coined to justify the reduction of the newspaper (and television) to the promotion of this or that corporate agenda. Ideas of individualism and enterprise are the dogma – in Technicolor; the obligations of the national movement and the Nehruvian ethos are painted in sepia – colors of the past.[37]

The opening up of the Indian television system in the 1990s allowed corporate capital to rush in to promote the neo-liberal cultural ideas through its business channels (a new development for India), its frameworks for social and political policy on the news channels, and its slowly evolving paid-news culture.[38] This media would faithfully be the dummy to a confident Indian capital’s ventriloquism.

The Indian media, Prabhat Patnaik argued in 2002, was now more ubiquitous than ever and yet less able to produce a common narrative of events. The sheer quantity of news built on a “degree of confusion, uncertainty and fuzziness” in public understanding of events. Subservience of the media to international finance capital did not help. “Where the media are on the same side as international finance capital,” Patnaik argued, “they appear powerful; but in fields where they strike out on their own, upholding humane values and expressing concern for the poor and the suffering, they appear powerless.” This powerlessness comes from “the process of ascendency of international finance capital over the economy, which the media, paradoxically, with few honourable exceptions, have avidly supported.”[39]

KABHI KHUSHI

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991 prevented him from being able to pluck the fruit that he had grown. It was left to the man excoriated by Rajiv Gandhi in that Planning Commission meeting, Dr. Manmohan Singh, to lead the charge as Finance Minister.[40] Rajiv Gandhi’s old friend Montek Singh Ahluwalia formed part of Singh’s core team. In June 1990, Ahluwalia wrote a secret (but leaked) paper, “Towards Restructuring Industrial, Trade and Fiscal Policies,” which proposed wide-ranging “reform” – twenty per cent devaluation of the rupee, tariff reduction, freedom for foreign capital, closure of specific public sector units and freedom for Indian capital from the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices asset limit. Much of this agenda had been lifted wholesale from the IMF reports – the laundry list was a cliché of reforms that had already struck many of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.[41] Dr. Singh’s IMF-induced shock therapy of 1991 opened the floodgates to a new cultural dispensation, which broke the back of the old socialist consensus, allowing the Indian elite to represent their desires through their own media as the desires of the Indian public.

The corporate houses – the largest beneficiaries of LPG policies – and their media houses aided and cheered on the great moving Right show. The language of inevitable growth and ineluctable equality became the currency of the media. It did not matter that most of the population had no access to the goods, and not even to institutional finance.[42] It mattered little that of the 1.3 billion Indians, 680 million live in deprivation.[43] Neoliberal policy

not only drives inequality. It also produces aspirations. Malls, filled with shining new commodities, have been built in the large cities and small towns. Television shows and films have produced a culture of goods – fancy houses, jobs that pour money into their employees’ bank accounts, which give out credit cards to buy anything that one sees in these malls. Rajiv Gandhi’s vision has indeed descended upon an India that nonetheless has major structural problems of inequality and illiteracy. Studies by sociologists and anthropologists show us that even day labourers believe that consumption of a certain kind is the key marker of social mobility.[44] India’s ruling class foisted its ideas for the country as the ideas of India. Matters are made much more difficult with the addition of the character of these aspirations. They are not only for refrigerators and personal computers, but also for a particular vision of the family and of society. Rewind to Sooraj Barjatya’s 1994 superhit film Hum Aapke Hain Koun, which the critic Rustom Bharucha found “in tune with the liberalization of our times, while being thoroughly grounded in the signs of a homogenized, upper class, upper caste Hindu constituency.”[45] Desire for commodities is sustained by a particular moralism – “good” families prosper, “bad” families go to seed. The vector of goodness runs through reverence for Family, Elders and God. Karan Johar’s 2001 blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, a 21st century mythological film, ran with the tag, “It’s all about loving your parents.” The upper middle class (even aristocratic) Hindu family emerges in these films as the anchor of Indian modernity. Amitabh Bachchan’s slide from Vijay, the angry young workingclass man of Deewar (1975), to Yashvardhan Raichand, the rich feudal businessman of Kabhi Khushi (2001), illustrates the shift, as does Hema Malini’s move from the feminist critique of male desire in Seeta aur Geeta (1972) to her victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha seat for Mathura as a “gopi” of Krishna.[46]

What is melodramatic and sentimental in the films is hectoring in the evening television serials, where family discipline is tirelessly and tenuously maintained by the mother-in-law, the husband and God – on the body of the woman.[47] The shows are legion, from Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (The Story of Each Home), which ran from 2000 to 2008, to Aaj ki Housewife Hai … Sab Jaanti Hai (Today’s Housewife … She Knows Everything), which ran through 2013, to Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law), which ran

from 2000 to 2008. Banal invocations of Hinduness are legion – daughters in law must be submissive, sons are to be treasured, fate explains bad outcomes, trust in god is paramount.[48] These serials reflect the triumph of the synthesis of feudal patriarchal values with modern needs and practices. The culture of consumerism and Hindutva has slowly absorbed the space of the culture of the national movement, with its implications of national solidarity and cultural diversity. This is on the one hand the nationalism of tandoori pizza and on the other of a saffron coloured Mercedes Benz. Kyunki Saas, the most popular on Indian television, starred Smriti Irani, who joined the BJP, ran against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi and then earned a cabinet berth in Modi’s government. She became the Minister of Human Resource Development, responsible for education – a key locus of culture.[49]

The cultural shift takes place on a different register amongst the working-class. Bombay is a good place to track these movements. Credit for that city’s cosmopolitanism goes to the mill workers and the Left, not the city’s liberal intelligentsia. It is the workers in particular, wrote the historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, who gave the city its “diversity and hybridity, not wholly surprising in a city of migrants. Its public life was marked by its secularism, its equidistance from the particularisms of caste and religious community and often its transcendence of their differences.”[50] When globalization’s authors padlocked the textile mills, the workers’ culture took a turn from popular secularism to virulent communalism. As a weapon against the workers and communists (who dominated in these areas), the employers paid the Shiv Sena, a key BJP ally, to use violence, intimidation and money against them. On June 6, 1970, the Shiv Sena assassinated Krishna Desai, CPI Member of the Maharashtra Assembly, and a popular leader of the textile workers. This was the first political assassination in Bombay since 1947.[51] It would not be the last. Chandavarkar, who studied this shift in worker culture, notes,   As the industry was dismantled, and the social organization of Girangaon [the workers’ neighbourhood] began to disintegrate, workers sometimes sought protection in caste and communal affinities and the social connections build around them. With its active neighbourhood presence, its readiness to do favours for its clients, to find jobs for the boys, to confront authority and to terrorize the powerful on behalf of its individual members, its spectacular displays of violence and its increasing access to state power, the Shiv Sena offered a different kind of citizenship to workers, now seemingly

disenfranchised and wholly subordinated, and created an arena in which they could at least fleetingly make a claim for dignity and equality.[52]



Chandavarkar sees a “degradation” of social life authored by the “outcome of political choices,” such as deindustrialization and the fragmentation of worker solidarity into the silos of religion and caste. This outcome had been envisaged by G. D. Birla in 1929, and brought to bear by the Shiv Sena from the 1970s on the terrain of the shut-down of factories. Without an agenda for the betterment of the lives of the workers, the Congress Party tried to gain legitimacy by making connections based on religion. Indira Gandhi’s restoration in 1980 was made possible – partly – by her transformation from a socialist into a defender of the Hindus and the dismantler of the system of state intervention in the economy. Religion as a social force has always had an important role in India. That goes without saying. But in the 1970s, it emerged as a way for an adrift middle-class to seek its cultural moorings as the tide of Americanism rose around it. Vijay Sharma’s Jai Santoshi Ma (1975) offered a deity to middle-class Hindu women, many among whom now began to take a cue from the film to fast on twelve consecutive Fridays and offer besan to lithographs of Santhosi Ma.[53] Sunil Banerjee’s Baba Taraknath (1977) encouraged middle-class Hindus to make pilgrimages to Tarkeshwar to offer their solicitude to the deity encased in this famous Bengali temple.[54] That two films can engender a religious revival is itself indication of the modernity of the religious turn from the mid-1970s. Prior to the arrival of the BJP on the political scene, “political Hinduism” was having something in the way of a comeback. If the Hindu middle-class was flocking to mythological films, to pilgrimages and to the new temples (themselves negotiating with the state for real estate during a mini-boom in the 1970s), the political leadership was surrounding itself with astrological and tantric speculations and rituals as well as lying face down in front of Hindu idols in order to secure the newly discovered “Hindu Vote.” Politicians also began to play with religious sentiments and hoist religious leaders forward to disrupt political debate (Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and the Khalistan movement in Punjab is the appropriate example – the Times of India cuttingly writing on September 22, 1982, “The irony, of course, is that the Sant was originally a product nurtured and marketed by the Centre to cut into the Akali Dal’s sphere of influence”).[55]

Importantly, the turn to “religion” was not itself about doctrine, but about the politics of electoral “vote banks.”[56] Syndicated religion arrived in the 1970s just in time for the expanded middle-class to find some way of setting its increasingly international capitalist Self apart from the Americanized norm: now one could be an universal capitalist as well as take a holiday-pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi. The Congress tried to exploit the religious fissures between caste Hindus and Muslims across northern India. The only beneficiaries of this raw communal politics were the BJP and the Shiv Sena, the authentic voices of communal bigotry. Slowly, surely, the politics of the Shiv Sena and the BJP, as well as its allied organizations, wore down the forms of secular culture that had been in formation for a century. In Bombay, where the transformation took place in broad daylight, pressure on those who were not Hindu Marathis came from these parties and their various cultural fronts. The “soft Hindutva” of the film industry came alongside the “hard Hindutva” of the RSS organizations. Mumbai is certainly not what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. The mills, for instance, remain shuttered, and their worth was reduced to real estate. Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) became the order of the day. The film industry, which once celebrated plebeian culture, now revels in upward mobility and gangsterism.[57] It accurately reflects the shift in aspirations and commitments. These movies push what the critic Sudhanva Deshpande calls “a fantasy of endless consumption.”[58] The dynamic of social development is sidelined. Old traditions of conviviality fall by the wayside. Such neo-liberal desires have over the course of the past twenty years had a marked impact on the Indian imagination. No more the values of the anti-colonial movement or of the Nehruvian period of national development. No more the traditions of Indian socialism, as authored by Periyar and Ram Manohar Lohia, anchored by the Dravidian parties and the Samajwadi parties. The core values of the present are personal consumption and career advancement. Such a cultural universe is detrimental to the kind of political project promoted by the Left. The Samajwadi and Dravidian parties are able to thrive on occasion because they are the ladders for this caste or that community to gain favoured access to the social goods of neoliberalism. This is not the way the Left operates. It has the hardest time in the Great Moving Right Show.

UNDER THE TWINKLE OF FADING STARS AND STRIPES

“Your qibla is Washington.” Iranian Diplomat to former Indian Diplomat,

Chinmaya Gharekhan, 2013[59]



Within the world of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), India played a significant role. Founded in 1961, the NAM had been created as a platform for the newly post-colonial states that neither wished to ally with the NATO bloc nor the Warsaw Pact. Ideology played a role in this, although the grouping was less ideological than institutional – there were communists in power in some of the states (China, for instance), and there were fullthroated capitalists in others. Most of the political elites in these states had a curious amalgam of views when it came to politics and economics, with variants of socialism in the ascendant (African Socialism, Arab Socialism). The suspicion of Western power emerged not only out of the history of colonization but also of the kind of neo-colonial strategies established by the United States – CIA coups (from Iran to Guatemala) combined with domination of the World Bank and IMF filled in the blanks. The NAM, for its career, stayed clear of any adjustments to US power till the end of the 1980s, when the debt crisis had murderous results on its independent space. [60]

From 1947 to 1992, the Indo-US relationship was ambivalent. India played a very important role in the United Nations forums, pushing for peaceful solutions to conflict as much as possible, as well as for the creation of multi-polarity in the world.[61] With the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the Third World Project (the decline of NAM, for instance), the leadership of the Congress Party, reflecting the new aggressiveness of the domestic bourgeoisie, made a willful analytical shift. The Congress leaders argued that now that the Cold War had ended, the world had become multipolar. This was a curious elision of the clear and present reality of a newly uncompromising United States. As the sole superpower, the United States freely bombed small countries such as Panama (1989) and then Iraq (1991) as well as aggressively pushed through the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs (1986-1994) to protect the economies of the North against the South. Both political and economic power remained with

the United States and its allies in the Group of 7 (G-7) as well as NATO. The word “imperialism” went out of fashion, but the practice saw no reason to become passé. It was fully operational. Influential members of the Indian foreign policy elite turned their back on the old goals of “non-alignment” and of the creation of multi-polarity.[62] They declared that the end of the Cold War had de facto created a multipolar world. The significance of this was it denied the resilience and ambition of US imperialism; indeed it camouflaged the American pursuit of uni-polarity by use of the iron fist of military intervention and the velvet glove of bilateral trade deals. For example, one of the pillars of Indian foreign policy was the refusal to sign discriminatory treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), not because India necessarily wanted nuclear weapons, but because the NPT seemed discriminatorily to allow the five nuclear states to retain their arsenal (they happened to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council). By the early 1990s, this objection faded; as the Indian foreign secretary J. N. Dixit put it, “India does not expect the big five to disarm. If they did disarm, any tin pot dictator with a couple of bombs would be a world power.”[63]

India’s Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao recognized that the liberalisation agenda would not be able to proceed full-throttle without a new rapprochement with the United States on a wide range of strategic issues, including a new entente with Israel. The emergent consensus among the New Delhi elite was that normal relations with Israel would send a signal to Washington of Delhi’s seriousness toward the established power equation.[64] Non-alignment was to be squandered on behalf of a new alliance policy with the United States, a kind of alliance that might mimic the special relationship between Israel and the United States. The Indian government recognized the state of Israel in January 1992, and over the course of the decade developed close ties for the import of military hardware and intelligence software.[65] As well, India tempered its previously resolute backing for the Palestinian struggle. This was an important gesture to Washington. It meant that India was willing to sacrifice its own ideological and institutional commitments for a narrative of the world favourable to Washington. If India could become close to Israel, the door to the special relationship that really mattered (with Washington) opened wider.

Since imperialism was not a factor in the calculations of the Rao team, they suggested that India would join the US as an equal, not as a junior partner. Entry into the United Nations as a permanent member of the Security Council became a goal to show this to be the case. The US, Rao’s advisors argued, saw India as a partner in the “community of democracies,” which is why the Rao government eagerly signed a military collaboration agreement with Washington. The top brass of the US and Indian militaries created executive committees and proceeded to conduct naval, air force and special forces joint exercises – all widely publicized. In 1995, Indian officers went to the US armed forces academies to train with their peers through the Indo-US Military Cooperation Agreement. Due to US Congressional prejudices, as it were, the cooperation was briefly halted after India tested nuclear weapons in 1998. But they were re-started as soon as was possible, and intensified after 2001. The Defence Framework Agreement (2005) between India and the US had four main points: (1) It minimized the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution (in the immediate aftermath of the US aggressive war on Iraq, this was a major concern); (2) It brought India into the conversation about the aggressive missile defence systems on the US side; (3) It made India a bilateral partner in the “defence” of the sea lanes around China, tossing into the bin the idea of a pacifist Asian Pact of the Seas; (4) It encouraged India to purchase military hardware from the United States. Other currents remained, however, such as the recognition amongst sections of the elite and in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs that the United States was a fickle friend, in need of its alliance with Pakistan (particularly after 2001), and unwilling fully to commit to making India a partner in the first circle of world affairs. There is also the caution by the liberal Nonalignment 2.0 group, expressed in 2012, that an adversarial position against China might be counterproductive since there might at any point be a “tactical upswing in Sino-American ties.”[66] It was never going to be an easy sell, to disrupt India’s own various international entanglements and the various theories of its national interest in order to become the subordinate partner in an alliance with the US. By the late 1990s, the Indian government turned toward increased arms purchases from the United States and welcomed US military personnel to train with the Indian armed forces. This close relationship (“interoperability”) sent the next hint. Since much of the military

relationship is also commercial, it is fitting that these two elements (the military and the commercial) remain side-by-side. In the Clinton years, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen repeatedly said of India that its middle class is the “size of France,” and so is capable of buying much that US firms produce (even as the production sites moved to China). The existence of this class and its hitherto suffocated desires would provide a market for US goods that could not find homes in the over-saturated US market. In 1994, US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arrived in India with a delegation of US CEOs. They pledged $7 billion for various deals, largely in telecommunications and energy. The leader in the energy team was Enron Corporation, whose Maharashtra power plant deal ended in disgrace over charges of bribery and cost gouging.[67] The “special relationship” therefore had a very prominent commercial angle – with agricultural businesses interested in drastically changing Indian agriculture (to a more agro-business model) and energy firms invested in the privatization of the forecasted energy boom. Cargill and Enron, General Electric and ADM lined up with as much enthusiasm as the major banks, who wanted to open up the money markets to predatory “hot money.” US State Department official Christina Rocca put it plainly to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2002, “Not far from Agra, Indian paratroopers and American Special Operations Forces are participating in their largest-ever joint Army and air exercises since India’s independence. But the larger, long-term goal is much more ambitious and is based on strategic, diplomatic and political cooperation as well as sound economic ties.”[68] Rocca’s comments about “sound economic ties” flattered the industrialists.

In Washington, DC, the US-India Business Council (USIBC) – formed in 1975 – emerged from hibernation in this period to lobby for US business interests in India. The USIBC is housed, conveniently, in the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, from where it pushes against the walls erected in India to protect the national economy from those who want to make dollars out of rupees. Energy deals, for their sheer scale, had the most dramatic impact on the USIBC’s work. When the US promised to bring India out of the nuclear cold – because of sanctions for India’s 1998 nuclear tests – it alerted the energy giants toward the business opportunities. In March 2007, the USIBC hosted the Commercial Nuclear Executive Mission, a 230-member business delegation to India. Ron Somers, president of USIBC, said of the purported $60 billion boondoggle that would come as

a result of a nuclear deal, “The bounty is enormous.”[69] Robinder Sachdev of the Indian American business lobby group, USINPAC, said of skeptics in the United States to the deal with India, “It is like being penny wise and pound foolish. The US industry will benefit from the nuclear deal.” This, to Sachdev, was a good thing. It is precisely the leading contour of the “strategic partnership” – namely to allow US-based businesses to benefit from the emergence of the Indian market onto the world stage. This is precisely how the US had defined “globalization.” In 2005, US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice came to New Delhi and told the Indian business lobby, “It is the policy of the United States to help India become a major world power in the twenty-first century.” This flattery when broken down into its component parts meant that the US firms would gain access to the Indian markets and India would deliver its votes to the International Atomic Energy Agency to the US against Iran (as in September 2005 and November 2009). The US-India Strategic Economic Partnership (2006) that was a photocopy of the proposals from the US-India CEO Group (2005) urged India to remove tariff and non-tariff barriers to all its products. Pabulum about the “mutual benefits of globalization” is invalidated in the details, and in the associated Agricultural Knowledge Initiative (2005). This Initiative, guided by multinational agro-businesses, pushed for a revision of India’s patent laws and for a vitiation of protections to small farmers. Both Indian (Dabur and Hindustan Lever) and US (Monsanto and WalMart) firms have since benefited at the expense of the Indian farmers. To be a “major world power” in this period is to emulate the US model that delivers political power to private monopoly firms to determine policy to their interest and against the interests of the wider population.

The way that the Indian government dealt with Union Carbide Warren Anderson’s case is an indication of the tilt to the US and to business over the rights of the Indian people. On February 1, 1992, the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal declared Warren Anderson a fugitive from justice for the 1984 Bhopal gas leak from a Union Carbide factory. Anderson refused to return to India to face trial. Greenpeace served Anderson with the warrant in 2002. In 2003, India contacted the US government for the extradition of Anderson. The US refused, saying that the evidence chain was not sufficient to indict Anderson for the 1984 disaster. On July 31, 2009, Prakash Mohan Tiwari, Bhopal’s Chief Judicial Magistrate issued an

arrest warrant for Anderson. Anderson remained in the US, given safe harbour from the reach of Indian courts, till he died in September 2014, aged 92. Worse, the Indian government had now seemed to have decided that its new found “strategic relationship” with the United States was far more important than justice for the tens of thousands of residents of Bhopal. Indian Ambassador to the United States Ronen Sen said the “evidentiary links” between Anderson and the 1984 disaster needed to be clarified by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In 2010, retired CBI officer B. R. Lall said that the Indian Ministry of External Affairs had asked the CBI to “go slow” on the Warren Anderson case. The fix was in at the USIndia CEO Forum meetings of 2005 and 2006. After the 2005 meeting, Dow CEO Andrew Liveris wrote to the Ambassador Sen on September 14, saying “to facilitate the Indian-US Strategic Partnership and to help chart a path forward the following proposal is designed to help resolve a specific legacy legal issue – the Bhopal matter.” The next year, the government of India went further at the Forum. In a letter from Liveris to Sen dated November 2006, he wrote, “Given the statements made by Government of India representatives in front of all meeting attendees that Dow is not responsible for Bhopal and will not be pursued by the Government of India, it will be important to follow through to ensure concrete, sustained actions are taken that are consistent with these statements.” Namely, that India would withdraw its complaints against Dow and set aside the extradition claim on Anderson. Liveris’ view was supported by the CEO Forum cochair, Ratan Tata, in a letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Tata offered to create an Indian fund for the clean-up of Bhopal – shielding Dow from even that liability. Tata had reportedly delivered Liveris’ letter to Planning Commission head Montek Singh Ahluwalia, saying that if India accepted Dow’s position it would “break the deadlock.” The battlefield that turned out to be the most contentious for India’s subservience to the logic of imperialism was the question of Iran.[70] It was the test case of India’s subordination to the US narrative of world affairs. The Bush administration was adamant that Iran be isolated, despite Washington’s adventure in Iraq and its own remove from the world community at the UN General Assembly. Iran poses a threat to the establishment’s order of things in West Asia. For the US and its clients, Iran has been a threat since 1979, and this is precisely the reason why they: (1)

encouraged the 1980 Carter Doctrine (that the defence of the Persian Gulf region was a vital national interest for the U.S.); (2) pushed Iraq to go to war with Iran (1980–1988); and (3) formed the Gulf Coordination Council, the Arab NATO (1981). It has long been this establishment’s policy to reduce Iran by military and political means. Corralling India into this policy has been US policy since the early 1990s. In January 2004, the Bush administration sent David Mulford to be the US ambassador to India. Mulford remained at this post until 2009. It was a crucial period. When Mulford came to India, relations between Tehran and New Delhi were on a reasonably good footing: congruence on Afghanistan was the most recent foreign policy linkage, but so too was the question of energy. By 2009, India had moved closer to the US vis-à-vis Iran. The deal from Washington was simple. India would soft-pedal a natural gas pipeline from Iran to India, and it would be given assistance in building up its nuclear sector (to be built, largely, by US firms). Any disentanglement from Iran would allow India freedom of maneuver toward the US narrative of world affairs. When next the United States needed a vote to sanction Iran, in the IAEA or in the UN, it might have to call upon India, and thereby confuse the NAM bloc, which was often led by India on some of these matters. To make the case, Bush sent his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India in 2005; she got what the United States wanted from India, but gave very little. India did not get a commitment of US support for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, and the United States would not go back on its commitment to sell Pakistan a new batch of F-16s. Rice lobbied hard for India to abjure the peace pipeline and to adopt the nuclear road. It was clear by 2005 that the nuclear deal was a quid pro quo for scuttling the peace pipeline and for giving the United States political cover in the NAM-type forums in its policy to isolate Iran.[71]

India’s best case scenario for nuclear power was that it would provide no more than 5 percent of India’s electricity needs and only 2 percent of its energy needs by 2015 – hardly a solution to India’s energy problem.[72] It was, rather, a political matter: India, now anointed as a legitimate nuclear power, and emboldened to seek its proper place in the Security Council, must earn that role by acting “maturely,” namely working with the “international community” (viz. the Atlantic powers) to isolate “revisionist” powers, such as Iran.[73] That was the bottom line. The aggravations of David Mulford come out clearly in the cables he sent off to the US State

Department. In early September 2005, prior to India’s vote against Iran in the IAEA on September 24, Mulford met Shyam Saran, at that time Foreign Secretary, the top Foreign Service position in the Ministry of External Affairs. In Mulford’s rendering, he “delivered the mail (wrapped in a brick).” Mulford told Saran, “The time was drawing near for fence-sitters to make hard decisions.” Then comes the clear quid pro quo: “Many in [the US] Congress and throughout Washington, [Mulford] reminded Saran, were watching India’s treatment of Iran prior to Congressional debate on the USIndia civilian nuclear initiative.” One could only come if the other was demonstrated. Why was India’s vote so important? “India had a key voice in the NAM and could swing opinion in the [IAEA Board of Governors]; it was time, [Mulford] said, for us to know where India stood.”[74] From the US side, the “nuclear deal” was about nuclear energy (and $60 billion promised in purchases for nuclear hardware), but more so it was about cementing India’s shift from its non-aligned foreign policy to being a subordinate ally of the US narrative.[75]

Within India, few currents stood against the shifts in India’s orientation toward the world order. Old non-alignment hands occasionally stood up as an embarrassment. When Rice was in Delhi in 2005, External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh said at their joint press conference, “We have good relations with Iran.” It is the kind of embarrassment that the US officials do not tolerate. Singh and the non-alignment advocates in the establishment found themselves muzzled. Only the Left came out directly against the new developments. When the Left provided outside support to the Congress United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2004, an early draft of their Common Minimum Programme called for “strategic relations with the United States.” The Left insisted that this be removed. In its place came an undertaking for the bedrock principles of non-alignment, “The UPA government will pursue an independent foreign policy keeping in mind its past traditions. This policy will seek to promote multi-polarity in world relations and oppose all attempts at unilateralism.” Certainly the Common Minimum Programme spoke of “closer engagement and relations with the USA,” but only in the context of “the independence of India’s foreign policy position on all regional and global issues.” The Communist challenge got under the skin of the new proimperialist group in the Indian establishment. India’s Ambassador to the United States, Ronen Sen, was less diplomatic in his remarks about the role

of the Left in its opposition to the US-India deal. When the Left demanded a debate in parliament, Sen fulminated, “I can understand [such a debate over the deal] immediately after [India’s] independence. But sixty years after independence! I am really bothered that sixty years after independence they are so insecure – that we have not grown up, this lack of confidence and lack of self-respect.”[76] Who did Ambassador Sen refer to when he said, “They are so insecure”? Could it be the BJP? Or the Left? The BJP had inoculated itself from criticism by back channel visits to the US embassy in New Delhi. On December 28, 2005, BJP National Executive Member Seshadri Chari told the US embassy that they should not “read too much into the foreign policy resolution [of the BJP national council meeting], especially the part relating to the US.” This was just “standard practice,” the BJP leader told the Embassy – rhetoric for the elections.[77] On October 21, 2005, BJP leader Jaswant Singh met with Nicholas Burns, no. 3 at the US State Department, and the point person for the nuclear deal. Singh complained about US support of Pakistan. But the main message that Singh delivered was that the Congress Party “does not have the intellectual commitment to improve US/India relations.” The Congress Party is hampered by the Communists who are bent on “hollowing out” the Congress Party by “disapproving anything and everything.”[78] The BJP would govern without any Communist influence, and was therefore a better partner. It was the Communist bloc that was obdurate. Jaswant Singh told Burns, “The Communists will obstruct the policy and the PM should deal with this problem. Singh emphasized that the United States should not have frontloaded the relationship with nuclear issues but should have waited to construct a large political base first.” Better to have a government that would abjure any links to the Communists, and best of all to keep the details away from public scrutiny. As General Electric’s T. P. Chopra said, “The last thing we want is to give ammunition to the Left-wing parties. They would love to project the US as greedy capitalists selling the country for a few dollars more. Business will keep silent until [the deal] is signed, sealed and delivered.”[79]

The pendulum of fealty to the US narrative began to swing back around 2008. Two developments led to this movement. First, the credit crunch in the US and the Euro-Zone convulsed financial institutions and led to a major housing and bank crisis. This constrained the messianic faith amongst the ruling elites of the North Atlantic towards their planetary

destiny. The credit crunch in the North Atlantic came on the backs of a recognition that US military power had been far too thinly worn not only in the conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq but in the entire imperial system. Confounding rhetoric against Iran could simply not be matched by any comparable military posture, and even the 2011 intervention in Libya had to be restricted to aerial bombardment with some Special Forces support. The period from 2007 showed a decisive weakening of the US bloc, notably in the empty promises to wind up the G-7 and replace it with the G-20 (including the major countries of the South). Second, the opening provided by the weakened North Atlantic and the broken promises of the G-7, led to the creation of the BRICS bloc, where the “locomotives of the South” strengthened the resolve of each other to act not so much as a sectional grouping but now as an alternative power center. Whatever the limitations of the BRICS bloc, and there are many, this has been its most significant contribution. It is what stayed India’s slide into the US narrative, and opened breathing room for other tendencies. Precisely the pressure from the BRICS drew India to a less offensive position on Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, and it was the BRICS ethos that moved India to a less subservient position on trade policy (the 2014 rejection of the Trade Facilitation protocols in the World Trade Organisation stems as well from India’s farmer lobby, not inconsequential at election time).[80]

Older Hindutva traditions of economic nationalism provide Modi with the rhetoric to stand apart from the full-scale subservience of the Congress regime: “Make In India” and “First Develop India” (FDI) are his trademark ways to stress the need for a nationalist form of liberalisation.[81] But beneath the surface, the arsenal of liberalisation proceeds apace, and the collaboration with the pillar of imperialism is unruffled. Modi’s 2014 visit to Washington concluded with the extension of the ten-year defence treaty with the US. No debate was necessary any longer. Both the Congress and the BJP are enthusiastic about this arrangement with the United States and the G-7 powers. Neither sees any problem with it. The rightward tilt, slightly modulated by the winds of geopolitical uncertainty, remains. The lonely vigil by the Left continues. The language of antiimperialism sounds anachronistic because the language of imperialism has been modulated – sequestering itself into older lineages of its own, “free trade” and “liberal, humanitarian intervention.” It is too sophisticated to

speak of resource grabs and gunboat diplomacy, preferring to conduct its imperial policies in the name of its victims.       [1] 

  Zoya Hasan, Congress After Indira: Policy, Power and Political Change, 1984-2009, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ananya Vajpeyi is off the mark with her assertion, “The fact that neither the Congress nor the Left seem any longer to be conversant with or proud of the leftliberal political traditions that dominated Indian politics since independence, drives the final nail into the coffin of secular opinion.” “Hind Swaraj vs. Hindu Rashtra,” The Hindu, July 12, 2014. What drove that nail into the coffin was evisceration of liberalism by neo-liberalism – conducted largely by the Congress, driven by international capital and the big bourgeoisie.

[2]

    C. G. Somiah, The Honest Always Stand Alone, Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2010, pp. 142–4.

[3]

    Hari Jaisingh, India After Indira. The Turbulent Years (1984-1989), New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1989, p. 58.

[4]

    Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: June 2006 to May 2007, New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 2005, p. 253.

[5]

    Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reforms, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, Raka Ray and Amita Baviskar, eds., Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011. India is not its middle class, a numerical minority – only 4. 6 per cent of the Indian households own all of the following – a television, a telephone, a computer and a car. That’s a pretty small slice of the population, with pretty modest modern appliances.

[6]

    S. Ambirajan, A Grammar of Indian Planning, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1959.

[7]

    Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas, et. al., Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944, pp. 9-10 and 58.

[8]

    The Bombay Plan actually asked the state to avoid land reforms for precisely the reason that it wanted to ensure that the right to property went unchallenged. Thakurdas, Memorandum, pp. 3031.

[9]

    Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966, p. 88.

[10]

    Michelguglielmo Torri, “Economic Policy and Political Gains: The First Phase of India’s Green Revolution,” Asia Studies Journal, vol. 12, nos. 2-3, 1974, p. 50 and Deepak Lal, “Indian Economy: In Deadly Soup,” Far East Economic Review, January 4, 1968, pp. 19ff.

[11]

    Government of India, Problems of the Third Plan: A Critical Miscellany, New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1961, pp. 49-50.

[12]

    Government of India and Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Papers Relating to the Formation of the Second Five-Year Plan, Government of India, 1956, p. 558.

[13]

    Monopolies Inquiry Commission, Report, New Delhi: Ministry of Finance, 1965.

[14]

    R. K. Hazari, Corporate Private Sector: Concentration, Ownership and Control, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966 and Stanley Kochanek, Business and Politics in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

[15]

    Government of India, Report of the Industrial Licensing Policy Inquiry Committee, New Delhi: Government of India, 1969, p. 74.

[16]

    Ministry of Home, The Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions, New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs Research and Policy Division, 1969, p. 4ff.

[17]

    Thakurdas, Memorandum, p. 37.

[18]

    “Between equal rights, force decides,” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2010, p. 225.

[19]

    Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, London: Bodley Head, 1936, p. 552.

[20]

    Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Industrial Growth in India: stagnation since the mid-sixties, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985 and Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

[21]

    George Fernandes, “Railway Strike of 1974,” a talk from 1977, George Fernandes Speaks, ed. George Mathew, Delhi: Ajanta, 1991, p. 21.

[22]

    Vijay Prashad, “Emergency Assessments,” Social Scientist, vol. 24, no. 9/10, SeptemberOctober 1996 for the full analysis.

[23] 

  Era of Discipline (Documents on Contemporary Reality), ed. D. V. Gandhi, New Delhi: Samachar Bharati, 1976, p. 338.

[24] 

  Michael Kaufman, “India sets limits on right to strike,” New York Times, July 28, 1981.

[25]

    Fatima Zakaria’s interview of J. R. D. Tata, Times of India, July 22, 1981.

[26]

    Howard Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

[27]

    Atul Kohli, The State and Poverty in India. The Politics of Reform, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 89.

[28]

    A. D. D. Gordon, Businessmen and Politics. Rising Nationalism and a Modernizing Economy in Bombay, 1918-1933, Delhi: Manohar, 1978, p. 184.

[29]

    Milton Israel, Communications and Power. Propaganda and the press in the Indian nationalist struggle, 1920-1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 131.

[30] 

  Birla to Thakurdas, May 4, 1929, Thakurdas Papers File 81 (II) of 1929, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML). For an excellent discussion of this document, see

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India. Business Strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 442. [31] 

  Birla to Desai, July 14, 1942 in G. D. Birla, Bapu: A Unique Association. Correspondence, 1940-47, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1977, p. 316.

[32]

    Kuldip Nayar, Between the Lines. An Autobiography, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2012, p. 254.

[33]

    Nayar, Beyond the Lines, p. 232.

[34]

    Ken Auletta, “Citizen Jain,” New Yorker, October 8, 2012, p. 53.

[35]

    Nayar, Beyond the Lines, p. 394.

[36]

    Press Council of India. Sub-Committee Report, ‘Paid News’: How corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy, New Delhi: Press Council, 2009, p. 4.

[37]

 

 

Stanley Kochanek, “Liberalisation and business lobbying in India,” The Journal of

Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 34, no. 3, 1996. [38]

    Daya K. Thussu, “The ‘Murdochization’ of News? The case of STAR TV in India,” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 29 no. 4, July 2007, Manjunath Pendakur, “Twisting and Turning: India’s telecommunications and media industries under the neo-liberal regime,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, vol. 9, no. 2, June 2013 and P. Sainath “Paid news undermining democracy: Press Council Report,” The Hindu, April 21, 2010.

[39]

    Prabhat Patnaik, “Markets, Morals and the Media,” Convocation Address, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai: ACJ, 2002 and N. Ram, “The Changing Role of the News Media in Contemporary India,” Indian History Congress, 72nd Session, Punjabi University, Patiala, 2011.jabi University,

[40]

    For a fuller sense of Manmohan Singh’s career, see my The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, New York: Verso and New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2013, Chapter 2 and Vinod Jose, “Falling Man,” Caravan, October 2011.

[41]

    Prashad, The Poorer Nations, Chapter 1.

[42]

    Nivedita Mukherjee, “Banking on Inclusion,” India Today, July 12, 2010.

[43]

    McKinsey & Company, From Poverty to Empowerment: India’s Imperative for Jobs, Growth and Effective Basic Services, Mumbai: McKinsey & Company, 2014.

[44]

    Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, “From Transcience to Immanence: Consumption, Life Cycle and Social Mobility in Kerala, South India,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999; Gowri Vijayakumar, “Gender, Class and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India’s Knowledge Economy,” Gender & Society, vol. 27, no. 6, 2013; Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase and Timothy J. Scrase, Globalisation and the middle classes in India: the social and cultural impact of neoliberal reforms, New York: Routledge, 2009 and Nita Mathur, “Shopping Malls, Credit Cards

and Global Brands: Consumer Culture and Lifestyle of India’s New Middle Class,” South Asia Research, vol. 30, no. 3, 2010. [45]

    Rustom Bharucha, “Utopia in Bollywood – Hum Apke Hain Koun … !” EPW, vol. XXX, no. 15, April 15, 1995.

[46]

    “I belong to Mathura, I’m a gopi, says Hema Malini,” Asian Age, April 4, 2014.

[47]

    The pre-history of these serials was the Doordarshan era Hum Log (1984-85), which already bore the seeds of the conservatism – as shown by Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

[48]

    For an excellent analysis of Ekta Kapoor’s serials, see Santanu Chakrabarti, “Banal Nationalism and Soap Opera,” Ph. D., State University of New Jersey, Rutgers, NJ, 2012.

[49]

    Hasan Suroor, “Return of ‘Saffron’ Textbooks? Who’s behind Smriti Irani’s Plans?” First Post, June 5, 2014.

[50]

    Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From neighbourhood to nation: the rise and fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the twentieth century,” History, Culture and the Indian City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 186. For a superb account of the shifts, see Neera Adarkar and Meena Menon, One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon, An Oral History, Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2004.

[51]

    Ashok Dhawale, The Shiv Sena. Semi-Fascism in Action, Delhi: CPI-M, 2000, p. 14.

[52]

    Chandavarkar, “From neighbourhood to nation,” p. 189.

[53] 

  Veena Das, “The Mythological Film and its Framework of Meaning: an analysis of Jai Santoshi Ma,” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, March 1980.

[54] 

  E. A. Morinis, “Baba Taraknath: A case of continuity and development in the folk tradition of West Bengal, India,” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 1982.

[55] 

  Harkishan Singh Surjeet, “Lessons of Punjab,” The Marxist, vol. II, no. 4, October-December 1984 and Randhir Singh, “Marxists and the Sikh Extremist Movement in India,” EPW, vol. XXII, no. 34, August 22, 1987.

[56] 

  Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 134.

[57] 

  Also the case with the books on the city, such as Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Bombay Lost & Found, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004 and Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010.

[58] 

  Sudhanva Deshpande, “The Unbearable Opulence of Devdas,” Frontline, August 17-30, 2002.

[59]

    Chinmaya Gharekhan, “Lesson on Diplomacy, from an Iranian,” The Hindu, February 1, 2013.

[60]

    Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2007.

[61]

    For a flavor of the early years of India’s foreign policy making, see Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010.

[62]

    The comprehensive history of this move is documented in Ninan Koshy, Under the Empire: India’s New Foreign Policy, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2006.

[63]

    J. N. Dixit, My South Block Years: Memoirs of a Foreign Secretary, Delhi: UBS, 1996, chapter 22.

[64]

    C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s Foreign Policy, New York: Palgrave, 2004 and Impossible Allies: Nuclear India, United States and the Global Order, New Delhi: India Research Press, 2006.

[65]

    Vijay Prashad, Namaste Sharon, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2003 and Vijay Prashad, India’s Israel Policy, Doha: Al Jazeera Center for Studies, 2013.

[66]

    Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Lt. Gen (Retd) Prakash Menon, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth Varadarajan, Non-Alignment 2.0. A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century, New Delhi: Center for Policy Research, 2012, p. 32.

[67]

    Prabir Purkayastha and Vijay Prashad, Enron Blowout: corporate capitalism and the theft of the global commons, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2002.

[68]

    “We can become partners even in unexplored areas: Rocca,” The Hindu, May 15, 2002.

[69]

    Vijay Prashad, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2013, pp. 54-55.

[70]

    For a complete assessment of the dynamic vis-à-vis Iran, see Vijay Prashad, “India’s Iran Policy: Between US Primacy and Regionalism,” Working Paper Series, no. 19, Beirut: Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, 2013.

[71]

    Vijay Prashad, “Quid Pro Quo? The Question of India’s Subordination to the ‘American Narrative,’” Monthly Review, vol. 63, no. 5, October 2011.

[72]

    M. V. Ramana, The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India, New Delhi: Penguin, 2013.

[73]

    On the idea of “revisionist” powers and the place of Iran in US policy, see my Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2012, part 1.

[74]

    US State Department Cable no. 39910. 05NEWDELHI6840, Embassy New Delhi, Confidential. September 6, 2005 (Wikileaks Cache).

[75]

    Prakash Karat, Subordinate Ally: The Nuclear Deal and India-US Strategic Relations, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2007.

[76]

    Aziz Haniffa, “Ambassador Sen: ‘We Will Have Zero Credibility,’” India Abroad, August 20, 2007.

[77]

    US State Department Cable no. 48692. 05NEWDELHI9761, Embassy New Delhi, Confidential. December 28, 2005 (Wikileaks Cache).

[78]

    US State Department Cable no. 43447. 05NEWDELHI8231, Embassy New Delhi, Confidential. October 24, 2005 (Wikileaks Cache).

[79]

    Prashad, Uncle Swami, p. 55.

[80]

    “WTO stand in interest of the poor: Modi,” Times of India, August 10, 2014 and for an explanation of the negotiation, see D. Ravikanth, “WTO Upside Down,” EPW, vol. XLIX, no. 36, September 6, 2014.

[81]

    “‘Make In India’: FDI is also ‘First Develop India,’ says PM Modi,” Economic Times, September 25, 2014.

 

3.  The Collapse of Indian Socialism

“The test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires

it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.”

M. K. Gandhi, Muir Central College Economics Society,

Allahabad, December 22, 1916[1]

THE GANDHIAN MOMENT

One of the great contributions of M. K. Gandhi was that by the 1920s he took the grievances from a hundred years of peasant and working-class struggle and translated them into the otherwise tired Congress Party. The decade after the Swadeshi movement (1905-11) had been host to a variety of popular struggles against the British Raj, including its Indian allies, the industrial capitalists. Peasants, workers, small traders, students, tribals, dalits: all went into the fray, whether against the pith-helmeted, ruddy faced British official or the sharp tongued subordinates of those officials, the patwaris (land record clerk) and daffadars (native army sergeant), with their pens and bayonets, or against the private officialdom of their localities, the capitalists, the banyas (moneylenders), and those of the dominant castes who felt the urge to exercise their structural authority in their vicinities. Gandhi led three subcontinent-wide mass actions (1919-1921, 1930-33, 1942) that paralyzed the Raj, and collapsed its moral authority to govern. India was born in these immense moments, where the people walked on their streets to claim their right to govern themselves, and to do so based on the principle of equality. Gandhi did not give this as a gift to the country, but he was fortunate to lead a population that had already chosen for itself that prize.

Before 1919, the two main organized political actors, the Congress and the small bands of idealistic students (most of whom remained in underground terrorist outfits) shared one limitation in common: their politics was elitist. Neither had a taste for the messiness of mass politics.

They remained above the fray, hoping that their petitions or their bombs would function to rattle the desks of the British Empire or else as propaganda to spur the people to action. Neither strategy succeeded in dislodging the people effectively, to move them into the rough and tumble of mass action. Gandhi changed that, and brought both into the byways of India, to help draw out the people to challenge the Empire with their numbers. The role of Gandhi himself was contradictory. The youth who became communists saw him as the author of the mass upsurge, but they did not take kindly to his every political move. A young Sajjad Zaheer was taken up by the Gandhian moment, “If you ask me, in all my life, when I have been deeply stirred, experienced the deepest stirrings of my emotions and my soul, I would say it was at this time.”[2] Hajrah Begum, his comrade, agreed, but then went further. For her the Gandhian moment was not solely about Gandhi and the Congress. It was about struggle. “We came to Marxism because we saw the people’s reaction and their enthusiasm. Otherwise, how could I, a purdah girl, have come to Communism?”[3] Young Bhagat Singh, a vibrant revolutionary during Gandhi’s various struggles and leader of the Hindustan Republican Socialist Association, wrote, as he languished in prison, “Non-violence as policy indispensable for all mass movements.”[4] The mass character of Gandhianism nullified the politics from above and the politics from underground, creating the necessary space for the creation of a politics from below. Gandhi did not stand up for Bhagat Singh when he languished in prison and then when he was executed at the age of 23. P. Ramamurti, a future Communist leader, would remember that the “mood of the youth was very bad” and turned against Gandhi. “The fact that Gandhiji did not plead for the release of Bhagat Singh did not go down well with us, among the youth.”[5]

“Gandhi” was the moment. It was much more than the politics of Gandhi, the man. To mobilize the people Gandhi relied upon the Congress’ organization and the young people’s idealism, now yoked to both the theory of mass action and to the caustic and accurate theory of imperialism that came to them not from Lenin’s Imperialism (1916) but from the 19th Century Indian nationalists, such as Dadabhai Naoroji. As early as 1867 at a lecture to the East India Association in London, Naoroji pointed out that “out of the revenues raised in India, nearly one-fourth goes clean out of the country,

and is added to the resources of England.” As a consequence, India is “being continuously bled” (fourteen years later, in 1881, Karl Marx would describe this same process to Nikolai Danielson as “a bleeding process with a vengeance”).[6] Twenty years later, Naoroji went even further, “The short of the whole matter is, that under the present evil and unrighteous administration of Indian expenditure, the romance is the beneficience of British Rule, the reality is the ‘bleeding’ of the British Rule.”[7] Empire had none of the liberalism that it boasted, for it was nothing more than cannibalism on a vast scale.[8] Gandhian populism turned to Naoroji’s theory of the Drain of Wealth for his analysis of the degradation of India: the simple act of spinning one’s own cloth, and later of making one’s own salt, was a pedagogical exercise. Raw cotton left the shores of India for Britain, in whose textile factories it was spun into cloth, now sent back on British ships to be sold to the very Indians who had grown the cotton. The valueadded profits of the process resided in Britain: Indian peasants earned a pittance for their cotton and paid a pound for their clothes. If the people spun their own cloth, they would cut Britain out of the equation. Gandhi’s simple device not only created an esprit de cours among the nationalists, but it also provided a consistent lesson in self-reliance and against imperialism. The Congress and the students were vital instruments to take Naoroji’s academic message to the fields and factories of India. They brought the ideas to life.

Gandhi’s talents were encircled by a set of close associates who convinced the Congress to go along with the theory of Satyagraha, whose investment in mass action required all kinds of people to risk themselves on the streets. That non-violence was the preferred method of protest helped the movement along in the germinal phase of the 1920s. Brought out in large numbers to the streets and into the jails, people from all social classes and communities forged new social identities. The popular energy unleashed in the Gandhian moment is not to be underestimated. But, to be clear, Gandhi was not the initiator of all these movements, but a beneficiary of them. “Gandhi” was a symbol of the energy, the talisman of the moment. The specific, or literal, demands of the various struggles were enfolded into and contributed to the size of the revolutionary wave of Gandhianism. The specific interests of different groups, to a great extent, were submerged into the general interest of anti-colonialism.

Women of the peasant and tribal communities had routinely taken part in the mass rebellions of the earlier era. In cities, women of most classes had less access to street protests for a variety of reasons. Gandhi, in 1925, took advantage of a widely accepted (and sexist) idea that women are biologically less given to violence in order to appeal to families to allow young women to go out onto the front lines. “As long as women whose body and mind tend in one direction – i. e. towards the path of virtue – do not come into public life and purify it, we are not likely to attain Ramrajya or swaraj. Even if we did, I would have no use for that kind of swaraj to which such women have not made their full contribution. One could well stretch oneself on the ground in obeisance to women of purity of mind and heart. I should like such women to take part in public life.”[9] Women who worked in the Congress formed the Rashtriya Stree Sabha (1920), the National Council of Women in India (1925) and finally, the All-India Women’s Conference (1927). “Their concerns were ‘women’s issues,’” writes historian Geraldine Forbes, “but these could not be separated from a concern with freedom from foreign dominance and exploitation.”[10] By the late 1920s, the women who entered the movement pushed beyond Gandhi’s own approach to women (as mothers, as biologically non-violent), claiming their own place, seeing themselves as equally capable as men, and so entitled to universal rights.[11] Their experiences incubated the women’s movement, whose agenda far exceeded anything Gandhi had anticipated.[12]

Gandhi and the Congress orthodoxy would not countenance any fundamental reform on child marriage, purdah and female inheritance, but they did accept the claim for women’s education, women’s suffrage, women’s labour rights and an improvement in the situation of widowhood. These debates would spill over into the post-colonial era, where they would become the platform for settling accounts with family life and women’s rights. In the colonial period, meanwhile, large numbers of women came out onto the streets and into the Gandhian moment: “Even our old aunts and great-aunts and grandmothers used to bring pitchers of salt water to their houses and manufacture illegal salt. And then they would shout at the top of their voices, ‘We have broken the salt law!’”[13]

By the late 1930s, the Indian student movement became an important incubator for young women’s radical political action. The All India Students’ Federation set up a Girl Students’ Committee, which drew in young women such as Gita Banerji, Nargis Batlivala, Perin Bharucha,

Kanak Dasgupta (later the communist leader Kanak Mukherjee), Shanta Gandhi, Kalyani Mukherjee (Kumaramangalam), Bishwanath Mukherjee, Sova Majumdar, Anima Majumdar and Renu Roy (Chakravartty).[14] These young women took the lead in the prisoner release movement (bandimukhi andolan). Twenty thousand students at Delhi University followed their call in 1941 and marched out of their classes to demand the release of the Andaman prisoners. Manikuntala Sen, one of the young students, was close to the women who had been in these struggles. “Many had begun to form women’s units even as students,” she wrote in her memoir, “because in most towns and villages it was only these [college-educated] girls who could move around independently. In a manner of speaking, it was they who formed the vanguard of the women’s organization.”[15] The young women in Bengal, now organized together in the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS), threw themselves in the movement to get food into the mouths of those struck by the Bengal famine of 1943 – in Mymensingh, “Communist girls in the town rallied about a hundred mothers and sisters and brought them on to the streets. With babies in arms, they appealed to traders to stop profiteering and help the work of the people’s defence committees”; in Badarganj, a girl who worked in the sugarcane fields heard from the MARS organizers that the women in the Calcutta slums (bustee) had organized themselves, then asked, “Take me to Calcutta. I would like to learn from the bustee women how we can organize our village women”; in Pabna, five hundred women of MARS marched to the district magistrate, told him of the food crisis, and when he left in a huff, announced, “Next time we must bring ten thousand women. Only then can we break the callousness of the bureaucracy.”[16]

No equivalent Gandhian logic was necessary to prove the need for subordinate caste men and women to come out on the streets. Their early political career began in the trade unions and in the caste associations, where men and women gathered to fight for better working conditions and better social conditions. Dalit and “backward caste” men who had fought in the lower ranks of the British imperial army returned to their homes from World War I and from their imperial postings, eager to experience the equality promised them by their sacrifices. These servicemen argued against the restrictions against access to wells and to temples, to roads and teastalls. They joined with an earlier generation of social reformers who had fought to create schools for the subordinate castes, and used education as

the ladder for social mobility. Here the agenda of caste reform exceeded Gandhi from the start. In 1915, when he was on a trip to India from South Africa, Gandhi went to a meeting of the Servants of India Society in Pune. After listening to the various grievances and demands, Gandhi told the Marathi novelist Hari Narayan Apte, “I am afraid you will make [untouchables] rise in rebellion against society.” Apte responded, “Yes, let there be rebellion. That is just what I want.”[17] Apte’s comment is indicative of the radical edge in “untouchable” politics that was to be taken up by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who would become one of the principal leaders of modern India. Anxiety over the relationship between subordinate castes and Hinduism moved Gandhi to place temple entry movements at the forefront, and despite the origin of this struggle, it became one of the main conduits to draw dalits and “backward castes” into the Gandhian moment. Gandhi was anxious about both temple entry and the question of the relationship of dalits to Hinduism, which is why he was wary of the Vaikom satyagraha (1924) that used his techniques to open the road to a temple to all castes. His methods were also taken up by Ambedkar, whose Mahad satyagraha (1927) to open up a water tank, resembled in all the particulars the protests of the Congress. Of course, Ambedkar’s tone was far removed from Gandhi (he burned a copy of the odious Manudharmashastra, giving rage to many Brahmins). The two streams of Gandhi and Ambedkar fed into the same wide river of anti-colonial nationalism, with the two diverging on their vision for Indian society. The power of the moment should not be underestimated. One dalit man recalled that when he dressed like a Gandhian, he was an Indian tout de suite, “if I wore a Gandhi cap no one would ask me who I was … What I saw in the movement were the seeds of change that sooner or later had to germinate.”[18]

Gandhi had an easier time with the ideal of the peasantry. He saw them as essential to India, as, in a sense, from the soil of India. Gandhi’s first major ground struggle in India was in northern Bihar, the Champaran satyagraha of 1917. Of the peasants there, Gandhi wrote, “The world outside Champaran was not known to them. And yet they received me as though we had been age-long friends. It is no exaggeration, but the literal truth, to say that in this meeting with the peasants I was face to face with God, Ahimsa and Truth.”[19] Gandhi would call the peasants of India, daridranarayan, or the poor divine, a concept he developed from the

nationalist C. R. Das and the “godman” Vivekananda. The peasants were the “dumb millions,” as Gandhi called them, who invested their millennial hopes in his capacity, as well as found a way to utilize his resources to make gains for themselves in their localities.[20] Aware of the complex cultural world-view of the peasantry, Gandhi drew from them to create the concepts for his own movement. Karma, Sanyasi, Yagya, even ahimsa, Ram Rajya, tapasya, moksha, these and many other words came from the Hindustani speaking peasantry (albeit not necessarily those whose solace came from the Quran rather than the Ramcharitmanas). “The seeker is at liberty,” Gandhi wrote, “to extract from [The Gita],” for example, “any meaning he likes so as to enable him to enforce in his life the central teaching.”[21]

The peasant struggles engendered in the 1920s enhanced the confidence of those who took part. One elderly peasant, emboldened by the Champaran struggle said, “No one seems to help the poor people. Here is the Magistrate, who does not even do justice to us. All those who wear hats are alike. A few days ago, the planter had my house looted. When I preferred a complaint before this Magistrate, he instead of acting on it, threatened me with a cane.”[22] But the peasant nonetheless made his case, while others took to their own sticks and brickbats to give as good as they got. The retaliation flummoxed Gandhi, although confidence for it came not only from the earlier traditions of peasant insurgency but also from Gandhi’s own satyagrahas. The Congress refused to join with the peasantry on the Bengal Tenancy Amendment Bill (1928), and ducked an opportunity when Fazl-i-Hasan of Punjab went after the moneylenders. In both cases, the Praja Party and the Unionists held hands with the zamindars, and the Congress encouraged them. Even the mildest agrarian reforms did not cross the desk of the annual Congress meetings. The peasants rallied to Gandhi, even as, when the hoe hit the earth, the Congress wanted their support but not their issues. The peasants were daridranarayan, but not so the industrial working class. In them, Gandhi always sniffed the chalice of Bolshevism. At a meeting with zamindars (big landlords), Gandhi made clear his aversion to industrial action, not only as a tactic, but as a civilizational alien, “Class war is foreign to the essential genius of India which is capable of evolving a form of communism broad-based on the fundamental rights of all and equal justice to all. The Ramrajya of my dream ensures the rights alike of prince

and pauper.”[23] The abrupt entry of the working class into mass politics, outside the control of traditional hierarchies disturbed Gandhi. The early foray into politics came in Bombay in 1908. It made sense that Bombay be the home to this pioneering effort, for a third of the city’s workforce toiled in the factories, in the construction trades and in transportation. Half the workers, about 100,000, could be found in and around the textile trade. As well, the timing made sense. The Swadeshi agitation of 1905-11 came just after the introduction of electric lights in the factories. The former electrified the masses, the latter made them work longer shifts (15 hours), as the sunlight rule had been nullified. Conflict broke out in October 1905, with workers “throwing rocks, breaking windows and, in one case, destroying the attendance sheets and records kept by the time-keeper.”[24] The political leader in Bombay was B. G. Tilak, leader of the extremists in the Congress. He spoke on behalf of the workers, egging them on (he would later take their case to the 1907 Surat meeting of the Congress).[25] On June 24, 1908, the government arrested Tilak for consorting with anarchists. The workers at one factory struck (Greaves, Cotton & Co.) and then another (Lakshmidas) and then another (Globe), until the mills went silent and the millworkers went onto the street to battle the police. Small merchants joined in, as did domestic workers. It was the opening salvo from the working class.

The workers would go on to be an active part of the All-India Trade Union Congress (1920). Gandhi was averse to this, having already experienced another form of labour-management conflict in Ahmedabad. Gandhi joined the workers in their Majoor Mahajan (also known as the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association) during a strike in 1918. Gandhi recognized the problems faced by labour, but discouraged strikes or violence. He went on a fast, pleading with his friends among the mill owners to be the “trustees” of the wealth produced by the factories. This was his model of “trusteeship,” with the parent-owners taking good care of their children-workers. The workers’ organizations remained close to the Congress, pushing it from within (as well through the Congress Socialist Party, founded in 1934), or else from without. In 1928, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party held a forum next to the Calcutta session of the Congress, and then, fifty thousand workers joined the Congress for a mutual rally, with Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi addressing them.[26] Standing together, an inch of daylight between dais and crowd.

If the working-class posed a danger to the Gandhian ascension because of their independence, then the tribals were entirely invisible till 1921. Gandhi had little experience among the adivasis, the communities of people who laid claim to aboriginality, whose social and economic life was often governed by communal forms. One of the core principles of most adivasi communities was a trenchant independence, which provided them with the will to stand up to anyone who tried to subdue their political life or their social autonomy. Rebellions against the British bore the stamp of their various names (the Santhals, the Bhils). Millennial they might have been, but their inspiration was mainly from this devotion to sovereignty. Even as Gandhi only came to know of the adivasi in the 1920s, his leadership elsewhere moved the Bhils of his native Gujarat to begin a struggle for their rights and dignity. Motilal Tejawat, although himself not of the Bhil community, was incensed by anti-adivasi discrimination. The Bhils who joined Tejawat wore Gandhi caps, and in 1922 they began their own version of a Gandhian satyagraha. Armed with bows and arrows, the Bhils traversed their dominion, confronting aggressive policemen who felt their frustration. As historian David Hardiman puts it, “There is no record of anyone being killed by the Bhils – by their standards they were protesting in a remarkably non-violent manner.”[27] Gandhi, however, was unhappy by the staged violence, and he distanced himself from the Bhils. An envoy went to investigate, and he sent favourable reports back to Gandhi, as did Tejawat in a letter to the Mahatma. The British sent in the Mewar Bhil Corps, who fired into a crowd killing either 22 (according to Major Sutton) or more than a thousand (according to an oral Bhil tradition).

A similar struggle took place in the Rampa and Gudem hill tracts of the Andhra-Orissa borderlands, where Alluri Sita Rama Raju led a struggle of Gonds between 1922-24. Sita Rama Raju came to the area, inspired by Gandhi and moved quickly to organize among the adivasis. He did not have to work very hard to convince anyone of the systematic problems, namely the perfidious role of moneylenders and the merciless work of the forest officials who interfered with the Gond ways of shifting cultivation and nomadism. Sita Rama Raju “spoke highly of Mr. Gandhi,” wrote a colonial officer, although he was disposed to violence and regretted “that he was not able to shoot Europeans as they were always accompanied and surrounded by Indians whom he did not want to kill.”[28] It took the British two years to suppress the revolt. In both the Bhil and Gudem-Rampa rebellions,

Gandhi’s wave had a remarkable influence, and to both, Gandhi remained skeptical. The adivasis needed the full force of social reform (temperance, education, spinning), Gandhi felt, and not agitation; the adivasis and their allies did not always reject these reforms, but they conducted their own version of Gandhianism in their style. Gandhi worried about the independence of the working-class and what he called the indiscipline of the peasantry and adivasis. They had to be a part of the movement, but mainly as loyal followers. They were the “mob,” who had to heed the “heroes,” words Gandhi used to help sort out who belonged where in the struggle. The “mob” had to be mobilized through rules that Gandhi scrupulously devised, including how to stand at a demonstration. Of course, this is essential work of a sort, because any movement has to have some codes of conduct, some sort of discipline. Gandhi was, as the historian Ranajit Guha points out, “the first political leader of the Indian bourgeoisie to identify [the] resistance [of the masses] and attempt to overcome it as a precondition for harnessing the mass and energy of popular mobilization to his campaigns.”[29] Gandhi was fairly straightforward about this, writing in 1920,   The fact is that the formation of opinion today is by no means confined to the educated classes, but the masses have taken it upon themselves not only to formulate opinion, or to ascribe it to a temporary upheaval. It would be equally a mistake to suppose that this awakening amongst the masses is due either to the activity of the Ali Brothers or myself. For the time being we have the ear of the masses because we voice their sentiments. The masses are by no means so foolish or unintelligent as we sometimes imagine. They often perceive things with their intuition, which we ourselves fail to see with our intellect. But whilst the masses know what they want, they often do not know how to express their wants and, less often, how to get what they want. Herein comes the use of leadership, and disastrous results can easily follow a bad, hasty, or what is worse, selfish lead.[30]

 

The masses could not be taken for granted. It was to the benefit of the organization to have them lined up, almost inert in their acceptance of the leadership. But this was not to be, if the leadership took them for granted. The success of the Congress was in Gandhi’s insistence that the mass line must hew closely to the needs and demands of the masses. Of course, some parts of the masses had to be properly disciplined or else they would disrupt

the general tenor of the Gandhian revolt. Industrial workers and adivasis, in particular, had an independent political identity that irked Gandhi’s lieutenants. They wanted to welcome workers and adivasis for their civic identities, as long as these were flung into the Congress and its mass organizations. Their independent organizational identities had to be set aside. Gandhi wanted to exercise hegemony over his movement, not to allow antagonistic interests to remain, such as between capital and labour. These had to be neutralized, to remain not as antagonistic, but to be seen as differences that could be resolved without any change in the basic structure of society. It was a united front with the more powerful in the saddle, and the political leaders invested in securing some modest allowances for those on the lower ends of the wealth spectrum. This the industrial magnates accepted. They too, uneasily but surely, lined up behind Gandhianism.

It was not for nothing that the industrial magnate of Bombay, J. N. Tata opened Swadeshi Mills in 1886, drawing on the word (swadeshi) that had already become an important indicator of sympathy for the nationalist cause.[31] Britain suffocated the Indian economy, but yet, in the interstices, it allowed, and even encouraged the growth of native businesses in some sectors. To absorb the excess cotton production from East Africa and Central India, the British gave the nudge to nascent industrialists, who opened their mills in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Madurai and elsewhere. The pre-Gandhi Congress did not threaten the businessmen, since its principal demand, more representation for Indians in governance might also translate into more opportunities for Indians in business. In 1908, Tilak approached Dinshaw Wacha, Congress’ grande homme Sir Pherozeshah Mehta’s confidante, hoping that he would go to his fellow mill-owners and calm them down. Wacha had no special beef against the Congress, but he disliked the extremists. He did not walk with Tilak, for he felt that the lokmanya spent his time with the “economic Cheap Jacks who are now vociferously howling the Swadeshi shibboleth.” The mill-owners, Wacha argued, were the true proponents of swadeshi, since it was through their factories that India’s industrial advancement would take place.[32] In 1927, the chief captains of industry created the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). They were spurred on by the Hilton Young Commission (1926)’s decision to overvalue the rupee, and so suppress India’s domestic industry by finance rather than (as with the East India Company) by brute force. G. D. Birla took to the floor of the

Legislative Assembly in 1929 to criticize Sir Victor Sasson’s claim that it was Indian industry that wanted an Industrial Disputes Bill. “I wish Sir Victor Sassoon had the courage to tell the government why that is so,” he said – “because Indian mills are losing money, they are not very keen to come to terms with labour. And all that is due to the ruinous financial policy pursued by the government.”[33] Sir Sasson decamped to China shortly afterwards. At the 1930 FICCI meeting, D. P. Khaitan spoke for his class, “at long last there is a dawning upon our minds the realization of the stubborn fact that unless India attains Self-Government it is difficult for her to improve her economic position.”[34] These were bourgeois nationalists, eager for freedom from the British but not freedom for the masses to fashion their own destiny. The tight struggle between these competing visions of the new nations continues into our day.

Gandhi’s socialism (sarvodaya, compassion for all) would otherwise have disturbed the barons of FICCI, as it did many including Wacha, but it emerged in the context of the working-class movement and the threat of Indian Communism. Gandhi’s theories of trusteeship did not always sit well, but it was better in the eyes of the barons of the FICCI than outright expropriation. Gandhi’s gentle mediation in the 1918 Ahmedabad dispute endeared him to the industrialists, who had otherwise steeled themselves for much more forceful syndicalism. Gandhi drew in the business magnates whose ancestors had opened their purses to the Congress, which now got their money and support.[35] Occasionally, when the Congress strayed, the magnates turned up their noses. In 1942, for instance, G. D. Birla and J. R. D. Tata, two of Gandhi’s financiers, joined others in signing a memorandum to the Viceroy against the subcontinent-wide Quit India movement, “We are all businessmen and therefore we need hardly to point out that our interest lies in peace, harmony, goodwill and order throughout the country.”[36] This memorandum – now forgotten – was perfidious. It went against the struggles of the Indian people. Two years later, these very businessmen inked the Bombay Plan, which threw the magnates in with the emergent nation-state. They even joined the Congress’ theory that the State should regulate and manage the economy through the infant industry thesis (using subsidies and import tariffs to help grow Indian industry). In 1931, in a letter to the communists Gandhi wrote, “The history of Japan reveals many an instance of self-sacrificing capitalists. During the last Satyagraha, quite a number of capitalists went in for considerable

sacrifice, went to jail and suffered. Do you want to estrange them? Don’t you want them to work with you for the common good?”[37] The example for Gandhi was Jamnalal Bajaj, founder of the Bajaj Group, who joined Gandhi’s struggle as a full-time pracharak (worker), became the founding president of the Gandhi Seva Sangh, was ex-communicated by his caste fellows for his anti-untouchability work and went to jail during the Salt Satyagraha.[38] Gandhi would have had Bajaj in mind when he wrote this letter. Except Bajaj was the exception not the rule. To Gandhi the business sector was as authentically Indian as the peasantry: represented in varnashramadharma (the order of varnas) as the Vaishya, business was of the soil. The magnates recognized this in Gandhi, and were swept up in his moment with their interests intact and unthreatened. What is remarkable about the Gandhian moment is that it was able to absorb, with different capillarity, both the business class and the communists. The former came because they felt that Gandhi was not as radical as the latter, whose influence among the working-class had begun to make itself felt in the 1920s. A rich debate among the communists over how to characterize Gandhi began at the inception of the movement, and would linger on long after Gandhi died: was he the fig leaf of an emergent Indian bourgeoisie, unwilling to make significant concessions to the workers, and only in alliance under the flag of nationalism out of its own convenience, or was Gandhi a genuine mass leader who had yoked the business class against its will for a transition of colonial India into some kind of socialist dispensation? Twenty-two year old S. A. Dange published an extended pamphlet in 1921 entitled Gandhi vs. Lenin, which while sympathetic to Gandhi came out in favour of Lenin. “Gandhism admits all the vices from which Society of our day is suffering, all the vices emanating from the rule of capitalism. It also concedes that Capitalism will stoop to anything to preserve its authority and a revolution or a radical change alone can redeem Society. But the point where Bolshevism and Gandhism are deadly opposed, is that of methods to work out the revolution in Society.”[39] A quote from B. G. Tilak hung under the title. The shadow of “extremist” Congress remained with Dange. It was impossible to discount the impact of Gandhi, but Gandhism’s methods did not impress this young man. The leftwing within the Congress came principally from the students who would otherwise have taken to the gun, from those inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and those who took umbrage at the Gandhian

accommodation of tradition and power. In 1921, a lawyer from Madras, who was then active in the nascent trade union movement and in the Congress, wrote an “Open Letter to Mahatma Gandhi” in The Hindu, the leading paper of the region.   I do not wish to trouble you much with my views on the present situation. I am your humble follower in the fight for Swaraj … I believe that our unfortunate people will never be free and happy until we succeed not merely against the present foreign bureaucracy, but also against the future bureaucracy of our own people. Therefore I believe that only communism, that is to say, holding land and vital industries in common use and for the benefit of all the workers in the country, can bring a real measure of contentment and independence to our people … When we can make use of non-violent non-cooperation against political autocracy, I fail to see why we should not use the same against capitalistic autocracy? We cannot fight against the one without fighting against the other.[40]

 

The writer of this letter was M. Singaravelu, born of a modest fisher family in Madras but given to hard work and to good fortune, which brought him to the bar and eventually into politics. Inspired by the 1905 Russian Revolution and the 1908 Bombay strike, Singaravelu involved himself in social welfare work, and from there he went into the Congress. Drawn to working-class struggles, Singaravelu found himself at odds with the Congress’ reticence to give itself over to industrial action. At the 1922 Gaya Congress meeting, Singaravelu fell in with Dange, whose biography resembles in part that of Singaravelu, although Dange was from the Bombay region. Attempts to form various labour formations and trade unions and contact with people like M. N. Roy, whose link to the Russian Revolution of 1917 was well-established, Singaravelu and Dange were involved in the foundation of the Communist Party. And yet, they persisted in working alongside the Congress, whether in the Workers and Peasants Party (1925-1929) or the Congress Socialist Party (founded in 1934). Singaravelu, E. M. S. Namboodiripad and others straddled the fine line between nationalism and socialism, holding fast to the latter while in the Gandhian moment.[41] In 1922, Singaravelu and Roy corresponded about the “methods” of Gandhianism – with Roy averse to the non-cooperation method (which he saw as “petty bourgeois) and Singaravelu as aware of the need “to concentrate on paralyzing the bureaucracy wherever possible and

that and that alone.”[42] The strategic and tactical divergences had to be naturally debated amongst the communists – although it would have been foolhardy to sit out the massive wave of struggle that had broken in the 1920s.

If the bulk of social classes found their way into the Gandhian sweep, artists and intellectuals, as well as figures in the public light, came easily into the nationalist orbit. The Progressive Writers’ Association (1935-36) captured the energy of the anti-colonial writers across the subcontinent. Gandhian themes and virtues saturated the novels of Premchand’s Sevasadan (1918) to Godaan (1936), Venkataramani’s Murugan (1927) to Desabhaktan Kandan (1932) and Shivram Karanth’s Choman Dudi (1949), as well as the short stories of Ali Sardar Jafri, Manzil (1938) and Ismat Chugtai’s Lifhaaf (1941). Jafri would eventually bend to the Communism that became a substantial part of his life. Chugtai offered a vibrant critique of cloistered domestic life and a celebration of female sexuality, something outside Gandhi’s own personal ambit but not incommensurable with the vast social changes afoot in Gandhian India. These writers either fully celebrated Gandhi, as did Vallatthol in his massive poetic cycle, Sahityamanjari (1934-54) or else they had a testy relationship with him, as did Rabindranath Tagore. Nonetheless, just before he died, Tagore wrote Gandhi Maharaj,   We who follow Gandhi maharaj

Have one thing in common. We never fill our purses with the spoils of the poor. Nor bend our knees to the rich.

 

Unnava Lakshminarayana’s Malapalli (1922) cautioned the country that if economic justice did not come to the dalit hamlets a violent revolution would break out. The British appeared in the novel as rakshashas (monsters), the police as vultures. Venkatdas, a dalit youth, forms an army (called Santan) to take on the landlords and the State. The government banned Lakshminarayana’s book. The communist activists would recite Venkatdas’ speeches from the book in their colleges in the 1930s; communist pamphlets would quote extensively from Venkatdas’ speech on economic inequality delivered in the courtroom scene before his tragic death in prison. Pendyala Lokanatham, a communist activist who

would go on to become the secretary of the Progressive Writers’ Association, wrote his poems for the red flag, while his contemporary Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (Sri Sri) sang for the “red flag of its dawn, like the ritual flame of time.”[43]

From the revolutionary poets to the cricketers at the 1923 quadrangle, from the painters to the film-stars, from the historians to the scientists, the impact of Gandhianism and the freedom movement was remarkable. In Jayant Desai’s 1940 Aaj ka Hindustani (Today’s Indian), Prithviraj Kapoor struts his nationalism as he ambles through his villages,   Charka chalaao behno Kaato ye kachche dhaage Dhaage ye kah rahe hain Bharat ke bhaag jaage Charkhe ke geet gao Duniya ko ye sunaao Charkha chalaane waala Gandhi hai aage aage.

  Spin the charkha [spinning wheel] sisters, Cut these raw threads The threads tell you India’s destiny is aroused Sing the song of the charkha Proclaim to the world, The charkha spinner, Gandhi, Leads us all.[44]

 

India in the 1920s bristled with popular energy. It was difficult to remain outside the fold of the Congress. At least one person in every family took to the streets, and most people felt the warm breath of the nationalist wind. It was impossible to miss. What brought these people into the widest embrace of the movement was a Gandhian Bargain: that India’s freedom from British rule would produce a dynamic toward the fullest democracy and equality, even within the constraints of a structure that set the industrial magnate against the industrial worker, the zamindar against the peasant, the patriarch against the daughter-in-law. Aspirations of the movement set

democracy and justice as irreducible values. These took on the names of socialism and secularism, the ethics of social equality that promised to sweep away distinctions of class and caste, make less of the differences of religious worship, and to do away with hierarchies in the household. These promises, the Gandhian Bargain, would sustain the major political events of the entire twentieth century, certainly till the 1980s, when the Bargain began to fray. The fights were fought on the foundation of the freedom movement, on its ethic of democracy and equality. Its enemy was strong, not only the colonial state, but as well the social inequities of Indian history. The social effect of the Great Depression set off by the late 1920s, Gandhi’s compromises with Viceroy Irwin in 1931, and the murder of Bhagat Singh by the British with no condemnation from Gandhi and the Congress leadership threatened the unity of the Congress. In 1931, the Congress members came to Karachi for their annual session. The official historian of the Congress (and a member of its right-wing), Pattabhi Sitaramayya recalls that at Karachi “there was a certain cleavage between the younger and older sections.” Doubt spread – was the Congress going to drift “with the old current of Dominion Status, British Imperialism and a Brown Bureaucracy,” and was it going to toss overboard the “labour problem – of the peasants and the workers – and socialistic ideals.”[45] Nehru, the safe socialist, was made the president. He felt pressure to push for a Resolution on Fundamental Rights. Nehru later acknowledged that the resolution – although it called for “nationalisation of key industries and services” – was nonetheless “not socialism at all, and a capitalist state could easily accept almost everything contained in that resolution.”[46] Yet, the resolution condensed the broad socialist demands that had become common sense in India by 1931: freedom of expression, free association, freedom of conscience, protection of minority cultures, legal equality, equal rights, adult franchise, free and compulsory education, no capital punishment, rights for industrial workers, no serfdom, protection of women workers, right to form unions, land reforms and onward. It was a remarkable dossier of rights, although, as E. M. S. Namboodiripad put it, the resolution “did not contain anything beyond the bourgeois democratic slogans raised by those who led bourgeois revolutions in France and other European countries.”[47] The 1931 Resolution on Fundamental Rights provided the horizon of possibilities for the national struggle and for the republic to come.

In the new India, after 1947, Gandhi’s Congress, under pressure from the big bourgeoisie and the rural landlords, hastened to avoid the more radical gestures in Gandhi’s agenda – sarvodaya, welfare for all, had to be made into a cottage industry rather than a horizon for the entire country. Nehru’s fascination with big industry allowed these old social classes to hide their political instincts behind him, the face of modernity rather than of old-fashion hierarchy. If Sardar Patel had been their champion he might not have been able to draw in the left-leaning sections of the Congress. Nehru could do so. He was the best mask for the big bourgeoisie, both in setting aside Gandhi and in appealing to Gandhi’s masses as his political heir. In March 1948, not long after the assassination of Gandhi, his closest advisors and followers gathered at his ashram in Sevagram for a conclave. This meeting had been planned before the murder. Gandhi had sensed a drift in his movement, as the new Indian leadership seemed uninterested in his agenda of sarvodaya. The Gandhians who arrived, naturally, seemed at sea. Their guru had been killed not more than a month ago, and grief and bewilderment confounded them. All eyes descended on Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s putative spiritual heir, hoping that he would have some answers for them. But Bhave wanted little part of leadership. He was content with his small acts of service. Gandhians of immense stature – Bibi Amtussalam, Kaka Kalelkar, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Acharya Kripalani, Jayaprakash Narayan, Pyarelal, G. Ramachandran, and Thakkar Bapa – were paralyzed by Gandhi’s death, the partition of India, the magnitude of the refugee crisis and the rise of the Hindu Right. Government ministers and officials such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Dr. Zakir Husain and Gulzarilal Nanda, were caught between their official responsibilities and their emotional attachment to Gandhianism. These Gandhians bemoaned the fact that spinning of cloth and khadi seemed already to have lost its centrality in the new nation, that even the new national flag had been fabricated with machine-made cloth. They worried about the growth of the Indian army, hoping that they might be able to create a “non-violent army” as a counter to the defence establishment. They wanted to create a new national organization, drawing together all the Gandhian social service unions – the Charkha Sangh (spinning union), the Gramodyog Sangh (cottage industry union), Talimi Sangh (educational trust), Goseva Sangh (cow-protection union), Harijan Sevak Sangh (union for dalit welfare), Hindustani Prachar Sabha (association for the

propagation of Hindustani), Hindustan Mazdur Sevak Sangh (Indian labourers’ union), Adivasi Seva Mandal (association for the welfare of the adivasis) and the Kasturba Trust. These made up a large part of the Indian social service and charity landscape. Nonetheless, these leading Gandhians felt insecure. Gandhi’s youngest son, Devadas, worried that too few people would join the new Sarva Seva Sangh, “The world will assume that the strength of Gandhians is but one fistful.”[48] Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), already the most well-known socialist, had less patience for this despondency. “You are like Hanumanji, unaware of your own strength, your own energy,” he said.[49] JP wanted something to happen, anything.

The Gandhians waited for Nehru. He arrived a day after they had begun their discussion, and poured cold water on their aspirations. Talk of khadi and spinning irritated him. “Major issues confront us,” he said, “fundamental questions. Things like khadi are secondary; they’re branches of the tree, not the root of the matter. Such issues are fine in themselves, but behind them lies an artificiality and an unreality.”[50] Would khadi industries be productive enough to generate enough cloth to cover the shortfall, and would these industries be able to compete with machine production? The answer, of course, was no. Nehru was interested in industrialization and state centralization, principle elements in the “new atmosphere of change.”[51]

Without Nehru in the room, the Gandhians considered their options. Acharya Kripalani – Gandhi’s associate since the Non-Cooperation Movement and Congress President in 1946 – knowingly said that Gandhi’s turn to khadi and salt had to be seen in terms of their revolutionary implications. What Gandhi manufactured in the seashore was not “salt but revolution,” namely that it was the revolutionary act of defiance that governed the action – not the salt making itself. “Why are these things no longer animated with the same feeling?” asked Kripalani. “Because the old spirit of revolution is gone … We should not now change from being revolutionaries to being reformists.”[52] Gandhi’s secretary and biographer, Pyarelal, pointed out that the spirit had gone because the horizon of the freedom movement had been met at its lowest level – India had attained independence. The Congress Party, geared to this end, had ended up “a mere shadow of the original Congress. The Congress is enervating itself in the power struggles of the day.” The “politics of power” had drawn it in and eviscerated its revolutionary potential.[53] The Congress had ejected the

Gandhians from its ranks. It had become the instrument of state power for the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie.

INDIAN SOCIALISM

The Congress could not have so easily nudged on the cultural consensus in India over the past four decades without the collapse of Indian socialism. Gandhi’s ideas had a much more decisive impact on the Samajwadi traditions of Indian politics than in his own Congress Party. The Congress became the domain of Nehru, the great modernizer, who buried artisanal production and Gandhian social pieties in the 1952 Indian Constitution’s Directive Principles of State Policy. Nehru was keen on large infrastructure and big industry, with the corporate barons willing to go along with him because they were not yet strong enough to tackle international capital on their own and, besides, already benefitted from the no-bid contract regime set-up to benefit them. “Socialism” would remain a convenient word to be wheeled out when it suited the Nehru regime, such as at Avadhi in 1956, when the government wished to gets its policies past this or that corporate barrier. It would be used by Indira Gandhi to settle factional scores, by bludgeoning her opponents with her capacity to earn mass appeal through rhetoric and bluster (the 1969 bank nationalization being exemplary). It would be used by Rajiv Gandhi in his darkest days, as the Bofors scandal erupted, to go after “black money” through the “raid raj” of the late 1980s – and then, as it got too close to his friends (such as the industrialist Lalit Thapar), the dogs (namely Finance Minister V. P. Singh) had to be called off.[54]

When Gandhi pushed the Congress to become a mass party in the 1920s, he had to confront the old social classes and notables who had little interest in democracy. Between the Khan Bahadurs and the Maharajas lay the industrialists and the zamindars. In 1934, G. D. Birla wrote to his closest ally Thakurdas, “Vallabhbhai [Patel], Rajaji [C. Rajagopalachari], and Rajendra Babu [Prasad] are all fighting Communism and Socialism. It is therefore necessary that some of us who represent healthy capitalism should help Gandhiji as far as possible and work with a common object.”[55] When Nehru took the reins of the Congress in 1936, the industrialists worried that he would take the party toward socialism. Thakurdas wrote to Birla, “The way it strikes me is that Jawaharlalji meant to go the whole hog,

but evidently, he found resistance in the opposition which he encountered from what I would call the ‘Mahatmaji’ group.” Birla replied, “I am perfectly satisfied with what has taken place. Mahatmaji kept his promise and without uttering a word, he saw that no new commitments were made.”[56] Socialism was off the table. Nehru’s political views of the 1930s drew him to the Communists and Socialists despite his own misgivings about their agenda. In 1936, he created a team in Allahabad to advise him and to help him run the All-India Congress Committee. They included some of the brightest lights amongst the new generation of Communist and Socialist intellectuals – Z. A. Ahmed, K. M. Ashraf, Hajrah Begum, Rasheed Jahan, Mahmuduzzaffar Khan, R. M. Lohia, and Sajjad Zaheer. They engineered the mass contact movement. The mass contact movement had a special relevance for the Congress towards Muslim peasants and workers who had slowly drifted to the Muslim League. This was certainly on Nehru’s mind. But it was not the entire reason for mass contact, which was also the instrument by the socialists to reach out to the masses as a base for their views in the Congress. This was a “state of revolutionary mass action,” Ashraf said.[57]

All this was too much for the Congress’ right wing. Later, Sajjad Zaheer would recall the role played by Acharya Kripalani, who “politically I think hated us.”[58] “I feel that the right wing of Congress leadership knew about each and every one of our activities and, I think, they were reported to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and even to Gandhiji by Kripalaniji. I felt his, sort of, main job was to see that Jawaharlal Nehru did not go left and that he remained in the confines that they thought he should remain. That is my opinion. And that any transgression by Panditji was disliked by these people. So they concentrated their main attack, long discussions in the Working Committee, I believe, on why these communist, these leftists, had been allowed to work in the All-India Congress Committee.”[59] Hajrah Begum felt that Kripalani was Gandhi’s eyes and ears in the Congress Committee. He let them do their work, “but if Kripalani put his foot down, then that was dead.”[60] The Socialists felt hemmed in by the Congress’s conservatives. Nothing that the “Mahatmaji Group” could do was able to prevent the mass upsurge of peasants and industrial workers in the 1930s – some driven by the adverse conditions set by the Great Depression and others by the 1930 Civil Disobedience movement’s radical no tax, no rent slogan. Peasant

unrest around the country galvanized socialist and communist activists to create platforms such as the South Indian Federation of Peasants and Agricultural Labour (by N. G. Ranga and E. M. S. Namboodiripad) and the Bihar Kisan Sabha (by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati). Sahajanand traveled across Bihar and the United Provinces to speak at small Kisan gatherings trying to build what would in 1936 become the All-India Kisan Sabha. The Kisan Sabha manifesto called for the abolition of the zamindari system, cancellation of rural debt and full tenancy rights for agricultural workers.[61] Colonial officials watched people like Sahajanand carefully. “There is no doubt that the movement is gaining ground and that his policy of working up his brief against local abuses wherever he goes is gaining him adherents,” wrote one official.[62] These meetings had a decisively radical edge. Congress vacillation rose quickly to the surface. A meeting of the UP Provincial Congress Socialist Party in Etawah (UP) in 1934 expressed “its deep concern at the fact that there exists a clique within the Congress whose evil influence is making the Congress policy reactionary and diverting the attention of the country from the goal of complete independence.”[63] It was in this melee of popular struggle that the two influential British Communists, R. P. Dutt and Ben Bradley, drafted their “Dutt Bradley Thesis” – that the Congress leadership had two flanks, one reactionary who had to be defeated, and the other made of “left national reformists” who had to be supported and pushed to the left. The “left national reformists” already pushed for “a line of irreconcilable struggle with imperialism, for an advance of the program to reflect the growing influence of socialist ideas.”[64]

Contradictions abounded, largely along caste lines. Swami Sahajanand, like Chhotu Ram of Punjab, represented the cultivators from middle-caste backgrounds. They subsumed the dalits under their agenda. Jagjivan Ram, a young Congressman at that time, organized the Khet Mazdoor Sangh to bring dalit agriculturalists into this political contest.[65] Caste cleavages in the countryside would continue to bedevil Indian socialism, right to the present. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, industrial workers conducted almost four thousand strikes and lockouts across the subcontinent, with more than half a million workers involved in them. From Bengal’s jute mills to Kanpur’s textile mills, from the Bombay workers’ massive struggle against the Industrial Dispute Bill to the railway workers’ fight for their rights and the safety of their industry. A mass rally in Bombay on

November 6, 1938 saw eighty thousand workers addressed by the Communist leader S. A. Dange, the Kisan Sabha leader Indulal Yagnik and the Independent Labour Party leader B. R. Ambedkar. The Kanpur strike pulled in the Congress workers, so that the United Provinces Congress Committee felt impelled by its local Congress leader Balkrishna Sharma (president of the City Congress Committee) to resolve, “The workers of Cawnpore are fighting not only for themselves but for the entire working class of India and are fighting for human rights.”[66] This was indeed the case: sanitation workers refused to clean the homes of the clerks and jobbers, barbers gave free haircuts to the strikers, bus drivers refused to bring strike breakers to work, traders and shopkeepers maintained solidarity strikes, and women from all backgrounds maintained the pickets at the factory gates.[67]

In 1934, the socialists in the Congress formed the Congress Socialist Party. It was to be an anchor for their views, a vehicle to assert themselves inside the increasingly conservative Congress Party. Gandhi was not a man of their ilk – he went backwards to the reform tradition of Gopal Krishna Gokhale not the radical dynamic of Jotirao and Savitribai Phule. The Congress Socialists recognized Gandhi’s importance, but they did not adopt his horizon. They drew from India’s vibrant radical history and from the theory of Marx. “The immediate task,” the founders of the Congress Socialist Party wrote, “is to develop the national movement into a real antiimperialist movement aiming at freedom from the foreign power and the native system of exploitation. For this it is necessary to wean the antiimperialist elements in the Congress away from its present bourgeois leadership, and to bring them under the leadership of revolutionary socialism.”[68] The wave of struggles in the 1930s gave the socialists confidence. Sampurnanand wrote in the Congress Socialist Party’s journal in 1935, “We must, while concentrating on the organization of labour and the peasantry, leave no stone unturned to expose the follies and reactionary policies of the Congress High Command, without deliberately irritating the rank and file.”[69] This loyal Congressman (who would become the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in the 1950s), hoped to mold “the Congress into a Soviet of the representatives of the revolutionary classes and a true instrument for the attainment of independence and socialization.” Ashok Mehta, a leader of the Congress Socialist Party, wrote confidently, “So today for the world socialism is the only goal available. Sooner or later the

nations of the world will have to go the Moscow Road.”[70] The colonial state worried about this as well. The Bombay authorities agonized for good reason, “The Congress Socialists are drifting more definitely in the direction of communism.”[71]

The tasks set for the local Congress Socialists was to organize workers and to expose the reactionaries in the Congress. In 1936, Sajjad Zaheer toured the towns of northern India to test the waters. Enthusiasm for socialism amongst students, peasants and workers lifted Zaheer’s spirits. In Meerut, five to six hundred members of the district Kisan Sabha, led by Congress leaders Keshav Gupta and Rajendra Pal, marched into the city. “They presented their grievances before the Collector. This demonstration had caused quite a stir in the town.” Among paper mill workers in Lucknow, Zaheer found, a strong union. “Lenin Day was organized by that union and was well attended by the workers.” In Lucknow he also found that “some Muslim students of local Arabic Colleges of theology” had joined the Congress Socialist Party. “I gathered that one developed comrade had organized several study circles of those students, and now they were keen to participate in our general activities.” But all was not well. In Meerut, as in other towns, Zaheer found, “The local Congress Committee is completely dominated by the Rightists, who seem to be pro-landlord. The Socialists are fought bitterly by these people on every occasion.”[72] The Congress in power in the provinces since 1937 began to exercise the prerogatives of rule for the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie – cracking down on strikes to protect their links to the power brokers. Sardar Patel, champion of the Bardoli (Gujarat) peasants in 1928, became the champion of the Saran (Bihar) landlords in 1938: “Comrade Lenin was not born in this country and we do not want a Lenin here. We want Gandhi and Ramchandra. Those who preach class hatred are enemies of the country.”[73]

The strand of the Rightists at the grassroots level reflected the views of Birla-Thakurdas and the “Mahatmaji Group.” It would seek any opportunity to isolate and remove the Socialists, and of course the Communists. In the aftermath of the 1942 uprising, when the Congress Socialists threw themselves into an armed rebellion against the British, the Congress Right went after the Communists – accusing them of being collaborators with the British.[74] This accusation took place in 1945-46, during a major wave of uprisings against both British rule and the Indian bourgeoisie: the movement to release the imprisoned Indian National Army troops, the

Royal Indian Navy mutiny, the industrial strike actions in the main factory towns, the Tebhaga uprising in Bengal, the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising in Travancore and the Telengana uprisings in Hyderabad.[75] The Congress drew up charge sheets, accusing the activists closest to the uprisings of collaboration with the British. In the process, they expelled the Communists from the Congress movement.[76] It is no wonder that by 1948 the Communists would have no faith in the Congress – turning to their own adventures with the planned putsch, which was circumvented by arrests of Communist leaders early in the year. The Congress had a difficult time purging socialism from its rank and file. A major discussion inside the party during 1947 about its reorganization led inexorably to the question of socialism. The upshot of the discussion revealed a deep-seated commitment to socialism in some form. “Most Congressmen call themselves socialist; it would remove many causes of friction if the Congress were deliberately to announce its socialist objectives, plan its policies with these objectives in view and rehaul its organizational structure, including a shake-up of the personnel in control of the key points in the Congress,” said the Congress’ summary document. “The Congress refusal to become the catharsis of popular discontent and disillusionment,” it continued, “has left the field open to communalists and adventurists to cynically exploit the situation.”[77]

Ram Manohar Lohia, one of the leaders of the Congress Socialist Party and the principle intellectual of Indian socialism, considered the dilemma of independent political action seriously on the verge of independence. He wrote two long memorandums to his colleagues in the party, wondering whether the Socialists should not simply wind up their organization and work to change the Indian National Congress to the Indian Socialist Congress.[78] Could the Congress, “an instrument of independence,” become “an instrument of socialism”? Lohia believed it possible, and urged the Socialists to attempt to reconstruct the Congress into an “instrument for state-building and an instrument for socialism.” On the eve of independence, the Congress General Secretary Shankarrao Deo, a key drafter of the Indian Constitution, urged the Socialist Party to cooperate with the Congress to move it to build a “state based on solid, democratic and socialistic principles.” If the Socialists wished instead to be an opposition to the Congress, then they should leave the Congress Party. Socialist President Jayaprakash Narayan welcomed Deo’s comments, as did

peasant leader N. G. Ranga. Ranga called on the Socialists to “liquidate their party and join us in making the Congress the greatest champion of the toiling masses.” JP was more circumspect, “Congress resolutions and manifestos have always read well and aimed high. But compare them or Mr. Deo’s fine words with the practice of the Congress Governments. Or, compare them with the state of the Congress organization, the rapid growth in them of vested interests, the mounting corruption and communalism and ‘castism,’ all enemies of Socialism. Mr. Deo knows how in his own province [Maharashtra], the Congress has fallen a prey.”[79]

The CPI, which had been torn over some of these same questions, suggested that the problem of the Socialist Party was that its leadership pinned too great hopes on the Congress and Nehru (at the most to become “his majesty’s constitutional opposition”). The CSP believed that the parliamentary and legislative route was sufficient to bring socialism to India (“It requires an amazing boldness these days to parade mere responsibility to the legislature as a transitional step to socialism,” commented the CPI).[80] This was a fair assessment. The Socialists themselves seemed at crosspurposes. Unlike the Gandhians, who despite their legendary status were able to have an honest conclave in 1948 to consider their tasks, the Socialist legends (JP, Lohia, Ashok Mehta, Achyut Patwardhan) seemed unable to agree on their assessment of the Congress and their way forward. The Socialist Party broke with the Congress for the 1951-52 elections, winning only twelve seats – this was its death-knell. JP and Patwardhan withdrew from politics, Ashok Mehta joined the Congress, leaving Lohia by himself. The Praja Socialist Party (PSP) that Lohia founded in 1952 had a decidedly north Indian look – Lohia’s insistence on Hindi as the national language alienated many of those who had been part of the anti-Hindi agitation. At its founding Congress, Lohia said, “A sterile Gandhism has come into existence which concentrates almost exclusively on changing the heart of the well-placed to the utter neglect of change of the poor-man’s heart.”[81] Lohia wanted to invigorate the class politics of Indian socialism. But the vacillation toward the Congress crippled the socialist movement. Nehru’s tilt toward socialism in the late 1950s with policies of the 2nd Five Year Plan confused many of Lohia’s supporters. A third of the PSP members left the party with Mehta for the Congress in 1964, and by 1971 half of those who remained departed for the Congress.[82] Along with them went important

local leaders, who took their units – P. C. Ghosh (West Bengal), M. Prasad Sinha (Bihar), P. T. Pillai (Kerala), T. Prakasam (Andhra Pradesh) and Triloki Singh (Uttar Pradesh). Triloki Singh, once the General Secretary of the PSP, joined the Congress, and then departed from it to form his own Jan Congress – angry at what he called the “totalitarian trends” in the Congress. Lohia’s death in 1967 hastened the PSP’s demise – since so much of the socialist movement in the decade previous emanated from his person. The last gasp of the original Socialist dynamic came with Karpoori Thakur’s accession to the Chief Minister’s office in Bihar in 1970. When V. P. Singh took the oath of office for his ill-fated eleven-month tenure as Prime Minister (1989-90), he invoked the names of Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan – this from a man who as Finance Minister under Rajiv Gandhi pushed forward the liberalisation agenda only to abandon Rajiv Gandhi on personal grounds. It was the nadir of the Indian socialist tradition.

As popular distress and discontent grew in the 1960s, the socialists and the communists moved toward more extensive participation in struggle. In Bihar, a famine tore through the countryside. The state government appointed Jayaprakash Narayan to head the Bihar Relief Committee. The journalist Khushwant Singh visited the villages around Aurangabad, Sasaram and Bhabua – epicenter of the famine, and gauged the popular reaction. “Jayaprakash is in a unique position. He is much loved by the peasantry. No political labels attach to him.”[83] JP became the pole around which opposition to Indira Gandhi’s Congress grew in the 1970s. When the Bihar students launched their strike on March 18, 1974, they turned to JP as their leader. A year later, Indira Gandhi launched the Emergency, which went after her four opponents – those in the Congress who as yet had no faith in her; those on the Right (the Jana Sangh and RSS) who had deeply divisive ideas about Indian society; those on the socialist flank such as JP who commanded large swathes of the social unrest around her; and those on the communist left such as the CPI-M and the Maoists who posed the greatest threat to her in the workers’ movements. Antipathy to the Congress drew substantial sections of these four strands close together – only the communist left (the CPI-M and the Maoists) stayed away from fronts that included the toxic Right, although it played a significant role in the antiEmergency underground. A seam of deep misogyny played across the socialists and the Hindu Right, whose hatred for Mrs. Gandhi cannot be explained only by her politics and her policies. The socialists took the lead

from Lohia, who had called Indira Gandhi a gungi guria (a dumb doll). George Fernandes used to refer to her as “that woman” and Raj Narain (channeling Krishna Menon) used to say that she was a “chit of a girl.” From the Congress Right came Morarji Desai who called her a chhokri, the Hindi variant of Raj Narain’s put-down. This hatred of Indira Gandhi, the Gandhi family and the Congress drove the socialists into a corner – and from that corner they would later cozy up to the Hindu Right. The Janata Party alliance that won the elections of 1977, defeating Indira Gandhi’s Congress, spanned the political terrain from the Hindu Right (Bharatiya Jana Sangh) to the Socialist Party of India. It was not merely their opposition to the anti-democratic Emergency that resulted in this union. In 1971, George Fernandes’ Samyukta Socialist Party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the old guard in the Congress (Moraji Desai’s Congress-O; O for opposition) formed a quixotic Grand Alliance against Mrs. Gandhi. They failed miserably in 1971, but resurrected their alliance in 1977 adding in the right-wing Swatantra Party and Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Lok Dal. The CPI-M ran candidates only where there was no Janata Party candidate – as a way to ensure the defeat of the Congress. It did not, however, join the alliance. Hindutva was toxic then; it remains toxic today. The Janata victory in 1977 ended the ban on the RSS and welcomed the Hindu Right to positions of great power (Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as well as Information and Broadcasting Minister Lal Krishna Advani – others had near affinity with the Jana Sangh, including Law Minister Shanti Bhushan, Finance Minister Haribhai Patel and Agriculture Minister Surjit Singh Barnala of the Akali Dal). The socialists, namely JP, welcomed the RSS to the center of political life, giving it legitimacy and authority where it had none beforehand.[84] It was their deep antipathy to Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress that turned the socialists to being the enablers of the Hindu Right. A year into the Janata regime, the problem of the RSS tore through their coalition. George Fernandes challenged the Bharatiya Jana Sangh members to rid themselves of their “dual membership” in the RSS – something they were not willing to do. At this point, Raj Narain and Charan Singh left to form the Janata Dal (Secular), a sign of their disagreement with the RSS entry to the core of Indian public life.[85] By then, it was too late. Hatred of Indira Gandhi had pushed Indian socialism into the arms of the Right. No surprise then that George Fernandes became the Defence Minister in the BJP-led government

of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004). When Fernandes took that route, a new Janata Dal (Secular) led by Deve Gowda was formed out of those who broke with him. The anxiety within Indian socialism continues to emerge – although it has not been able to draw a fine line between its national vision and that of the Indian Right. Odium at the Congress comes in the way of lucidity.

CASTE

Indian socialists and communists frequently start their memoirs with a story of caste oppression, where an experience of caste Hindu violence sends them on to a radical trajectory. In the socialist tradition, Lohia had across his career written of the centrality of caste oppression to Indian social reality. Economic inequality and caste inequality, he wrote, are “twin demons, which have both to be killed.”[86] In 1959, Lohia’s Socialist Party put caste inequality to the front, calling for at least sixty per cent reservation in government administration for all of the oppressed, including Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC and ST), minorities and women. It was a bold move. Many OBCs and dalits came to the party, largely in northern India, where the party had some purchase in the Gangetic belt.

None amongst the wider Left questioned the centrality of caste as the toxic element in Indian society. Like Lohia, E. M. S. Namboodiripad pointed to the “two-front battle” that the Left had to wage against caste and class inequality.   Ranged against us on the one hand are those who denounce us for our alleged ‘departure from the principles of nationalism and socialism,’ since we are championing ‘sectarian’ causes like those of the oppressed castes and religious minorities. On the other hand are those who, in the name of defending the oppressed caste masses, in fact, isolate them from the mainstream of the united struggle of the working people irrespective of castes, communities, and so on.[87]

 

Lohia’s Socialist Party morphed between the 1960s and 1980s from a party committed to the creation of a socialist future to a set of parties rooted in the upward mobility aspirations of this or that caste. It shifted from socialism to caste solidarity. An early indication was the departure of

Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal, an elected member of the Bihar Assembly, from the Socialist Party to found his own Shoshit Dal (Party of the Oppressed) in 1967, taking along with him forty other Members of the Legislative Assembly. It was a vital blow to the Socialist Party’s ambitions in Bihar. When power came to the socialists, wrote Lohia’s colleague Madhu Limaye, they “broke up into caste groups.” The Socialists tasked Limaye to talk to Mandal about a return to the party. Mandal agreed out of loyalty to Lohia, but then backtracked. “Ministers developed affinities on caste lines,” Limaye wrote. “Castemen belonging to other parties were felt to be closer than one’s own Party comrades belonging to other castes.”[88]

Mandal’s story is precisely a cautionary tale. He was a landlord from Saharsa (Bihar), who came from the already locally powerful Yadav community. Mandal’s political career began in the Congress, but because of a snub from Chief Minister K. B. Sahay, he moved to the Socialists. In them, Mandal saw the opportunity for advancement through their commitment to reservations. He would become the Chief Minister of Bihar in 1968, the first OBC to the post, but would do little to advance any socialist agenda. He did not last long in the chair. He was pushed out by the shenanigans of the Congress, who arranged defections and put up Bhola Paswan Shastri, a dalit, to take his place. The socialist movement could not preserve any of its electoral gains – the most it was able to do was to inspire a generation of politicians – Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav – who would have a major impact on the next phase in the collapse of Indian socialism. Mandal himself would be appointed to chair the most important Backward Castes Commission, which reported in 1980 for widespread reservations for oppressed castes – a deeply democratic demand. When Mandal finished his report, he handed it to the Home Minister Zail Singh in December 1980. As he left Singh’s office, he told the Commission’s secretary S. S. Gill, “I know how much labour has gone into the writing of this report. But let me tell you that today we have performed its visarjan (immersion) ceremony.”[89] The report had been immersed into the vaults of the Home Ministry, where it sat for an entire decade, untouched but by the rats in the North Block of the Central Secretariat. The tragedy of the Mandal Commission was that the government accepted its demands in 1990, on the threshold of liberalisation – Mandal’s demand for reservations in the public sector came alongside the evisceration of that sector for the advantage of the private sector, where

reservations are not enforced. Toward the end of the Mandal report, in a little regarded paragraph, just above Mandal’s signature, sits a paragraph that stays true to his socialist tryst. It is worthwhile to quote it in full,   Under the existing scheme of production-relations, Backward Classes comprising mainly small land holders, tenants, agricultural labour, village artisans, etc., are heavily dependent on the rich peasantry for their sustenance. In view of this, OBCs continue to remain in mental and material bondage of the dominant castes and classes. Unless these production relations are radically altered through structural changes and progressive land reforms implemented rigorously all over the country, OBCs will never become truly independent. In view of this, highest priority should be given to radical land reforms by all the States.[90]

 

The idea that the “highest priority should be given to radical land reforms” did not emerge as a major recommendation of the Mandal Commission. It would be allowed to sit there, untended. It was already outside the bounds of Indian socialism, and of the policy agenda of India’s ruling class. Socialism’s entry into caste politics ended not with a challenge to caste oppression but to the enhancement of the position of certain OBCs, notably those who were in many areas dominant rural castes.[91] The essence of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations offered advantages to OBC landlords as much as to OBC agricultural workers. A Supreme Court challenge (Indira Sawhney v. Union of India, 1993) to nuance the reservation agenda by giving more advantages to the workers than the landlords was knocked down by the Janata Dal (and the BJP). The “creamy layer” of OBCs, the Court had suggested, had no need of state compensatory advantages.[92] The Mandal Rath Yatra of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav of 1992-93 held fast against any suggestion to remove the “creamy layer” from the opportunities. The ill-starred alliance between Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and the largely dalit Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati in 1993 broke on the contradictions in rural Uttar Pradesh between largely OBC land-owners and dalit landless workers. Internal fissures between Yadavs, Lodhis and Kurmis eroded a unity platform, and worse opened the door for the BJP to become the champion of the Lodhis (with Kalyan Singh as their leader) and the Kurmis (by making an alliance with Nitish Kumar).[93] Little was here for the politics of

anti-caste. It was more clearly the politics of the “creamy layer,” with the subordinated castes – dalits mainly – having to take refuge in dalit platforms such as the Bahujan Samaj Party to build their own power, not against Brahmins but typically against the OBCs. Such was not Lohia’s programme, although this has been part of what Lohia called “the resurrection of India – the destruction of caste” as we know it.[94] The socialist movement projected itself as the defender of the minorities – the Muslims and the oppressed castes. Old ideas of peasant solidarity crumbled as the caste equations became central to the socialist movement – in western UP, their Jat base consolidated into a Jat vote for Charan Singh’s Lok Dal (later his son Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal), while in the rest of the state Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (1992) emerged for a time as the leader of the OBCs and the Muslims. The Bahujan Samaj Party had already put itself forward as the leader of the dalits, whose own contradictions in terms of land and work relations with the OBCs, had shown the difficulty of linking dalits to OBCs. These parties morphed soon enough into conduits of neo-liberal growth for certain communities, the parties of castes rather than socialism, the party of OBC merchants, or dalit merchants – but not of the producing classes as a whole. [95] It is fitting that the best known Lohia scholar, Yogendra Yadav, is not part of the organized descendants of Lohia’s political tradition. He was a leader in the AAP, till his recent expulsion.[96]

In south India, the Congress Socialist Party had a fractured heritage. The Kerala CSP went root and branch into the Communist Party. Indeed, the communists entered the CSP as the best platform for them to do their work in periods of sustained illegality. In Tamil Nadu, the CSP’s best organizers (P. Ramamurti, P. Jeevanandam, M. R. Venkataraman, C. S. Subramaniam and Mohan Kumaramangalam) became the core of the CPI, although some joined the Forward Bloc (M. Thevar) and the Congress.

In Mysore (later Karnataka), the socialist tradition would operate through the Jana Jagruthi Sangha, or Mass Awakener’s Union (MAU). Their movement began in Banappa Park at a mass meeting to condemn the proposed marriage between a 65 year old man and a 17 year old girl. They moved rapidly to build campaigns for free speech and against high rents for the working class, for worker’s rights and against communalism. The MAU members, such as S. V. Narayanamurthi, C. B. Monnaiah, K. R. Sreenivasa Murthy and S. V. Ramanna, according to historian Janaki Nair, translated

Communist Party literature into Kannada and distributed it “in factories, workshops and hotels in Bangalore, Mysore and Bhadravathi.”[97] They helped build a union at the Mysore railway workshop and in Mysore Paper Mills, at Binny Mills and at Mysore Iron and Steel Works. But the MAU could not sustain itself. Its largely Brahmin members did not dig deep roots into working class culture, rife with caste hierarchies, and remained an auxiliary of the workers’ struggle. By the 1940s, it would substantially collapse – with its membership drifting into the Congress and the Forward Bloc, incubating the rich tradition of Kannadiga socialism. It would remain alive in the writings of U. R. Ananthamurthy (notably Bharatipura, 1973) and in the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), the 1980s farmers’ movement led by Nanjundaswamy.[98] Two members of the MAU – C. B. Monnaiah and M. S. Rama Rao would in 1942 join the CPI, then led by N. L. Upadhyaya. Caste politics smothered socialism in the state. Its leading “socialist” mannina maga (son of the soil), H. D. Deve Gowda went from JP-style socialism to being the leader of the Vokkaliga community, to an electoral alliance with the BJP despite being the leader of the Janata Dal (Secular). Tamil Nadu’s E. V. Ramaswami Periyar had inaugurated the SelfRespect Movement in 1925, driving a rationalist agenda against Brahmanism and obscurantism. Periyar threw a radical spanner into the non-Brahmin movement’s works – setting aside the Saiva Vellala elite’s obsessions with Brahminism and Vaishnavism. His movement had no time for debates within Hinduism. “Can rats get freedom because of cats?” he asked, “Can non-Brahmins ever get equality because of Brahmins?”[99] The Vellala elite felt subordinate to the Brahmins, but others were subordinate to the Vellala. It was the basis of subordination that had to be rooted out, suggested Periyar to a society that found this ideological boldness invigorating. By 1931, the Self-Respect Movement broke with its bourgeois allies, took inspiration from Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience movement as well as Bhagat Singh’s challenge to the British Raj and charted a path to antiimperialism and socialism. Periyar’s industrialist supporters (such as R. K. Shanmugam Chettiar, later India’s first Finance Minister and W. P. A. Soundarapandian, the Nadar leader and coffee magnate) abandoned him. He swung to the Communists and Socialists, including Singaravelu, and proclaimed the Erode Programme with the following elements – debt

forgiveness to farmers, end of usury, no more middlemen in land ownership, primary education for all, and complete abolition of untouchability. Periyar’s new magazine was called Puratchi (Revolt). It carried a translation of Bhagat Singh’s “Why I am An Atheist,” published P. Jeevanandam’s “Blind Capitalists and Deaf Government,” and then was banned (as Periyar went to prison). The backlash led Periyar to break with the Communists, and to take shelter with the Socialist movement. It was decidedly safer.[100]

By 1944, Periyar had developed a coherent Dravidian ideology suited to the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), which he founded. It was committed to an end to social obscurantism, including untouchability, and to social reform (women’s education, widow marriage) – the radical economic agenda of the 1930s went by the wayside. Anti-Hindi provided it with a Tamil nationalist patina, cross-class certainly and united for federalism in the Indian set-up. What democratic content remained of the DK and later the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – Dravidian Progressive Federation) was rooted in the theory of Dravida Nadu – protection of Tamil culture and language, and development of an industrial sector run by Tamil capitalists. Even this was open to socialism’s opposite. Communist leader P. Ramamurti said of the Dravida Nadu demand, “The industrialists of Tamil Nadu fully utilized the separatist propaganda of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and financed it.”[101] What Ramamurti did not capture here was that the non-Brahmin movement, from the 1930s and 1940s, had engineered a diversity in the industrial and agrarian elite of Tamil Nadu – the old upper castes and mercantile business houses no longer monopolized business as they did in northern India.[102] Conventional social hierarchies no longer established themselves, so that the desperate impact of the Mandal Commission in the North did not repeat itself in the South. Here the non-Brahmin movement had done politically what the Mandal Commission sought to do administratively. This is why the socialist strands in South India have a different character than that of the Gangetic plains. The industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie of Tamil Nadu enjoyed the benefits of their regional market till the 1960s, which is why they supported the campaigns for cultural autonomy (against Hindi and for Dravida Nadu). By the 1960s, the attractions of the Indian market had set aside these commitments. DMK Minister S. Madhavan gave a speech in 1971 where he bemoaned the entire ensemble of licenses and planning. “I would prefer that

men who invest and institutions that invest make their own studies of future demands, and the licensing procedure itself will then be very much simplified.” He told K. Easwaran, the head of the Hindustan Chamber of Commerce, that licenses were a “torturous process” and the DMK was keen to do away with them.[103] The DMK had already fallen in the muck of capitalism, wrote CPI-M intellectual Mythily Sivaraman, and yet “Periyarism as such is still not a spent force. Cadres trained in the ‘Rationalist Sanctum’ (Pagutharivu Pasarai) of Periyar can be found in every political party from the Communists to the Swatantra.”[104] All this would erode by the 1990s. In 1999, Ambrose Pinto suggested that with the attraction of liberalisation, the remainder of the Dravidian ideology fell away from the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) – both of whom became parties of different sections of the state’s elites, and both of whom represented their ambition to global markets and power.[105] Pinto’s final assessment is scathing,   The Dravida ideology has become obsolete. It has lost its revolutionary character. The rhetoric of market-friendly dialectic of hi-tech production process whose ultimate purpose is to make people into a commodity, increase unemployment, maximize profits and brainwash humanity into the service of the profit-hungry corporate empire provides room for fanatic and fascist ideologies.

 

Pinto wrote this in the context of the electoral alliance of the BJP and the DMK. Later the AIADMK would ally with the BJP. Periyar and even C. N. Annadurai would become pictures in the party office, with their views left outside the door. But these are unstable departures. As M. S. S. Pandian showed after the 2006 assembly elections, the DMK was able to pull out a social welfare agenda from its heritage to great electoral advantage. The DMK manifesto promised measures sought after by the vast mass of the population, and as a consequence the document “caught the imagination of the voters and became a constant theme of conversation among them, in particular in the countryside.”[106] Pandian’s commentary was called “New Times Ahead.” No such thing. The DMK governed as the AIADMK had, and then it lost in 2011. Social welfare had become a campaign slogan, not a policy agenda.[107]

Just as the Samajwadi parties in north India became a vehicle for dominant rural castes and middle castes, the Dravidian movement devolved

into the party of the middle castes or merely of their leader (AIADMK’s Jayalalithaa might have been the first sitting Chief Minister to suffer the ignominy of an indictment for personal corruption, but the gap between her and her rivals in the bourgeois camp is slender). The DMK and the AIADMK appeal to these middle castes, the Thevars of southern Tamil Nadu and the Vanniyars of northern Tamil Nadu, both of whom are often only marginally better off than the dalits. Terrible violence between these middle castes and the dalits has come to be a feature of Tamil Nadu’s history over the past three decades.[108] Narrower caste parties – the Paattali Makkal Katchi of the Vanniyars, Kongunadu Munnetra Kazhagam of the Gounders, and the Makkal Tamil Desam of the Yadavas – entered the fray on this terrain of intense caste politics. The imagined horizon for these political platforms is advancement of the elite amongst their community. Wider socialist visions that link critiques of economic and caste inequality, Lohia’s “twin demons,” are far from these projects.

DALIT SOCIALISM

Dalit Socialists look backwards at B. R. Ambedkar for inspiration despite the fact that he was never a socialist. As a lawyer, Ambedkar recognized the value of reform through the legal sphere – which is why his Constitution of 1950 is attuned to the need for legal pathways to end untouchability and caste subordination in public life, in government employment and in rural land relations. A practical man, Ambedkar recognized that dalit politics had to embrace a wider horizon, which is why one of his earliest parties was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), founded in 1938. Ambedkar worked closely with the Congress Socialist Party, including a joint march of twentyfive thousand tenant farmers in the Konkan region during a struggle in 1938.[109] That same year, as we have already seen, Ambedkar joined the socialist leader Yagnik and the communist leader Dange to support the workers’ strike in Bombay. But the legal framework set by Ambedkar and the moral charge of his example produced the basis for far more than the Congress Socialists or the socialist parties after independence would be able to deliver. It set in motion a confident dalit politics against the economic and social subordination of dalits in the villages and towns across India.

By the 1970s, the fruits of this dynamic became apparent. In the late 1970s, one dalit socialist considered the example of Jagjivan Ram, a senior

Congress leader who became the Deputy Prime Minister in the Janata government of 1977-79. “I don’t know his caste and I don’t like his politics,” said the socialist, “but I do know he is achhut like me, and when I see him at the top of the government, I laugh at the Brahman landlord who used to be afraid I would ‘pollute’ his well. I am no more afraid of any Brahmans. For us, democracy works.”[110] The statement comes from the villages of western Uttar Pradesh where the caste dynamics include Brahmin landlords. These were not in evidence elsewhere in the country. The landlords in other parts of India could just as well be OBCs or middle castes. The confidence of the dalit socialist rankled the landlords of this period. The confidence was at variance with the conditions of dalit life, which remained miserable. In 1969, L. Elayaperumal’s report on dalits for the Department of Social Welfare noted, “To our utter dismay the Committee found that untouchability was still being practiced in virulent forms all over India.”[111] When asked to report on the conditions of dalit life, the Minister of State for Home, R. N. Mirdha, told the Lok Sabha on August 19, 1970 that the rates of anti-dalit murder remained very high.[112] Over the course of the 1970s, the “Harijan Atrocity” became routine. In July 1978, Vanniyar and Mudaliar dominant castes from the village of Villupuram in northern Tamil Nadu killed twelve dalits and destroyed the dalit cheris over a twelve day pogrom.[113] In Pipra (Bihar) in February 1980, a mob of five hundred people, led by Kurmi landowners, set upon the Chamar hamlet and killed fourteen dalits.[114] The bourgeois parties analyzed the existence of untouchability and the Harijan Atrocity as problems of culture. Indeed, in the decade after the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955, most complaints by dalits that the government recorded were about lack of access to public buildings and lack of freedom of expression. By the 1970s, however, the complaints shifted, with most dalit grievances over land rights, housing and education opportunities.

During the Janata regime, 1977-78, despite a dalit as Deputy Prime Minister, violence against dalits spiked – these were largely land battles fought by dominant castes to erase the gains made by the dalits. The violence was so widespread that the Janata Government empaneled the first Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in August 1978 (under the chairmanship of Bhola Paswan Shastri – Bihar’s first dalit chief minister) and the Backward Castes Commission in 1980 (under the

chairmanship of B. P. Mandal – Bihar’s first OBC chief minister). It is a telling point that the only dalit on the Mandal Commission, ex-Lok Sabha member L. R. Naik, dissented from the final report. He wrote in his note, “During the course of my extensive tours throughout the length and breath of India, I observed that a tendency is fast developing among Intermediate Backward Classes’ to repeat the treatments or rather ill-treatments, they themselves have received from times immemorial at the hands of the upper castes, against their brethren. I mean the Depressed Backward Classes.” Naik knew already that in the mulch of Indian politics and economics, the OBCs directly confronted the dalits for rural power. Naik regretted that the leaders of the OBC parties “are not immune from such aberration nor are they imaginative enough to bring about the advancement of the people who are at the bottom of our society, such as these Depressed Backward Classes.”[115]

Never a stable foundation, the politics of caste confronted quickly enough the material contradictions within caste society. Ambedkar’s original formations – the Independent Labour Party, the Scheduled Castes Federation and the (posthumous) Republican Party of India – had either disappeared or became a pale shadow of his intentions. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which tellingly emerged out of the All-India Backward SC, ST and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), founded in December 1978, would take on Ambedkar’s mantle. BAMCEF built on the base of elite dalits to fight not only for reservations (which was a class demand of the professionals), but also for political power. The BSP, under Mayawati, drew the grievances of dalits from all class backgrounds, although her own programme had little to offer the landless agricultural workers and the unemployed any tangible benefit. It is impossible to diminish the immense sway of Mayawati’s social agenda – the claim to public space on behalf of dalits and the claim to social goods to be diverted for dalit relief. Emerging in the 1990s, the BSP had little of the socialist ethos in its core – it grew as a caste party to deliver benefits to its preferred castes. In this way, the BSP was what the Samajwadi and Dravidian parties had become – conduits for the upward mobility of this or that caste but certainly not socialist parties committed to the common good.[116]

Kanshi Ram, a government employee who fought for dalit government employees, founded BAMCEF as their instrument. In the same way, B. Shyam Sundar created the All-India Federation of Minorities in 1956. But

Shyam Sundar, unlike Kanshi Ram, lost his faith in the political and judicial processes. In April 1968, he formed the Bhim Sena to defend dalits against the wave of attacks and to defend dalit gains from being rolled back. Four years later, young dalit activists in Maharashtra formed the Dalit Panthers – as young activists in Tamil Nadu created the Viduthalai Siruthaigal Katchi (the Liberation Panthers), drawing deeply from the well of the Marxist and Maoist traditions. They had no patience for a politics of government employees. Like Shyam Sundar, they turned to the land and to self-defence. Their dalit politics was to be rooted in popular struggles not for political power alone, but for social transformation. Their militancy seeded the terrain for a new kind of political atmosphere and for new alliances – occasionally with the Maoists, but also with the Communists. After the electoral debacle of 2014, Thol Thirumavalavan of the Liberation Panthers indicated that he was interested “at the right time” to form an alliance with the Left.[117] The Communist work in Tamil Nadu in the Untouchability Eradication Front drew the Panthers to the Left – they share an uncompromising militancy. It is this militancy for the common good that has been gradually wiped out in the rest of the socialist tradition.       [1]

    M. K. Gandhi, Socialism of My Conception, Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1966, p. 39.

[2]

    Sajjad Zaheer Oral History, acc. No. 298, December 4, 1969, p. 18, NMML.

[3]

    Hajrah Begum Oral History, acc. No. 613, January 9, 1990, p. 21, NMML.

[4]

    Bhagat Singh, “Why I am An Atheist,” The Jail Notebooks and Other Writings, ed. Chaman Lal, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2007, p. 169.

[5]

    P. Ramamurti Oral History, acc. No. 481, August 6, 1978, p. 42, NMML.

[6]

    Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1977, p. 637. Marx to Danielson, February 19, 1881 in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 317.

[7]

    Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism, p. 640.

[8]

    Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 is more balanced in its assessment, but not by much. There is none of the oily sleight of hand as performed by C. A. Bayly, who points out that “the Europeans,” not the English, “did well enough out of India; but not as well as they intended,” Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1983, p. 464. No mention here of the transfer of tribute that played such a crucial role in the development of English capitalism. [9] 

  “Speech at Women’s Conference, Sojitra,” January 16, 1925, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XXVI, p. 2.

[10] 

 

Geraldine Forbes, “Caged Tigers: ‘First Wave’ Feminists in India,” Women’s Studies

International Forum, vol. 5, no. 6, p. 529 and Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [11] 

  Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, London: Verso, 1993, p. 66. Sujata Patel makes a fine attempt at breaking down Gandhi’s attitude toward women into three periods, the first two (19170-1922 and 1925-1930s) where Gandhi displaces the 19th century discourse of reform to propose women as actors and thinkers, and then the third (in the 1930s) when Gandhi sees women as renunciators, as those who are now the ideal-type of nonviolence.”Construction and Reconstruction of Woman in Gandhi,” Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History, eds. Alice Thorner and Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000. I do not agree with Ketu Katrak who argues that “although Gandhi’s movement give women a chance to participate in a public sphere and to build solidarity, they did not organize to transform and challenge the roots of their oppression within traditional family structures.” This is precisely what they did do as the women’s movement came into its own. “Indian Nationalism, Gandhian ‘Satyagraha,’ and Representation of Female Sexuality,” Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 400.

[12] 

  Suruchi Thapar, “Women as Activists, Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement,” Feminist Review, no. 44, Summer 1993.

[13] 

  David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas, Columbia University, 2003, p. 113.

[14] 

  Renu Chakravartty, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980, pp. 9-11.

[15] 

  Manikuntala Sen, In Search of Freedom. An Unfinished Journey, Calcutta: Stree, 2001, p. 55.

[16]

    Chakravartty, Communist Women, pp. 31-33.

[17]

    Mahadev Desai, The Diary of Mahadeo Desai, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1953, pp. 52-53.

[18]

    Hazari, An Indian Outcaste: the autobiography of an unknown Indian, London: Bannisdale Press, 1951, p. 116 and p. 127. For other, equally powerful, examples of the same sentiment, see Om Prakash Valmiki, Jhoothan, Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 2009, Surajpal Chauhan, Tiraskrit, Ghaziabad: Anubhav Prakashan, 2002, Mohandas Naimicharay, Apne Apne Pinjare, Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 1995 and Shantabai Kamble, Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha, Mumbai: Purva, 1983.

[19]

    M. K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiment with Truth, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 412.

[20]

    Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur district, eastern UP, 1921-2,” Subaltern Studies III, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.

[21]

    Young India, August 6, 1931.

[22]

    Rajendra Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, Bombay 1955, pp. 55-56.

[23] 

  “Answers to Zamindars,” July 25, 1934, published in The Pioneer, August 3, 1934, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. LXIII, p. 248.

[24] 

  Indian Textile Journal, July-October 1905 and Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India. History of Emergence and Movement, 1830-1990, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1979 (2nd edition), Chapter 7.

[25]

    Richard Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya. Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, Chapter 8.

[26]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, History of India’s Freedom Struggle, Trivandrum: Social Scientist Press, 1986, p. 363.

[27]

    David Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 139.

[28]

    David Hardiman, “Rebellious Hillmen: the Gudem-Rampa Risings 1839-1924,” Subaltern Studies I, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981. As well, see Murali Atlury, “Alluri Sitarama Raju and the Manyam Rebellion of 1922-24,” Social Scientist, vol. 12, no. 131, April 1984, David Arnold’s response, “Sitarama Raju’s Rebellion: A Response,” vol. 13, no. 143, April 1985 and then, Murali Atlury’s rejoinder, “Manyam Rebellion: A Rejoinder,” vol. 13, no. 143, April 1985.

[29]

    The dynamics of crowd control and soul control have been well analyzed by Ranajit Guha, “Discipline and Moblise,” Subaltern Studies VII, Eds. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 110.

[30]

    M. K. Gandhi, “The Congress Constitution,” Young India, November 3, 1920, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XVIII, p. 429. Guha quotes from part of this passage, and points out correctly that “discipline, in the lexicon of Gandhianism, was the name of [the] mediating function” of leadership. Guha does, however, cut out the bits where Gandhi acknowledges the aspect of the leader following the masses – an inconvenient nuance that would have troubled Guha’s overly structural analysis. Guha, “Discipline and Mobilise,” p. 111.

[31]

    Dwijendra Tripathi, The Oxford History of Indian Business, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 154-162 (the chapter is called “The Battlecry of Swadeshi”).

[32]

    Cashman, The Myth of the Lokmanya, p. 175.

[33]

    Legislative Assembly Debates of Indian Legislatures, “Public Safetly Bill,” 1929 vol. 1, p. 528.

[34]

    Sumit Sarkar, “The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism,” A Critique of Colonial India, pp. 93-93.

[35]

    Two examples are Jamnalal Bajaj and Kasturbhai Lalbhai, on whom, see B. R. Nanda, In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj, New Delhi: OUP, 1990 and Dwijendra Tripathi, Dynamics of a Tradition: Kasturbhai Lalbhai and His Entrepreneurship, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981.

[36]

    Tripathi, Oxford History of Indian Business, p. 273.

[37]

    M. K. Gandhi, “To the Communists,” Young India, March 26, 1931.

[38]

    B. R. Nanda, In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Life and Times of Jamnalal Bajaj, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990 and Kakasaheb Kalelkar, Bapu ke Patra, Benares: Jamnalal Bajaj Seva Trust, 1957.

[39]

    S. A. Dange, Gandhi vs. Lenin, Bombay: Loksevak Press, 1921, p. 30

[40]

    M. Singaravelu Chettiar, “An Open Letter to Mahatma Gandhi,” The Hindu, May 24, 1921, reproduced in K. Murugesan and C. S. Subramanyam, Singaravelu: First Communist in South India, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975, p. 158.

[41]

    Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri, Leftism in India, 1917-1947, New York: Palgrave, 2007 covers many of the debates, and offers a vivid portrait of the fertile clashes between the Communists and the Congress. For a superb account of the early years of the Communists in Calcutta, and their attitude to the freedom movement, see Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist. Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, 1913-1929, New Delhi: Tulika, 2011. She shows us how Muzaffar Ahmad and his circle emerged as communists out of their clear-sighted rejection of nationalism, communalism and ethno-linguistic opportunism.

[42]

    M. N. Roy to Singaravelu, November 9, 1922 and Singarvelu to Roy, November 18, 1922, Archives of Contemporary History of India, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

[43]

    V. Ramakrishna, “Left Cultural Movement in Andhra Pradesh, 1930s to 1950s,” Social Scientist, vol. 40, nos. 1-2, January-February 2012, pp. 22-24.

[44]

    I have modified the translation for clarity, although it can be seen as well in Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir, Anthems of Resistance, Delhi: India Ink, 2006, pp. 115-116.

[45]

    Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, 1885-1935, Allahabad: Working Committee of the Congress, 1935, p. 462.

[46]

    Jawaharlal Nehru, Towards Freedom, New York: John Day, 1941, p. 197.

[47]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, A History of the Indian Freedom Struggle, Trivandrum: Social Scientist Press, 1986, p. 264.

[48]

    Gandhi is Gone. Who Will Guide Us Now? Gopalkrishna Gandhi, ed., New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007, p.82.

[49]

    Gandhi is Gone, p. 42.

[50]

    Gandhi is Gone, p. 58.

[51]

    Gandhi is Gone, p. 65.

[52]

    Gandhi is Gone, p. 92.

[53]

    Gandhi is Gone, p. 37.

[54]

    Jaisingh, India After Indira, pp. 84-85.

[55]

    Birla to Thakurdas, August 3, 1934, Thakurdas Papers, F. N. 126, 42 (vi), NMML. In this same period, Birla conceded the need to collude with the British against the socialists and the communists. In the Shadow of the Mahatma, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1953, pp. 193-195.

[56]

    Thakurdas to Birla on April 18, 1936 and Birla’s reply on April 20, 1936. Both letters in Thakurdas Papers, F. N. 177/1936-43, NMML.

[57]

    AICC Papers, F. N. 30/1937, Misc., NMML (the AICC Papers are in the NMML).

[58]

    Sajjad Zaheer Oral History, acc. No. 298, December 4, 1969, p. 77, NMML.

[59]

    Sajjad Zaheer Oral History, p. 76.

[60]

    Hajrah Begum, Oral History, p. 124.

[61]

    Walter Hauser, “Peasant Organisation in India: A Case Study of the Bihar Kisan Sabha, 19291942,” Chicago: University of Chicago, Ph. D., 1961 and Swami Sahajanand, Mera Jeewan Sangharsha, Delhi: Granth Shilpi, 2000.

[62]

    NAI, Home (Political), file no. 18/6/35, FR (i) and (ii).

[63]

    NAI, Home (Political), File no. 18/12/34, FR (ii).

[64]

    R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, “The Anti-Imperialist People’s Front,” Inprecor, vol. XVI, February 29, 1936, pp. 297-300.

[65]

    Prasanna Kumar Chaudhury and Shrikant, Swaraj par Dhawa: Bihar mein Dalit andolan, 19122000, Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005, p. 178.

[66]

    R. P. Dutt, India Today, Calcutta: Manisha, 1989, p. 428.

[67]

    Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories, London: Anthem Press, 2005, pp. 214-216.

[68]

    Documents on socialist movement in India. Volume 2. Birth of the Congress Socialist Party, ed. O. P. Ralhan, Delhi: Anmol, 1998, p. 199.

[69]

    Sampurnanand, “Our Role in the Congress,” Socialists, February 1935. AICC Papers, F. N. 3/1935.

[70]

    Ashok Mehta, “The Inevitable Moscow Road,” Congress Socialist, vol. 1, no. 9, January 27, 1935.

[71]

    NAI, Home (Political), File no. 18/10/34, FR (i).

[72]

    “Zaheer’s Report on his tour for CSP Reorganisation in UP,” January 23, 1936. AICC Papers, F. N. 21 (Pt. 2), 1936.

[73]

    Gyanendra Pandey, “Congress and the Nation, 1917-1947,” Congress and Indian Nationalism, eds. Richard Sisson and Stanley Wolpert, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 129.

[74]

    “Activities in Bombay of the Communist Party During 1942 Struggle,” AICC Papers, F. N. 36/1945.

[75]

    Sumit Sarkar, “Popular Movements and National Leadership, 1945-47,” A Critique of Colonial India, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985.

[76]

    AICC Papers, F. N. G23 (pt 2)/1945-46, F. N. 36/1945.

[77]

    AICC Papers, F. N. 6 (Pt. II), 1947.

[78]

    R. M. Lohia, “Fifteen Point Note on Congress and the Socialist Party,” May 23, 1947, AICC Papers, F. N. 6 (Pt. 2)/1947.

[79]

    “Socialists and the Congress,” August 14, 1947; “Liquidate Socialist Party: N. G. Ranga”; “Socialist Role for Congress,” August 3, 1947. AICC Papers, F. N. 27 (Pt. II)/1947.

[80]

    CPI, “Political Thesis,” 1948, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, ed. M. B. Rao, vol. VII: 1948-1950, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976, p. 221.

[81]

    Guha, India Since Independence, p. 136.

[82]

    Lewis Fickett, “The Praja Socialist Party of India – 1952-1972: A Final Assessment,” Asian Survey, vol. 13, no. 9, September 1973, p. 831 and Subhash C. Kashyap, “The Politics of Defection: The Changing Contours of the Political Power Structure in State Politics in India,” Asian Survey, vol. 10, no. 3, March 1970.

[83]

    Khushwant Singh, India. A Mirror for its Monsters and Monstrosities, Bombay: IBH, 1969, p. 69.

[84]

    Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 1996, p. 332.

[85]

    A. G. Noorani, The RSS and the BJP: a division of labour, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000, p. 34.

[86]

    Rammanohar Lohia, The Caste System, Hyderabad: Navhind Prakashan, 1964, p. 79.

[87]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Once Again on Caste and Classes,” Selected Writings, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1982, p. 184.

[88]

    Madhu Limaye, Birth of Non-Congressism: Opposition Politics, 1947-1975, Delhi: BR, 1988, pp. 155-156.

[89]

    S. S. Gill, “Diluting Mandal,” The Hindu, June 24, 2003.

[90]

    Government of India, Report of the Backward Classes Commission, First Part. vol. 1, Delhi: Government of India, 1980, p. 64.

[91]

    Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Rise of the Other Backward Classes in the Hindi Belt,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, February 2000.

[92]

    The idea of the “creamy layer” came in the Tamil Nadu Backward Castes Commission (1970), chaired by the eminent civil servant A. N. Sattanathan. For more on Sattanathan, please see his Plain Speaking: a Sudra’s Story, ed. Uttara Natarajan, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007.

[93]

    Arun Sinha, Nitish Kumar and the Rise of Bihar, New Delhi: Penguin, 2011 and Arjun Kumar Tripathi, Kalyan Singh, Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1997

[94]

    Jaffrelot, “The Rise,” p. 104.

[95]

    A. K. Verma, “Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh,” EPW, vol. XXXIX, no. 14/15, April 3-16, 2004, A. K. Verma, “The Elusive Samajwad,” Seminar, March 2007, and Zoya Hasan, Dominance and Moblisation: rural politics in western Uttar Pradesh, 1930-1980, New Delhi: Sage, 1989.

[96]

    Yogendra Yadav, “On Remembering Lohia,” EPW, vol. XLV, no. 40, October 2, 2010.

[97]

    Janaki Nair, “Contending Ideologies? The Mass Awakener’s Union and the Congress in Mysore, 1936-1942,” Social Scientist, vol. 22, no. 7-8, July-August 1994, p. 46.

[98]

    Chandan Gowda, “Many Lohias? Appropriation of Lohia in Karnataka,” EPW, vol. XLV, no. 40, October 2, 2010, p. 79.

[99]

    M. S. S. Pandian, “Notes on the Transformation of ‘Dravidian’ Ideology: Tamilnadu, c. 19001940,” Social Scientist, vol. 22, nos. 5-6, May-June 1994, p. 99 and A. R. Venkatacalapati, In Those Days There was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History, New Delhi: Yoda, 2006, chapter 7.

[100]

    Bala Jeyaraman, Periyar. A Political Biography of E. V. Ramasamy, New Delhi: Rupa, 2013 and V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Jyothee Thass to Periyar, Calcutta: Samya, 1987.

[101]

    R. Kannan, Anna. The Life and Times of C. N. Annadurai, New Delhi: Penguin, 2010, p. 225.

[102]

    Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists. Caste. Business and Industry in a Modern Nation, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008, p. 312.

[103]

    Mythily Sivaraman, “The Industrial Policy of the DMK,” Haunted by Fire. Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2013, p. 216.

[104]

    Mythily Sivaraman, “The Relevance of Periyar,” Haunted by Fire, pp. 106-07.

[105]

    Ambrose Pinto, “End of Dravidian Era in Tamil Nadu,” EPW, vol. XXXIV, no. 24, June 12-18, 1999, p. 1488.

[106]

    M. S. S Pandian, “New Times Ahead,” EPW, vol. XLI, no. 22, June 3, 2006, p. 2182.

[107]

    Or rather, “social welfare” had become a campaign wage, with the AIADMK in 2014 promising to deliver such consumer goods as animals (cows and goats), household items (fans, laptops, mixers) as well as four gms of gold per for the marriage of women from working-class and rural backgrounds. The DMK made no such promises.

[108]

    S. Vishwanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on Anti-Dalit Violence in Tamil Nadu, 1995-2004, Chennai: Navayana, 2005.

[109]

 

 

Gail Omvedt, “Ambedkar and Dalit Labour Radicalism: Maharashtra, 1936-1942,”

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 10, no 1, Spring 1990.

[110]

    Barbara Joshi, Democracy in Search of Equality: Untouchable Politics and Indian Social Change, Delhi: Hindustan, 1982, p. 68.

[111]

    GOI, Committee on Untouchability, Economic and Educational Development of the Scheduled Castes, GOI, 1969, p. 15.

[112]

    Lata Murugkar, Dalit Panther Movement in Maharashtra, Bombay: Popular Books, 1991, p. 41.

[113]

    Thirumaavalavan, Uproot Hindutva. The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers, Calcutta: Samya, 2004, p. 11.

[114]

    Oliver Mendelsohn and Markia Vicziany, The Untouchables, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 62.

[115]

    “Minute of Dissent by Shri L. R. Naik, Ex-MP,” Educational and Social Uplift of Backward Classes, eds. S. P. Agrawal and J. C. Aggarwal, New Delhi: Ashok Mittal, 1991, p. 233.

[116]

    Vijay Prashad, “May Days of Mayawati,” EPW, vol. XXX, no. 23, June 10, 1995.

[117]

    N. Ravikumar, “Thiru Waves Red Flag at DMK, cosies up to the Left,” Indian Express, June 22, 2014.

 

4.  The Era of Populist Politics

“Living in evil times, I turned evil; not seeing time passing, I became imperceptible as if trapped in clockwork driven crazy by my own words.”

Mohan Ram, Is Shor Paar, 2003 THE DOCTOR AND THE 56-INCH CHEST

Boredom is the normal tempo of governance. Rules are framed, behavior is regulated – time slips by at a snail’s pace in the office of the District Magistrate or the District Rural Development Agency. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, once said that his imperial bureaucracy moved like an elephant, “very stately, very dignified, but very slow in its movement.”[1] What annoyed the imperial leader, exasperated the nationalist Prime Minister. Except Nehru was not bothered by the speed of work, but the attitude. The bureaucrats, he told the Meerut session of the Congress in 1946, “were fossilized in their mental outlook. They were wedded to bygone and obsolete methods and refused to move with the times.”[2] In June 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet secretary Ajit Seth sent a list of instructions to secretaries of all departments in the Indian government – to improve the quality of governance. Most of what Seth asked the bureaucrats to do is common-sense and harkens back to the advice provided by Nehru in his many letters to government officials: create less intimidating procedures, work with more efficiency, and move toward “clutter free operation.”[3] The rhetoric of efficiency, imported from corporate culture, certainly appeals to the citizenry – no-one wishes to be kept waiting in a queue while the person behind the desk zips off for a tea break. Disrespect of the population has become commonplace from the bureaucracy, whether in the failure of the police to register a complaint

from a woman or the eagerness of a District Magistrate’s clerk to pocket a petty bribe.

Modi, cannily, talked of “good governance” as the removal of the small insults to the ordinary citizen. Behind all this is another, more serious agenda – to shift decision-making from the messiness of parliamentary democracy and decentralized government to the Cabinet, with Modi, primus inter pares. One of Ajit Seth’s rules was to get rid of archaic laws “that are redundant and would not lead to any loss of efficiency.” What these laws or rules might mean is of course left vague. At the generic level, no-one would be against it – unless redundant laws are those that have been put in place to constrain the desires and interests of capital, always eager to push the boundaries of workers and the natural world for more profit. Modi’s government is eager to do away with the Industrial Disputes Act (1947), the Apprenticeship Act (1961) and the Inter-State Migrant Workman Act (1979) – “So they are archaic,” said B. C. Prabhakar, one of software giant Wipro’s directors.[4] Minimum wages, right to work – all brakes on capital that need to be lifted. Modi also wants to set aside the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013) and replace it with the lax rules that apply in Gujarat. Columbia University’s Arvind Panagariya says that the 2013 act is “damaging” to development – it takes far too much time and too much red tape for industry.[5] Environmental regulations and rehabilitation schemes are to be whittled down as much as possible. Seth asked the Cabinet secretaries and others to weed out files and papers in their offices that are of no use. This was to take “three-four weeks,” according to his letter. In less than a month, the Home Ministry alone destroyed 150,000 files. When a Press Trust of India reporter asked a government official if these files were of historical value, he “expressed ignorance.”[6] Destruction of the historical record does not favour those who make a claim to the past (such as marginalized or oppressed communities) – it does, however, favour those who are blessed in the present and can convert their current gains into future opportunities. Unresolved conflicts and side-deals made by the government to advantage this or that person or community disappear in the ash-heap. Governmental accountability – a hallmark of modern democracy – is harder to accomplish without accurate records.

Since the early 2000s, the Indian public has been sold the view that “democracy” is a messy affair. Constant disruptions in the Lok Sabha, on the one hand, to obligations by petty officials for a bribe, on the other, squander the promise of democratic life. Rarely did one hear the name “Manmohan Singh” without his degree, the title “Dr.” During the 2009 election campaign, Dr. Manmohan Singh’s CV travelled around the web – a sure sign that he should be the Prime Minister. That Singh did not risk a Lok Sabha (lower house) seat, but took his chair at the head of the cabinet from the nominated Rajya Sabha (upper house) did not bother many people. Singh was part of an international fraternity of technocrats whose expertise was needed to handle financial and economic processes far too complex for the common person – or so the logic goes. In Europe, for instance, the process of democracy has been suspended not by Generals but by Bankers and Grand Coalitions. The European Central Bank and the reserve banks of the various countries, as well as the main bond rating agencies, set the terms by which the elected officials can govern. If there is any risk of an “extremist” assertion from the Left or the Right, electoral verdicts are set aside and Grand Coalitions appear – as in Germany in 2005, when the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats joined up to block Die Linke (The Left) from federal government. Such a view obviates the mandate of an election – the main parties, with their technocratic constraints and advisors, will set the agenda regardless of the will of the people. This is one side of populist democracy – the people put their trust in the Experts to rule for them.

Frustration with the pious silence of the Expert can oscillate to the other extreme – toward the Strong Man, the 56-inch chest, who will govern equally undemocratically but less with a slide-rule and more with the fist. In a campaign rally in Varanasi in January, Modi suggested that to convert Uttar Pradesh into his home state of Gujarat would take 24-hours, 365 days a year of electricity. Addressing his rivals, Modi said, “You can’t do it. You don’t have the guts to turn UP into Gujarat. It takes a 56-inch chest.”[7] Set aside the class genius, the IIT graduate, the Ph. D. in economics – the pehalwan, the wrestler, will seize problems and squeeze solutions out of them. Modi is Karna to Singh’s Krishna, brawn to brain. “Democracy,” in these times of inequality and financial crisis, has come to mean something quite different than in its more commonplace assumption. If there is no agenda to improve the well-being of people, it

becomes dangerous to allow them to determine their own destiny through the vote or through democratic institutions. In the name of democracy, most institutions are run as technocracies – experts of finance and of governance who are committed to the current world order (that produced inequality and financial crises) run the institutions absent robust checks and balances of the general public. If the institutional integrity of the state has to be protected by a military coup, by grand coalitions or by a Strong Man who rules by the fist, so be it. The price of institutional control to maintain the order of things is far more important – by this class logic – than ideals such as democracy and human rights. These are the raw materials of hope, but they have been processed fundamentally into their opposite – technocracy and capital’s rights. Modi is a man of these times, as much as Dr. Singh. The latter ruled like a banker, the former rules like the Strong Man. It is fitting that Modi tells government ministers to eschew the traditional obsequies of touching feet and forbids them from talking to the press. He has no need for the artifacts of worship. Their silent obedience to his will is sufficient.

DIDI

Apart from the Doctor and the 56-inch chest is the phenomenon of West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee, Didi (sister). Banerjee is a remarkable politician. Long-term governance is not her interest. She prefers the shortterm, offering advice to her followers, offering small dole packages to see people through tough times. In 2013, she told a crowd, “When you are unemployed, you feel depressed. Don’t sit at home, just go out and roam around on the streets, listen to music and chat with children. Try it and you will feel much better.”[8] Schemes to improve joblessness are not on the table – far more important are relief programs (such as the Kanyashree program), cash disbursements that the state government controls. Mamata Banerjee likes the name didi. She is the elder sister of the population, the personification of their savior. Banerjee learned this temperament from her teacher, Indira Gandhi, another leader who would draw attention to herself – India is Indira, Indira is India, went the slogan. Didi is Bengal, Bengal is Didi.

There is nothing of the expert in Mamata Banerjee. She says that she does not care for the details. For that she has “hired” the experts – such as

former secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry Amit Mitra to be her Finance Minister. She is crafty, subsumed in the idiom of the plebeian classes – flourishing anger against the elite. Since the CPI-M-led Left Front has ruled West Bengal for three decades, Mamata Banerjee has been able to define it as the elite. In her insurgency against the Left in the mid-2000s, Banerjee would gather those who had grievances of one kind or another – workers from all the sectors that have gone into deep decline (tea, jute), peasants who have seen their land threatened by acquisition for industry, street hawkers and sex workers whose livelihood had been imperiled by city beautification, and students angry at declining standards of education and the perils of unemployment. These are the bonchito, the shoshito, the doridro, the khetey-khaowa manush – the deprived, excluded, exploited, labouring people, the classes that were supposed to be central to the Left base. Many followed her in droves, disturbed by the collapse of their livelihood. Mamata Banerjee welcomed them with her “leftist” rhetoric, fiery speeches about their marginalization and exorbitant promises to fix their problems. While Mamata spoke for them, her “experts,” such as Amit Mitra would write budgets that would do nothing for them. As Ruchir Joshi put it in a sympathetic campaign diary from 2011, “None of these issues making it into the Trinamul Congress manifesto or Didi’s vision for a ‘new Bengal.’”[9]

Politics in the New Bengal becomes about the Leader – her life is endangered, she is the font of all ideas, she cannot be questioned or insulted. She surrounds herself with sycophants and celebrities. They answer to her. During the election campaign of 2014, Mamata Banerjee travels by helicopter on March 31 to campaign for the film-star Dev. She arrives four hours late. Her helicopter has malfunctioned. But this cannot be a simple technical error. “Many people didn’t wish me to visit Midnapore today,” she said, her voice slowly rising. “We were supposed to come by helicopter. At the last moment, the helicopter developed a snag. We will have to check whether the snag was technical in nature or political.” Is it political? Does someone want to kill her? The communists, perhaps? There is no evidence, but this is not important. It is what authoritarian populists do – they like a bit of drama, accusing their opponents of attempted murder (as Indira Gandhi would frequently do) and then using the emotional upsurge to cover over the lack of a genuine popular political programme. Her

candidate for the seat, Dev, is a nice man, but uninterested in governance. “I am a novice as far as politics is concerned,” he said at the rally. His party leader did not care to have a discussion about his naiveté. “You should vote for Dev,” she said. “He is doing very well in films.” Dissent is cast as an insult. A college chemistry professor (Ambikesh Mahapatra of Jadavapur University) forwards a cartoon on the Internet that makes a joke about Mamata Banerjee, and is arrested for defamation (under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act). A farmer, Shiladitya Chowdhury of West Midnapore, asks Mamata Banerjee at a public meeting, “What are you doing for farmers? Farmers are dying because they have no money. Empty promises are not enough.” He is arrested on grounds of criminal intimidation. A man in his sixties tries to drive to his house, but it turns out that the leader is nearby. A group of Trinamul men “explode into default rage” and beat his car.[10] It is a trivial episode, but it says a great deal of the kind of gangsterism inherent in this sort of populism.

In Mamata Banerjee’s New Bengal arises the great populist politics of anti-democracy. Celebrities are the face of the party, subordinate to the fierce Leader, but adding colour to the stage. Experts sit behind, doling out favours to the industrial bourgeoisie and setting in motion the reversal of the land reform regime. On the ground, the Leader’s party turns to the margins for its stick men. Ashok Mitra, former Finance Minister, suggested that West Bengal had turned into lumpenland. His judgment is severe,   Common criminals, murderers and rapists not excluded, currently control and guide the administration. More than one high court judge have failed to get arrested some of these lowest specimens of society against whom there are charges of the gravest nature and watch helplessly as their orders are not carried out. Their comments on the blatantly partisan manner the forces of law and order are going about in the performance of obligatory duties are left unanswered. But that is all. Their word is not law; in West Bengal, the lumpen now decide what constitutes the law.[11]

 

The grammar of street violence is essential to Banerjee’s form of populism. It gives the appearance of plebeian democracy, while behind the scenes the work of business is conducted to the satisfaction of the business class. In another era, this would be called fascism.   ***

  The Doctor, the 56-inch chest and Didi, the three overlapping forms of leadership, lean on two interrelated forms of populism to canalize grievances and discontent – demagogic populism and free-market, authoritarian populism.

DEMAGOGIC POPULISM

Populations across the planet, in both North and South, have seen their livelihoods drop and their expectations for the good life deteriorate. Not only does the neo-liberal economic framework create global imbalances and raise inequality, but it also fails to produce jobs – one of the singular promises for the production of social mobility. Evidence from a shelf-full of International Labour Organisation reports show that this turbulent economic system kills decent work.[12] Very large numbers of people are forced to survive on poverty wages and even in conditions of forced labour.[13] Vast reservoirs of dispossessed people live in pockets of cities and in abandoned areas of the countryside where they struggle to make ends meet and to live. The gradual removal of social provisions leaves the population to the winds of family and community mercy – what old traditions of goodwill remain helps the impoverished survive.

Modi, like Singh before him, promised to create hundreds of millions of jobs – but joblessness is the outcome of the policy framework adopted by the Indian governments since 1991. Singh was too liberal, too nice, to divert popular anxiety against immigrants. That is the mode of the 56-inch chest – the demagogic populist. Modi had no compunctions. Modi, while campaigning in Serampore (West Bengal) said, “You can write it down. After May 16, these Bangladeshis better be prepared with their bags packed.”[14] The antidote to joblessness is the deportation of the Bangladeshi migrant. Modi’s statement echoes a long tradition in the BJP – with the Bangladeshi refugee story as part of the bedrock of the BJP’s rise in north India. As a lead-up to the 1993 Delhi elections, the BJP national executive attacked the “infiltration” of immigrants from Bangladesh, accusing the Congress of taking no action “because it views them as a vote bank”. The BJP in Delhi launched a “declaration of war” against Bangladeshis as the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra called for Bangladeshis to “vacate the city on their own or be thrown out.” The BJP continued to blow

this trumpet till the end of the decade, and then, in government from 19982004, toned down its rhetoric (much to the displeasure of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal). Modi’s statement returned to the days of Operation Pushback and Operation Flush Out – policies that derive as much from xenophobic political pressure as from India’s lack of a refugee policy fully in line with international law. The impact of no policy, of course, means that refugees remain tinder for the incendiary rhetoric of Modi and his BJP.

The practical problem of migration is a complex matter – the literature is quite clear that it is not the migrant that takes the jobs away from the nonmigrant, and indeed that migration might enrich the skill sets in an area and provide new kinds of opportunities for the non-migrants.[15] The hostile tone set for migrants is a reflection of the restrictive domestic laws that remain in place, and the absence of any genuine international framework to manage the flow of migration. Migration does not create the problem of joblessness. In the absence of a mature discussion by politicians on the failure to create policy for job creation, it is the migrant that takes the blame.[16] In Europe, the anti-immigration sentiment has actually dropped between the early 2000s and the late 2000s, with the economic situation rising to the top of concerns.[17] Nonetheless, shades of right-wing parties (from fascist to ultranationalist) campaigned against immigration as the main problem, and indeed won major gains in the 2014 European elections from the United Kingdom to Greece, with the most important victory in France. What makes this kind of politics demagogic populism is that it appeals to the worst instincts of a disaggregated population. The political class refuses to engage with what seems to actually concern the people (joblessness) and finds a way to insinuate that their concerns can be addressed by jingoism – the 56inch chest as the bulwark against “infiltration.” FREE-MARKET OR AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM

Populations disaggregated and atomized as social goods disappear and social life had to be obtained through private means are left merciless to decipher social reality. Why are there no jobs and how can we get jobs? These are elementary questions. Trade unions take to the streets with their slogans, which are often clear-cut demands that emerge from their much longer pamphlets and position papers. The media, unfamiliar with the logic

of labour, no longer knows how to cover trade unions and the demands of working-people. There is an established business press, with reporters able to cover the minutiae of stock market movements and company law, but there is no such attention given to the side of labour. On December 12, 2013, for instance, a hundred thousand contract workers marched through Delhi in a rally organized by all the major Indian trade union federations – the CPI-M’s Centre for Indian Trade Unions, the CPI’s All-India Trade Union Congress, the Congress’ Indian National Trade Union Congress, and even the BJP’s Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh. The unionists produced pamphlets to explain the issues at stake – wages, pension, job security, work conditions – but the media registered almost total indifference. The media ignored the enormous workers’ rally at the same time as it often fixated on small protests, blowing them out of proportion. “Even as lakhs of workers gathered in central Delhi culminating in the rally at Jantar Mantar,” wrote Economic and Political Weekly’s associate editor Srinivasan Ramani, “the media seemed oblivious. Barring honourable exceptions in the print media, an otherwise hyperactive electronic media remained completely silent about the worker unrest.”[18]

The slow decline of the trade unions and of membership in the mass fronts of the socialist and communist world leaves very many millions of Indians outside the studied influence of the Left. Fellow workers – whether Bangladeshi or not – do become dry tinder, cowering in the corner as the lit match of jingoism flies around them. The explanations from the Left are more sober – more determined to show how the economic and political system in place pits workers against each other as capital sits back, smirking in its carefully crafted liberalism. The people are isolated from these sober explanations – now reliant as consumers for their theories from television, the Internet and of course the political class. The return of the great leader who promises to solve all problems – to take a stagnant economy and make it purr, to take joblessness by the throat and make it cough out jobs. This is a tradition that seeks its emotions in will not in sentiment, wasting no time in the terrible conditions of everyday life, the perils of miners or the futility of farmers. Argument is considered a waste of time, while action is valued. Democracy is given lip service but its constraints are mocked. National glory makes its return, but careful not to mimic fascism – an embarrassment for the elite. Justification for military rule has made a comeback after a brief moment in the 1990s when the West

promoted “Democracy” above all else.[19] The rhetoric of counter-terrorism and of social instability has allowed the army to leave the barracks from Egypt to Thailand – with liberal elites taking refuge in the Generals. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip  Erdoğan and India’s Modi are powerful examples of free market or authoritarian populism. They portray themselves as the sharp swords to cut the knots that bind progress. It is fitting for them to call for austerity – not as a means for personal virtue, but as the suffering of the people for a greater good (in effect, for the greater good of large business houses linked to their political parties). The long and powerful arm of the law, short of outright military dictatorship, can smash workers’ protests, political protests and arrest critical journalists of sedition. In the lead-up to the 2014 election, David Cohen (a veteran of the George W. Bush administration) asked in The Hindu, “Is India about to elect its Reagan?”[20] Beside Cohen’s expectation sits the liberal economist Robert Lekachman’s 1982 warning, “Ronald Reagan must be the nicest president who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000. If there is an authoritarian regime in the American future, Ronald Reagan is tailored to the image of a friendly fascist.”[21]

The terrain of these two types of populism – demagogic and freemarket – and of these three types of leaders – the Doctor, the 56-Incher and Didi – favour the Right. After the 2014 Assembly election victories for the BJP in Maharashtra and Haryana, Modi’s bagman, Amit Shah called him the “undisputed” leader of India, with “the Modi wave demolishing all opposition.”[22] Modi is larger than life. He is beyond challenge. The opposition is demolished. The grammar of politics is Epic, with Modi from the pantheon of Vedic gods. This is not a terrain that is propitious for the Left. In the opening of his critique of French politics in the 19th century, Karl Marx notes, “People [Menschen] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” My analysis thus far is not designed for special pleading – after all, the Left loses because the conditions are hostile. The assessment is simply to lay out the situation that

exists, and upon which the Left struggles to find an adequate pathway to hegemony.       [1]

    Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon, vol. 2, London: Ernest Benn, 1928, p. 27.

[2]

    S. R. Maheshwari, Indian Administration, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1968, p. 344.

[3]

    “11 ways to make the central government more efficient,” Times of India, June 7, 2014.

[4]

    “Stifling Acts,” Business Today, June 22, 2014.

[5]

    Sunny Sen, Sarika Malhotra and Manu Kaushik, “No Promised Land,” Business Today, June 22, 2014.

[6]

    “Following PM Modi’s directive, home ministry destroy 1.5 lakh files,” Times of India, June 23, 2014.

[7]

    Rajiv Srivastava and Arjumand Bano, “Will Take a 56-inch chest to turn UP into Gujarat, Modi to Mulayam,” The Times of India, January 24, 2014.

[8]

    Subir Bhaumik, “India’s Ultimate Populist,” Al-Jazeera, October 26, 2013.

[9]

    Ruchir Joshi, Poriborton! An Election Diary, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011, p. 29.

[10]

    Joshi, Poribortan!, p. 16.

[11]

 

 

Ashok Mitra, “A Footnote to Marx: The Specially Honed Tactics of Bengal’s

Lumpenproletariat,” The Telegraph, July 29, 2014. [12]

    International Labour Organisation, The Informal Economy and Decent Work: A policy resource guide supporting transitions to formality, Geneva: ILO, 2014.

[13]

    International Labour Organization, Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour, Geneva: ILO, 2014.

[14]

    Vijay Prashad, “Uprooted and Lost on Strange Soil,” Telegraph, May 1, 2014.

[15]

    José Antonio Alonso, “International Migration and Development: A review in light of the crisis,” CDP Background Paper no. 11 (E). New York: UN Department of Political and Social Affairs, 2011.

[16]

    The lack of mature dialogue is reflected in the lack of support for the only international convention to regulate the rights of economic migrants, the Convention on the Rights of Migratory Workers and their Families (1990), signed by only 41 countries. None of the G-7 states or the BRICS states are signatories of the convention.

[17]

    Alonso, “International Migration,” p. 50.

[18]

    Srinivasan Ramani, “March for a Minimum Living Wage,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XLVIII, no. 51, December 21, 2013.

[19]

    There is even a scholarly suggestion that military coups, in the post-Cold War era, are an effective road for the restoration of proper democracy. “Our theory predicts that authoritarian regimes are more likely to transition to democracy following both successful and failed coups than authoritarian states that do not experience coups.” Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell, “Coup d’état or Coup d’Autocracy? How Coups Impact Democratization, 1950-2008,” Foreign Policy Analysis, 2014, p. 9.

[20]

    David Cohen, “Is India about to elect its Reagan,” The Hindu, May 26, 2014.

[21]

    Lou Cannon, President Reagan. The Role of a Lifetime, New York: Public Affairs, 2000, p. 198.

[22]

    “Modi becomes ‘undisputed’ leader of India: Amit Shah,” The Hindu, October 19, 2014.

 

5. The Left

“Socialism is young and has its mistakes.” Che Guevara, 1965 SELF-CRITICISM

In late June 2009, the CPI-M’s Central Committee met in Delhi for a twoday meeting. The mood was poor. In the 15th Lok Sabha elections, the party and the Left Front had done abysmally. The electoral slide from the West Bengal panchayat elections of 2008 to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal has been steady. In 2008, the Left Front for the first time saw its vote share decline. The Left Front’s control over panchayat samities – the stronghold of communist power in the state – went down by thirty per cent. It was the first sign in a long slide, with the Left Front by now virtually wiped out of its rural bastions. The incident that marked the slide for the Left Front was the police firing in the town of Nandigram on November 14, 2007. The district had been in tumult for months, with agitation against land acquisition inflamed by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress and the Maoists. The local administration lost control of the area. When they attempted to regain authority, they faced stiff opposition – which is when the police opened fire and killed eight people. Despite apologies from the Left Front’s Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya right afterward, and the finding, six years later, by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) that the government was not guilty of aggression, the stain of land grabs and violence remains.[1] “The appalling tragedy of Nandigram,” wrote Prabhat Patnaik, “will haunt the left for a long time to come.”[2]

“Nandigram” dented the image of the Left. The CPI-M’s reputation had been hurt badly. The name of the town became a way for the variegated opposition to contain all the grievances against the Left, thirty-four years after it first took power. Tamaar naam, amaar naam, Nandigram,

Nandigram (Nandigram is Your Name, Nandigram is My Name) chanted protestors in Calcutta, echoing the old Left slogan, Tamaar naam, amaar naam, Vietnam, Vietnam (Vietnam is Your Name, Vietnam is My Name). The 2011 State Assembly election was a major blow, with the Left Front voted out after thirty-four years in power, losing 168 seats while the Trinamul Congress gained 194 seats. In 2009 few thought that the arrow would continue to dip downwards. Disputes in Kerala between the CPI-M’s State Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan and the then Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan flared up during the year – VS had to leave the Politburo the next month on grounds of indiscipline. An alleged corruption scam in Kerala – over kickbacks for a deal with the Canadian company SNC-Lavalin – resulted in the first corruption indictment against a major CPI-M leader (Vijayan). Four years later, a special court of the CBI cleared Vijayan of all charges.[3] Again, the penalty paid by the Left could not be undone. The political witch-hunt remained red-hot in 2009 and onwards. The Congress used the indictment to pillory the Left, and fissures within the Left Democratic Front weakened its position. West Bengal seemed in deep distress – with few signs of revival. It was certainly the case that the violence unleashed against the CPI-M cadre and sympathizers had already taken a few hundred lives, and intimidated the Left’s supporters. Nevertheless, the Central Committee wondered, how could it be that the Left Front, which dominated West Bengal’s politics for three decades, could so easily wilt before the pressures of its class enemies? The question had one main answer – “There has been a lack of consciousness within the cabinet ministers, leadership of the Party and mass organisations, panchayats and municipal bodies on the need for increasing popular initiatives and mass mobilization and resistance to address the problems faced by the people. Instead, there was increasing dependence on the administration.”[4] This was the tenor of the review. The election defeat resulted, the Party review noted, from “a mere formal approach in our contacts to the people, mechanical attitude, reluctance, lack of credibility – fear of facing questions and avoiding daily contact with the people.” A “bureaucratic attitude” had also stifled the CPI-M’s organizations, and the link of the Party with the mass organizations suffered “from confusion and distortions. Particularly, the work among the peasantry and the rural poor and the workers in the unorganized sector both in the rural and urban areas

and their struggles and the task of organizing them has remained neglected.” The Central Committee (CC) assessment was as harsh as the CPI-M’s harshest critics, including the former Finance Minister of the Left Front (1977-87) Ashok Mitra.[5] The Central Committee’s indictment would necessarily be endorsed by the West Bengal leadership in the CC, which makes up a healthy part of the party’s CC. The electoral slide in West Bengal had been dramatic – from a high point of Lok Sabha seats in 2004 (35 for the Left Front out of 42) to 2009 (15 for the Left Front, all with the CPI-M) to the ignominy of 2014 (2 for the Left Front, both with the CPIM).

The line of march laid out by the CC (“mobilise basic classes,” avoid a “bureaucratic attitude,” and deal fundamentally with “those elements who have degenerated”) did not stem the slide that continued beyond 2009. Habits die hard. Mass movements that brought the Left to power in the state from 1977, and that allowed the government to enact its land reform and local self-government agenda, ossified. Attempts to revive the militancy of the mass organizations faltered, delivering the edge of pugnaciousness to the authoritarian populism of the Left’s opponent – Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress (TMC), which even adopted the Left’s songs and slogans (Amra Kara [Who are we]? Trinamul; Jacche Kara [Who marches?]? Trinamul) – a direct copy from Amra Kara? CPM, Jacche Kara? CPM). The precipitous decline in West Bengal and the disarray in Kerala came alongside a failure of an electoral break-through elsewhere in the country – despite strong and vibrant Left units in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, despite creative and essential Left mass struggles in Haryana and Maharashtra and despite strong and brave Left units in Kerala and West Bengal. One bastion of the Left remained intact, the small state of Tripura – the CPI-M won both its 2014 Lok Sabha seats and triumphed in the local government elections (winning 563 of the 591 gram panchayats as well as all 35 panchayat samitis and all 8 zila parishads).[6] The continued success of the Communists in Tripura is rooted in its fealty to a long tradition of struggle for tribal rights and for literacy – when the CPI-M first won power in the state in 1977, only a quarter of the adivasi population could read and write; today, the literacy rate for adivasis in the state is 68 per cent for men and 45 per cent for women.[7] The gender gap is significant and has alerted

the Left to the next major campaign – for women’s full rights in society. Chief Minister Manik Sarkar of the CPI-M celebrated the 2014 victories, but said quite pointedly, “There is no room for complacency and selfboasting for this spectacular victory. This has only further heightened the responsibility of the Left Front and obviously the Left Front government.” After the experience of West Bengal, complacency is not on the agenda. In early June 2014, the CC of the CPI-M met to study the results from the recent parliamentary election. The tone of the review was sober, but once again it was forthright. The Left – and the CPI-M – had done poorly. In West Bengal, the rigging and the violence against Left cadre and supporters could not be confronted – all the canards about the armed wings of the CPI-M stood exposed (if these harmads – the so-called armed wing of the CPI-M – existed, why did they not fight the Trinamul and the Maoists?). The Left went on the defensive, with parts of the party in hibernation out of fear. Why was this? One reason, the 2009 CPI-M review suggested, was the “deficiency in developing sustained struggles and movements on the various issues affecting the people under TMC rule. The class and mass organisations have failed to independently develop broad based campaigns and struggles.”[8]

What the review did not say is that in certain areas – such as in Nandigram – the Maoists and the Trinamul Congress were able to ignite a growing hatred for the CPI-M, whose leader Lakshman Seth had around him the patina of corruption. When asked about his “lavish lifestyle” in 2010, Seth announced arrogantly, “Do you think only Congress and TMC men will enjoy all luxuries in society? And are we to go to Tapovan for sanyaas [renunciation]?”[9] The Left failed to take this attitude in hand, despite entreaties for rectification of cadres. Asceticism is not the norm of the Left, and nor should it be. But there are of course limits. In 2010, the CPI-M document on rectification worried about “the penetration of alien bourgeois and petty bourgeois values” which are “manifested in a lavish lifestyle, building houses which are far above the minimum needs required, spending large amounts on weddings of children, organising festivities on a lavish scale, etc.”[10] What the CPI-M had considered objectionable was high-handedness, corruption and arrogance – all values antithetical to a Left project. Lakshman Seth was first dropped from the CPI-M State Committee, and then eventually expelled from the party. He would slowly

drift toward the Trinamul Congress, which was wary of him given his very poor reputation.[11]

In Kerala, the older problems of “factionalism” seem to have dissipated. That problem had seriously damaged the Left’s work in the state. Since the CPI-M’s 15th Congress (1995), the CPI-M has publically acknowledged the problem of factionalism in Kerala, which it defined in a 1996 document and again in 2010 as “careerism, individualism and absence of collective functioning.”[12] In that 1996 document, the Central Committee acknowledged that factionalism had damaged the party in Punjab, and that this “prolonged factionalism” in Kerala has taken its toll. The 16th Congress of the CPI-M (1998) recognized that the factional problems began around 1989 “when differences developed in the Kerala state leadership.” Over the 1990s, this factionalism “persisted and got intensified.” The Party did not intervene to bring together the leaders, whose fights threatened the unity of the “big mass base … constantly active among the people and leading innumerable campaigns and struggles.”[13] For the 2014 elections, the old wounds seem to have been healed. Even K. R. Gowri Amma, who had been in the first Communist cabinet in 1957 but broke with the Left to join the Congress front a decade ago, returned to the Left alliance. The momentum in Kerala had been blocked, the CPI-M argued, not because of factionalism but because of “organizational weaknesses.” The three constituencies signaled out were Kollam, Alappuzha and Kozhikode. These are significant places: the Revolutionary Socialist Party left the Left alliance over the seat allocation for Kollam, where it ended up defeating the CPI-M candidate by a narrow four per cent margin; in Kozhikode, the impact of the 2012 grotesque murder of former CPI-M leader T. P. Chandrasekharan weakened the party. In late January 2014, the Special Additional Sessions Court at Eranhipalam convicted twelve people for the murder, including three local CPI-M leaders (convicted of criminal conspiracy). The government acquitted district leaders who they had charged with a wider political conspiracy.[14] The twelve appealed to the High Court, suggesting that the witnesses in the trial came from the RSS.[15] The RSS had been in a long-term struggle with the Communists in the north of Kerala, where harsh violence of its cadres against the Left has been met in coin.[16] It is likely that they saw the Chandrasekharan murder as a unique

opportunity to strike at the Left. The Left was weakened by the murder – nothing good came of it. The general verdict of the CPI-M review of the Left’s performance in 2014 is honest – the Communists have not been able to attract “the new generation of voters,” ages 18 to 25; the Communists have drawn low numbers from the middle class; there was “no advance” in the voting shares amongst the peasantry and the agricultural workers, as well as the workingclass. The Left’s political slogans did not connect with the youth. To these young people, at times the communist parties seemed not so different from the bourgeois parties. If they were to cross over to a social transformative political platform, they would like it to be one of hope and not of despair, one of possibility and not of defeat. The one demographic segment that saw an increase was amongst the adivasi populations where the Left has been working hard to defend adivasi rights and has been vibrant in its argument for a different path – apart from the mafia-State collusion and the Maoists.[17]

In general, the CC argued that the tactical alliances with the bourgeois parties had eroded the independent strength of the Communists, and the “weakness in translating the mass struggles and movements” has led to vulnerability in the Communists’ political influence. To compound this, the CC found that the CPI-M had failed “to initiate struggles and develop movements” – a strong critique that is, perhaps, written with too wide a brush.[18] After all, the Left’s struggles across the country continue to be innovative and vibrant – such as the anti-untouchability campaigns in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, the anti-feudal campaigns in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, the adivasi rights campaigns in Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. It is from the energy of these mass struggles that Indian Communism could be vital once more – affirming its allegiance to mass agitation and popular power.

COMMUNIST CELLS

Garam Hawa (Scorching Winds), M. S. Sathyu’s epic film, tells the story of a Muslim family who experiences the full range of discrimination. Landlords will not rent to them, jobs are hard to come by. This is not the normal experience of lower middle-class distress. The Mirza family’s troubles are compounded by the bigotry of their neighbours. In despair, the family decides to take a train to Pakistan. As they ride a tonga to the

railroad station, they find themselves in the midst of a Communist rally. The slogans are bracing, the placards proclaim an end to social division toward a communist revolution. Sikandar, the Mirzas’ son, jumps from the tonga to join the rally. His father, Salim, asks that the tonga take his wife home – as he joins his son in the protest. The future is not in emigration. It is in a communist revolution.

Sathyu’s film was made in 1973, when communism was widely seen as a possible future for a country wracked by religious conflict and economic distress. The end of the film lifts the spirits – a huge rally of communists, a future of unity not division. Yet, there is a problem here. How did these people come to this rally? What moved them from conflict and distress, from the normal ideologies of their time, to communism? And, in our own time, would it not have been the wife – an AIDWA member – who stopped the tonga, got out and dragged her husband and son along with her to the demonstration? Not for nothing is the smallest communist organizational node called a cell. There is something monastic and penal about the word – a remove from the world (“exiles from a future time,” as the communist poet Muriel Rukeyser described communists), or else a removal into prison. There is a reason that the Communist movement in India is the only Indian political party to have been formed outside the country – in Tashkent, Soviet Central Asia (1920). Repression of communism had been the ethos of the British Raj, as it has been through the history of the movement. Before the communists made their appearance in India, the Intelligence Branch in Calcutta already appointed an Anti-Bolshevik Officer, who collected the Weekly Bolshevik Reports.[19] Any stray report had to be collated, any gossip pursued. Communists were routinely arrested and tried in spectacular fashion, treated as the most dangerous threat to the British Empire. The tone was set in the five Peshawar Conspiracy Cases that ran from 1922 to 1927 and the Kanpur Conspiracy Case of 1923-24. Many of those found guilty and sent to prison did not carry party cards. They were convicted, a sessions judge said in 1923 “not because they adopted pure communism, but because they are emissaries of the communism adopted by the Bolsheviks and [M. N.] Roy.”[20]

In 1929, the British officials arrested thirty-one communist leaders from across the subcontinent in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Viceroy Lord Irwin wrote to his Secretary of State for India, “We have at present

reasonably good hope of being able to run a comprehensive conspiracy case against these men. If we could do this, it would in our opinion deal a more severe blow to the Indian communist movement than anything that could be effected through further special legislation.”[21] The judges did not stint in their sentences: Muzaffar Ahmad got “transportation for life,” the harshest sentence, while others got rigorous imprisonment. Secrecy was the order of the day for the communists. Muzaffar Ahmad wrote to his close comrade Abdul Halim to send “Sylhet Oranges” and “dry coconuts” – phrases that excised the Special Branch.[22] To what did these refer, surely – for communists – more than mere fruit? Communism, unlike other movements, emerges into the world with a commitment for transformation. Unlike movements of reform, Communism creates entire new platforms, develops a new ethos – all to maintain the commitment of those who join the movement or who are allied to it. Defeats are frequent and victories are dear. The 1917 revolution in Russia raised the spirits of the movement, but it was not without its own immediate tribulations – an invasion by the White Army, threats from the old social classes within, an urgency to override the anxiousness of the people by using force to push through policies, splits in the movement that hastened political repression rather than the place for dialogue. The leadership of the movement had a double task – to hold the tiller of history steady, undaunted by the headwinds and high waves, but at the same time to be supple and prepared to shift course. Lenin’s writings of 1917 are a test case of that steadiness combined with innovation. His April Theses described the “peculiar situation” that “demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.” Lenin was ready to take a risk. His comrade Alexander Bogdanov called these theses the “delirium of a madman.”[23] The Bolsheviks took the leap, exuberantly confident in their own abilities to lead the upsurge to a second revolution. Trust in the organization is a fundamental axiom of communism – out of democratic discussions emerges the broad outlines of the political line; this line has to be maintained by the leadership who have to also enjoy a certain amount of flexibility, if opportunities arise. What can be written into a communist constitution and explained by a political scientist is not easy in the rush and tumble of political time. Nothing is easy for communism, despite the millennial

rhetoric – the deep and abiding hope that a new world can be founded out of the dross of the present. No movement is delivered to it; no rally around the corner emerges out of whole cloth. From its emergence in 1920 to the present, the Indian communist movement has had to deal with substantial ideological and organizational debates, to draw its own map from the present to the future. Other political tendencies are delivered a reality with which they can live – whose edges at most need to be smoothed. The Congress Party did not dissent from reality: apart from its obligation to the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie, it simply wanted to find a way to deliver some social goods to the very poor, to make vital the lives of those who had been smothered. The Congress Party was not committed to a transformation of the social order. It was willing to collaborate with the old social classes. Anachronistic social relations – such as the aristocracy – could be frontally attacked. The communists, on the other hand, went after not only archaic social conditions but also those that were rooted in contemporary forms of exploitation – the brutality of class power, caste oppression and adivasi marginalization.

Three major issues tore through the communist movement at the same time as the organizers had to reach out to the people and protect themselves from the police:   MOSCOW: What would be the relationship of the Indian communists to Moscow and the world communist movement? The entirety of the movement saw the Soviet example as incarnated hope. Two years after the Bolsheviks came to power, the nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal told a gathering at Calcutta’s College Square, “There has grown up all over the world a new power – the power of the people, determined to rescue their legitimate rights – the rights of the people to live freely and happily without being exploited and victimized by the wealthier and so-called higher classes. This is Bolshevism.”[24] It is true that when the Indian communist movement got going in the 1920s, Moscow’s help was invaluable. It is to Moscow that the early organizers went to have their debates with their overseas comrades. It is from the USSR and its Communist International (Comintern) that many early comrades received their training in ideological and organizational matters at the Communist University of the Workers of the East. The USSR was also the hub that linked Virendranath Chattopadyaya in Berlin to Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo, M. N. Roy in

Moscow to Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta. But the USSR had by the 1940s begun to see other communist parties as instruments for Soviet foreign policy.

In 1925, Satyabhakta said of the communist party that it is an “absolutely independent body. Our relations with the Comintern is of the nature of friendship and mutual sympathy as followers of the same principle. We are not ready to tie our hands, nor do we want to take orders or instructions from others.”[25] This sentiment went from 1925 through the split in the communist movement, into each of the communist parties. In the political resolution at its 9th Congress in 1972, the CPI-M took both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China to task for letting their mutual animosity get in the way of uniting against imperialism, and to “subordinate the development of revolutionary forces in underdeveloped countries to the opportunistic needs of their governments’ foreign policies.”[26] Within the communist movement emerged a view that the best understanding of the ground realities of their politics could not be found in the Kremlin but amongst their own leadership – fraternal ties with Moscow should not become hierarchical. Much the same view would emerge about Beijing in its heyday as the promoter of Maoist rebellion. Should it determine the strategy (and even tactics) for communists across the planet? As West Bengal’s peasant leader Harekrishna Konar said in the 1970s, “We realize that we can learn very little from the experience of the Soviet and the Chinese revolutions. In the peculiar objective realities of India, we have to rely on ourselves to formulate the strategies and tactics of our revolution.”[27] One of the fault-lines that opened up in the 1960s was over the external glance toward the Soviets (by the CPI) and the Chinese (by the Maoists) – with the CPI-M straining to produce a communism with fraternal ties but not an umbilical cord.   CONGRESS PARTY: What would be the relationship of the Indian communists to the Congress Party after independence? Before 1947, the communists had a complex relationship with the Congress – in alliance with it against the British Raj, but diverging from it when it came to the class politics within India. The Congress, particularly during its first taste of governance after the 1937 provincial government elections, was often ruthless against working-class and peasant struggles. At the 1938 Haripura Congress meeting, the Kisan Sabha organised a massive demonstration to

protest a pro-landlord resolution. This resolution chastised Congress members who, as members of the Kisan Sabha had created “an atmosphere hostile to Congress principles and policy.”[28] That the Congress would see itself as antithetical to the peasant unrest said a great deal about its limitations to the peasantry.

As the Congress began to represent the class interests of the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie with increasing public confidence, the divide with the communists widened. The reckless 1948 push for an armed insurrection by the CPI did not come from no-where – in Telangana, the party was in the midst of a militant war, and elsewhere in the country arrests of party activists had taken place before any insurrection had been considered. But, within the CPI, a section felt that the Congress would remain loyal to its socialistic inclinations. Besides, it was felt, the overwhelming power of imperialism had pushed the Indian bourgeoisie to collaborate with the socialistic tendencies in the Congress. There was no need, therefore, for an antagonistic relationship with the Congress. The 4th Congress of the CPI at Palghat in April 1956 took place a month before the Congress met in Avadi where Nehru said of the private sector – “ultimately it will fade away.” At Palghat the CPI had a serious debate over the apparent socialist direction of the Congress – although the party leader, Ajoy Ghosh had already published a pamphlet with the telling title, Nehru’s Socialism – A Hoax. Ghosh argued that Nehru’s socialism was a “vote-catching device,” coming as it did months before the second general election in February 1957.[29] Nehru’s Congress won 371 seats out of 494 seats in that election (the CPI came a distant second with 27 seats). The CPI debate continued beyond 1956, with no resolution, and flared up again in 1962 during the India-China war. At that time, the section of the CPI that was close to the Congress took the view that Chinese aggression had to be fought off, whereas the majority of the CPI took an anti-war position. The split in the communist movement that produced the CPI and the CPI-M in 1964 can be rooted in the disagreement over how to understand the class nature of the new Indian state and the relationship of the Left to the Congress, the emissary of the new state.[30] But this disagreement was not without its complexities. In 1971, the CPI blamed the Congress policies for the rise of the Right (Swatantra and RSS). “If RightReaction has risen to its present monstrous stature,” said the CPI leaders, “it

is because of the failure of the Congress regime all these years to do away with the black legacies of the colonial past and of feudalism.”[31]

  DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS: Were Indian democratic institutions significantly useful to drive a communist agenda or where these shams that could only be confronted by extra-parliamentary means, whether armed or not? The CPI’s 1948 insurrection attempt and the Telangana armed struggle showed that the theory of limited efficacy of institutions always had a purchase in the communist movement. Harsh repression by the state against peasant and working class assertion led to the view that no amount of institutional politics would be able to either defend the producing classes or shift the terrain toward transformation. The CPI contested the first Indian elections in 1951-52 – coming a distant second to the Congress. In 1957, the CPI won the State Assembly election in Kerala, but was only able to govern the state for twenty-eight months. The communist government’s attempt to conduct land reforms and to bring some rational procedures to the education ministry was contested by the old social classes and religious institutions. The Congress egged on the reactionary campaign that followed (Vimochana Samaram). In a police assault at Cheriyathura, three people from the campaign died: Lazer Pereira, Flory Pereira and Antony Rebeira.[32]

Nehru, who agreed with the Communist educational bill, but disagreed fundamentally with the land reform agenda, nevertheless used the opportunity to dismiss the CPI government in 1959.[33] All democratic procedures had been suspended for political gain. But this did not dampen the communists’ commitment to the democratic institutions. Nor did other incidents where the state institutions went against the communists. In December 1968, while the CPI-M met in Cochin for its 8th Congress, the landlords of Keezhvenmani (Tamil Nadu) ordered the incarceration of forty-four dalits into their cheris (huts), where they were burnt to death. This killing followed the crackdown on the communist movement – including the assassination of three agricultural workers who were leading cadres of the CPI-M’s Agricultural Workers Association.[34] It was impossible to get any justice for the dead – even from the socialistic DMK government, which had taken power in 1967. Disillusionment with the democratic institutions remained high in the 1960s, leading at its end to the rise of the Maoist movement out of the CPI-M.

These three debates – over the role of Moscow, the Congress, and the democratic institutions – would play a major role in the splits in the Indian communist movement. In late February/early March 1948, the leadership of the Communist Party met in Calcutta. They would be arrested by the Nehru government at the close of this 2nd Congress. The general line that they adopted – that the principle problem for India was the Indian bourgeoisie and Nehru – led the CPI to an adventure that it later repudiated. B. T. Ranadive, the General Secretary, identified the many struggles across the country, called for a general strike to speed up the revolutionary process. The tide was very militant. In Thakurgaon, Dinajpur (Bengal), lay the epicenter of the Tebhaga movement (1946-47). The sharecropper tenants (bargadars) had previously to give half of their harvest to the landowners. They fought during this massive uprising to reduce their payment to one third. The militancy of the Tebhaga movement inspired the communists, many of whom were knee deep in the uprising.   Paddy cutting had started. One lot of volunteers had started harvesting, Red flag in hand. Another group of volunteers stood sentinel over them. After cutting the crop, they placed it in their own granaries. Police did not object. Next day, the police came and arrested 32 kisan workers, including the secretary, and sent them to Thakurgaon. But harvesting of paddy did not stop. This time, the police tried to stop the kisans. A kisan woman, Comrade Deepeshwari, lathi in hand, came and stood in the field. Raising the lathi she ran towards the police. Other volunteers ran behind her. The police retreated. They left the field.[35]

 

Workers, such as Comrade Deepeshwari, had a high sense of the moment. She was not alone. “As the movement spread beyond the possibility of control and direction by a few middle class leaders,” wrote Nepal Majumdar and Atis Dasgupta, “the Kisan Sabha decided to rely on the bargadars themselves to fix up shelters for them, act as couriers, hold meeting and keep regular contact with the peasants, in which process many emerged as mature leaders of their localities.” Women and the elderly “came forward to take a leading part. They often marched boldly to the fields to cut the paddy when the menfolk hesitated and held back.”[36] The enthusiasm of Tebhaga went from the bargadars of the plains to the tea planters of the hills,  

Maili Chetri, a woman tea worker of Denguajhar tea garden, started a union in 1946. The owner was the British owned Duncan Brothers. Within two months of the formation of the union the police was called in by the management. They opened fire and three workers were injured in protests Maili brought a demonstration of a thousand workers to the town. The strike that had broken out, went on for two months. On several occasions the workers came to the town to demonstrate for their demands and every time Maili stood at the head of the demonstration.[37]

 

Such sentiments and incidents exaggerated the expectation of revolution. That these were geographically uneven had to be taken into consideration. As Ranadive’s comrade P. Sundarayya wrote later, “Those armed peasant struggles were isolated ones.”[38] The temperature in the country was no-where near revolution. The CPI exaggerated the nature of the popular unrest. Caught between “right reformism” (identified with party leader P. C. Joshi) and “left sectarianism” (identified with party leader B. T. Ranadive), the new Central Committee of the CPI in 1950 called upon the party to “contribute your best to hammering out the new strategy and tactics.”[39] The inner party struggle would run from 1950 to 1964. In 1964, the CPI would split into the CPI (which favoured accommodation to the role of Moscow and the Congress) and the CPI-M (which believed in the growth of an independent communist identity, since the Congress had yoked itself to the dominant classes in the country). The splits in the communist movement developed entirely out of the contradictions faced by the movement, not for reasons of personality or power (unlike, say, in the bourgeois parties which are often centered around personalities). These splits certainly weakened the organizational power of Indian communism, and turned friends against friends.[40]

But, at the same time, they strengthened the movement by creating platforms with a diversity of views that should have been able to properly and soberly conduct ideological and political debates. Over time, the CPI and the CPI-M found a modus vivendi in the Left Front and drew closer to each other to the point where their formal unity has become a constant question.[41] The gap between these two communist parties and the Maoists, however, is very wide. Although even here, as far as the above ground Maoists are concerned, things seem to be in flux. The contradictions of the communist movement exploded outward to create a host of organisations. Unity, if it ever does come, will only take place at a higher level – with a

more mature sense of the political landscape and with a much more realistic understanding of how to work together.

In 1964, the CPI-M defined the Congress as a party that made “relatively progressive policy declarations” whose leaders might have “good intentions,” but which is “dominated by reactionary elements.” It could not be trusted. The CPI-M, with the 1959 Kerala experience behind it, warned against the idea that use of the democratic institutions is a sufficient task for the creation of socialism. Even in 1951, however, it was clear to the CPI that this was the case   There are a large number of people who think that [the Congress] government can be replaced by a people’s democratic government by utilizing the parliament ushered in by the new Constitution. Even a liberal, let alone the Communist Party and other democrats and revolutionaries, would now feel ashamed to maintain that this government and the classes that keep it in power will ever allow us to carry out a fundamental democratic transformation in the country by parliamentary methods alone. Hence, the road that will lead us to freedom and peace, land and bread has to be found elsewhere.[42]

 

The frustration with the bourgeois institutions ran right through large sections of the CPI-M into the 1970s.[43] In 1971, one of the CPI-M leaders, P. Sundarayya, wrote a strong editorial in People’s Democracy, the party paper, arguing, “It is only by developing a powerful mass movement culminating in land seizures that we will ultimately get the land to the tiller.”[44] The majority of the CPI-M saw that the democratic institutions were unwieldy and unwilling to submit to the needs of the people, and yet that it was through the long march into the democratic institutions that socialism could be produced. One section disagreed with the latter formulation. Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, then CPI-M leaders in Darjeeling district, believed in 1967 that the time had come for an uprising led by the tea estate workers and peasants.[45] In April, one of the area’s large landlords and Bangla Congress leader, Ishwar Tirkey, dismissed a landless farmworker, Bhigul Kisan. Kisan came to Sanyal and Santhal, who decided that a detachment of the Krishak Sabha would go and seize Tirkey’s land – peasant leaders Prahlad Singh and Sonamoti Singh joined in the struggle. At the end of May, the police arrived to arrest the peasants and communists. In the confrontation,

Jangal Santhal’s unit fired arrows at the police, killing Inspector Sonam Wangde of the Enforcement Department. Prahlad Singh and Sonamoti Singh hastily organized a women’s meeting, which was attacked by a detachment from the Eastern Frontier Rifles – eleven people died. What happened under Sanyal’s watch in the districts that surround the town of Naxalbari confirmed the view of the Eight Documents written by his comrade Charu Majumdar from 1965 to 1967. In his 1966, “Carry Forward the Peasant Struggle by Fighting Revisionism,” Majumdar – still in the CPI-M – wrote that his views on land reform replicated those of the leader of the Krishak Sabha, Harekrishna Konar. “Land reform in the peasant’s interest is possible only when we are able to put an end to the sway of feudal classes over the rural areas,” Majumdar had written. “To do this, we shall have to seize land from the feudal classes and distribute it among the landless and poor peasants.”[46] So far, what Majumdar had written was confirmed by the experience of Bhigul Kisan and his struggle, and indeed by Konar and the Krishak Sabha. It was the violence of the police that moved Majumdar, Sanyal and others to depart from the CPI-M line. In his 1966 document, Majumdar wrote that if the party wanted to build up its liberated area, it would “need the armed force of the peasants.” Influenced by Chairman Mao, Majumdar began to use the vocabulary of classical Maoism. Mao had considerable following in sections of the CPI-M – its publishing house, National Book Agency brought out a few collections of Mao’s writings in 1967, On Art and Literature, On Practice and Selected Writings – all of which remained in print for a decade. One of the people in the NBA responsible for these volumes, Suren Datta would eventually leave the NBA and found the proMaoist National Book Centre. The importance of the peasantry for the struggles of the CPI-M meant that Mao simply could not be ignored. The CPI’s Hiren Mukherjee, who carried his fealty to the Soviets and did not regard Chinese Maoism with much seriousness, nonetheless said on Mao’s death in 1976, “an Indra among men has fallen.”[47]

But what had been set-aside in the Indian communist consideration of Mao was the imperative of armed struggle in his work. Majumdar returned this front and center to the argument. The peasants need arms, he wrote in 1966. “Whether the peasants have come forward to collect arms or not is the basis on which we shall judge whether they have been politically roused,” he wrote.[48] It is the peasants’ desire for armed struggle that is the

gauge, not the revolutionary leadership’s sense of the strategic viability of an armed struggle. It is significant that in the Eight Documents, Majumdar does not fundamentally address the question of strategy. Tactics and mechanics lead the way. “Where from shall the peasants get guns,” he asks. “The class enemies have guns and they live in the villages. Guns have to be taken forcibly from them. They will not hand over their arms to us voluntarily. Therefore, we shall have to seize guns forcibly from them.” One of the great tragedies of the export of Maoism is that the Maoists in various parts of the world took Mao’s final, and contingent, lessons as universal laws. Concepts such as “comprador bourgeoisie,” “protracted war,” and “semi-feudal/semi-colonial” became terms used to define a reality that did not necessarily conform to it. In 1944, Mao asked his comrades to “treat all questions analytically; do not negate everything. Lacking an analytical approach, many of our comrades do not want to go deeply into complex matters, to analyze and study them over and over again, but like to draw simple conclusions which are either absolutely affirmative or absolutely negative.”[49] Mao had turned to concrete analyses of class differentiation in rural China when he was knee-deep in peasant organization in his native Hunan Province (An Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, March 1926, and Report on an investigation the peasant movement in the Hunan Province, March 1927). These findings would be set aside after the Long March of 1935, when Mao turned to his more fine grained military studies (such as his Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War, 1936). It is in this period as well that Mao developed his theory of the “semi-feudal and semi-colonial” conditions in China (The Current Revolution and the Communist Party of China, 1939). These helped guide Mao and his party into the strategy of the protracted war and towards the communist victory of 1949. The Indian situation was different then, and is even more different now. Capitalism was much more robustly developed in India, and the Indian state had a more effective set of tentacles into each corner of the country. Commercialization had not impacted Mao’s China as dramatically, and as a result of the Japanese invasion and the civil war, the state had largely collapsed. Early Indian Maoists sought to find their own context in their own studies of the landscape, but these experiments whittled as the powerful Indian state prevented them from the development of a mass (non-

violent) politics.[50] They were reduced to the armed path, with the phantom limb of over-ground politics being dragged along in the theoretical texts.[51]

Tensions in the CPI-M around the question of armed struggle for peasant revolution continued through 1967. In the party’s newspaper, People’s Democracy, B. T. Ranadive wrote a set of six essays that attacked the Maoist line. Ranadive opened by saying that in a Communist Party differences would appear on tactical questions and on the estimation of this or that event, but “one does not discuss programmatic questions every day.”[52] The Programme, worked out over years and through meetings of the entire party, set in place its understanding of the dynamic of the country, its geopolitical environment, its classes and its social movements. One of the great weaknesses of Indian Maoism, as it has been for Maoism elsewhere, is its remarkably poor theorization of state power and geopolitics. In India, the Maoists had decided that India is a “neo-colonial state” that remained feudal – therefore, the state rested unsteadily (suffocated by imperialism) and with force as its only instrument on a vast mass of prone subjects. “Everybody is against the state,” Ranadive said of this formulation. “No need to have auxiliary forms of struggle, for we are marching straight into a revolutionary situation; no need to utilize the bourgeois parliamentary institutions to expose and unmask them to release the masses from electoral illusions, for the situation has already released them.”[53]

The Maoists, Ranadive argued, “cannot imagine that a revolutionary use of the parliamentary forum is an adjunct to the class struggle and class war, and it should not be contrasted with it.” By the substitution of parliamentary opportunism with the use of parliament for the class struggle, the Maoists, Ranadive argued, “dispossess the working class of an important weapon to free the people of their parliamentary illusions and train their consciousness.”[54] What was necessary was to recognize the weakness of agrarian struggle across the country, to identify the revolutionary classes in a differentiated rural landscape and to pursue a militant policy of creating revolutionary majorities to fight the bourgeoislandlord state – that was Ranadive’s summary of the CPI-M’s April 1967 Tasks on the Kisan Front. “Without this class basis,” he wrote dismissively in August 1967, “all talk of militancy just becomes coffee-house talk which may relieve the dull monotony of a petty bourgeois’ ignorant mode of life but will not change an iota of the class struggle.”[55]

The Maoists did, however, leave the coffee shop. In November 1967, the Maoists formed the All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries. Their party included former CPI-M district level leaders mainly from West Bengal, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh – the heartland of Naxalism. Two years later, they formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). For them, the institutions of formal democracy had lost their efficacy. They had to be directly confronted by the gun. About ten thousand peasants died in the first five years of the Maoist insurgency – a terrible price to pay for revolutionary impatience. The oldest reply to Robespierre’s adage on revolutionary violence – you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet – is, comrade, where is the omelet? The CPI-ML broke into many fragments – squabbling over the correct line, broken by the repression and by discomforting personality differences. Majumdar’s line – “expand anywhere and everywhere” – was both proved correct and incorrect: the CPI-ML spread across the country, but fragmented as it did so. Majumdar died in police custody in 1972; Jangal Santhal was in prison till 1979, then died of alcohol poisoning in 1987. Kanu Sanyal remained a fierce defender of peasant power in Darjeeling. Mellowed by time, he came closer to his original party, the CPI-M. On March 23, 2010, the anniversary of the murder of Bhagat Singh by the British, he took his own life.[56] Their icarian adventure went into hibernation. Films that depict the high-point of idealistic Naxalism – in the 1960s – emerged in a flurry during the years of liberalisation – Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998), based on Mahasweta Devi’s novel about a woman whose son is killed in the Naxalite movement during the 1970s and finds herself drawn into his politics; Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003), a romantic and wistful film about three students in Delhi during the 1970s who go their own ways, one of whom goes to Bihar to become a Naxalite; Madhupal’s Thalappavu (2008), set in the 1970s in the context of a peasant uprising in Wayanad, Kerala; K. V. Anand’s Ko (2011), an overly complex political thriller with the Maoists in an unscrupulous alliance with the Tamil Nadu government; Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh (2012), in which the image of the Naxalites as terrorists is reversed. Each of these films suggests the romance of the Maoists – young people with different doses of privilege (St. Stephen’s college students, police officers) who encounter rural poverty, are shocked by it, and then begin to sympathize with the Maoists. In most of these films, the denouement is clichéd: there is no

answer to the tragedy, the Maoists are killed off, the state has to recognize some of the problems and conduct some reforms. The romance overwhelms the challenge of communist struggle. A romantic approach treats the struggle as a tragedy – fated to fail. Or else the people sit like dry tinder, awaiting the spark from the revolutionaries. The complexity of communism is reduced, as it is in the rhetoric of Maoism. Communist cells do not metastasize like an unstoppable cancer. They are slow to proceed, against the odds of a hostile reality despite the promise of a just and equal future.

Few of these films take the standpoint of the peasant or the adivasi. They are the extras, the human element, those who evoke pathos for the disenchanted elite. Much the same in the classic communist theatre of the 1950s. In 1950, three Communists – G. Janardhana Kurup, N. Rajagopalan Nair and K. S. Rajamani – formed the Kerala People’s Arts Club. Their second play – Ningal Enne Communistakki (You Have Made Me A Communist) – written by their comrade Thoppil Bhasi in 1952 was a runaway success. Massive social changes in Kerala freed up a new class to use any means necessary to annex as much property and wealth as possible, preying off both the old and moribund aristocracy and the tenants (kudiyans). Paramu Pillai represents the old world, but one that crumbles before him. His son, Gopalan, scans his social world, inflamed by prejudices of caste and undermined by people like Kesavan Nair, the capitalist. All is lost. Father and son, like the Mirzas seek refuge in Communism. “You have made me a communist,” says Paramu Pillai to Kesavan Nair – not theory, but circumstances. Matters are complex, and Shakespearean. Gopalan and Suman, Kesavan Nair’s daughter, are in love, and both are committed to communism. At the play’s end, Mala – a dalit woman who is a communist – carries the red flag, the flag of her class, she is told. Paramu Pillai goes up to Mala excitedly. “Give me the flag, my daughter. I want to hold it. I want to hold this higher and higher!” The play ends. We hear little from Mala. She could have anchored the play. Surely the story of the Pillai family, of Suman Nair, of Mala is not so simple. To make a commitment to communism is to break with one’s community, to disrupt one’s relationship with one’s neighbourhood. Gopalan and Suman wish to marry. Paramu Pillai begins to talk about auspicious times and ceremonies. Comrade Mathew says, “Those days are gone.” Although those days are not really gone for society. The communist movement continues to struggle with its relationship to the old social ways,

to hidebound attitudes to oppressed castes and tribals and of course towards women. To cross the threshold into communism, as Paramu Pillai does, is insufficient. It indicates a new orientation and a willingness to work for a different future. The communist movement in India has been slow to open its leadership ranks to women and the socially oppressed. For the first elections to the West Bengal Assembly in 1951, the communists only put up one female candidate, Manikuntala Sen, who won the Kalighat seat (the Congress only put up one female candidate, Ashrumati Devi who won the Jalpaiguri seat). Given the work that women had done in the mass movements and to build the CPI, Sen wondered, why “was I alone to be nominated as the sole representative of women among those 100 seats? Anila [Devi], Pankaj [Acharya], Kanak [Mukherjee], why couldn’t they be nominated? It just did not look right. Did the Communist Party consider its female workers unworthy?”[57] Sen’s question remained an open one when Brinda Karat refused to take her seat in the Central Committee in 1998. She would later join the CC when five women won posts to the party’s most important body. CPI-M senior leader and former Member of Parliament Malini Bhattacharya complained that even when women won seats, they were often delegated in the parliament to speak on issues pertaining to women, “and are hardly ever selected for debates on finance or defence.”[58] It was only in 2005 that the CPI-M’s Central Committee produced a forthright document on women’s issues. It was an indictment not only of the general social attitude toward women, but also attitudes within the party,   Communist families should discourage conformity to stereotypical roles expected of women, particularly newly wed women, of head covering, taking to the purdah, of shouldering the main burdens of domestic responsibility, etc. or of discrimination between sons and daughters. Party members should set an example within their own homes also. There should be a conscious effort to set standards of communist morality and ethics in relations with families … The Party has to make conscious efforts to root out alien patriarchal notions about women and women’s role within the family and in public life. Setting examples in personal life also will be of immense help in fulfilling the political task of mobilizing larger sections of women.[59]

 

It requires a great deal of effort to fight against social stigmas even within the Left. And here’s the rub. The communist has to stand against one’s social world at the same time as the communist has to become a

leader of that world. This contradiction has torn at communism from its beginnings. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the communists in Calcutta and Bombay lived in communes – not dissimilar to the Gandhian ashram, but now not in rural outposts but in the midst of bustling urban cities. Cross-class housing, disregard for caste restrictions, men and women mingling freely – all this was a direct challenge to staid bourgeois ideas of respectability that had moved out of the middle-class into the working-class areas as well. The Calcutta commune at 37 Harrison Road would have people like Soumendranath Tagore – who would later become a Trotskyite – come “without shoes, [wearing] shaggy, long hair, and dressed only in khadi,” as Kazi Nazrul Islam in one sitting would translate the Internationale into Bengali so they could sing it with their loudest voices.[60] Manikuntala Sen remembered that people would think of the communists as “followers of an irreligious, unsociable lifestyle.”[61] Basavapunniah recalled how middleclass intellectuals of the fledgling party would stroll into working-class areas of Madras – “agricultural labourers’ colony and untouchables’ colony” – to introduce their understanding of Marxism and Leninism. They were looked at strangely, and then welcomed warmly.[62]

When the Communist Party sent B. Srinivasa Rao to organize the peasants of Thanjavur in 1943, he arrived with little preparation. He spoke Tamil, but could not at that time read or write it.[63] He came dressed as an urban intellectual. The workers looked at him askance. But BSR, as he was known, persevered. He formed a little unit that comprised – as it turned out – mainly Dalit youth. One day he asked one of his comrades to carry a message across the village. Hours went by before the messenger returned. BSR asked him why he had taken so long. The young man said that he went by his bicycle, but since dalits were not permitted to ride a bicycle through the village, he had to take a circuitous route. BSR was shocked by this revelation, and later by the discovery that the landlords in the district relied upon bonded labourers (pannayals) on their fields. The realities of rural India had been far from his own bohemian sense of the world. With his comrades, BSR led the struggle against caste Hindu restrictions – the social basis of landlord power, and launched thereby one of the most important rural struggles in South India. It took a great deal for this highly educated man from Bangalore who first arrived in Kalappal wearing a sola topi to become a part of the dalit world that adopted him.

E. M. S. Namboodiripad found a flaw in Ningal Enne Communistakki. The characters, he wrote in 1954, “are puppets with no relationship to living communist activists.” Where are the voices of the dalits, the adivasis, the worker and the peasants, the heart of the communist movement? Thoppil Bhasi, Namboodiripad felt, had not adequately addressed the struggle to become a communist which often runs through several phases – fighting one’s circumstances, certainly, but then the break with established ideologies, ability to find activities to do to contribute to the struggle while living in this world. In close-knit communities at the nether end of the social order survival is an anxious business and social humiliation is a constant hindrance. The communists who emerge out of these worlds are often talented and bright – those who could make lucrative careers and could be the shining lights of their communities. Yet, they chose to go to the trenches of political battle. They refuse to leave their world, but in adopting the transformative social agenda of communism they remain within at a curious distance – unwilling to conform to conservative social trends. What Namboodiripad seemed to indicate is that communists live a double reality – fighting against this world to make a better future, and living in this world within one’s social order. To inhabit the present and the future is a stern burden on a communist. None of this comes out in the art on communism – too middle class in its orientation, only able to see the Maoists or the communists as figures of romance. It makes it so much easier to disdain them when the romance fades. What we rarely get, as Namboodiripad put it, is the communist, warts and all – including frustration, including humour. “When it comes to portraying a live, active cadre of the Communist Party,” Namboodiripad wrote in his review of You Made Me A Communist, “the author fails. He makes the ‘comrades’ talk and behave in such a way that we are led to exclaim, ‘if the leading Communists are so boring, how did the Party take root among the people?’” Laughter and camaraderie cannot so easily be erased from the historical record – although traces of these are hard to find in the documents, even in the oral histories. Historians of communism suffer from a major handicap – communists dislike recording their own social development, their own accomplishments. Memoirs are in short supply, and those that exist mainly lurch from this event to that one.[64] There is very little on the emergence of the communist from their social world into communism. Most of them start

with an incident in their childhood that sparked them to the inequities of the world, many of caste oppression rather than class exploitation. It is a Buddha moment – seeing something horrid moved them to reconsider their place in the world, either a place of privilege or a place of subordination. Ranadive remembered inviting some oppressed caste boys to play on a field, only to have to run with them as the landlord’s stickmen arrived to eject them.[65] Sundarayya was marked by his sister’s child-marriage and widowhood from age sixteen, as well as his mother’s fight against her family to retain some of her property after she lost her husband – when Sundarayya was only six.[66] Dange’s mother came from an oppressed caste background, and had a relationship with a Brahmin man in her village who had means. When Dange befriended a boy from an oppressed caste, his teacher beat him. Dange remembered his mother coming to school, “Don’t touch my boy. He may do anything he likes. And I have allowed him to touch a Mahar or Chamar or anybody. I do not observe all these damn things.”[67] Manikuntala Sen was inspired by the revolutionary martyrs, such as Dinesh Gupta, Bhagat Singh and Preetilata (“I gazed at [the] pictures [of these freedom fighters] secretly and felt an immense desire to follow in these people’s footsteps”).[68] These incidents mark their recollections of their youth. They became a part of what made them radicals. But they go by quickly. Politics takes over.

Dange remembers that his school “had the smell of politics in it.”[69] What does come out in their memoirs is that few of these communists came to the movement by reading Marx or Lenin. “Even when I joined the Communist Party,” recalled Namboodiripad, “which was in 1936, I had no theoretical grounding in Marxism.”[70] “I was transformed from an ordinary Congressman into a Congress Socialist and from a Congress Socialist into a Communist,” said Namboodiripad, “through the sheer process of my practical experience and discussions.”[71] Later Namboodiripad would study and become one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of his day – but his transit to communism was not from the books, but from circumstance. Politics would absorb their lives – the minutiae of this or that event, the importance of this or that political action. The role that the party played in their lives was to give them the space to produce a theory of action, a longterm anchor for their work – or else circumstance would take control.

The communists entered either full-time or part-time politics, avoiding the pitfalls of privilege and money, career and stability. A Gandhian ethos within the communist movement meant that their entrance into it was marked by aestheticism, by sternness toward frivolity and leisure. “If you consider the habit of not drinking and relatively simple living is a heritage of Gandhianism,” Namboodiripad admitted, “then you may say I still have it.”[72] These were hardworking people who expected a great deal from each other. Communists, building their confidence in each other and in their political line in their cells, would emerge into the world that had other desires, other dreams. The lure of commodities, from the 1940s onward, stood against the allure of the communist future. Even before the malls, the meager pay packets of workers were drawn to goods of one kind or another, and debt obligations climbed to pay for social extravagances that make life worth living (marriages, the birth of children, festivals). Communists were always useful in trade union and peasant struggles – for they knew how to help develop the fight for higher wages and better work conditions. But could communists be useful in the locality – would they be able to distribute cash at the time of festivals, or use their municipal muscle to bring water tankers if the water supply ran out? A worker in Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh) told me in 1996, during the Lok Sabha campaign of CPI-M candidate Subhashini Ali, that the “red flag is good for the factory. In our neighbourhood we vote either Congress or BJP.” These workers had a great deal of respect for the communists in their midst. They admired them. But they could not give themselves over to the communists. Their survival was premised on the social welfare of populist politics – the handout for votes.

REVOLUTIONARY PATIENCE

Units amongst the working-class and peasantry do not build themselves. They require the patience of communist action: regular meetings, frequent conversations with those who might be committed, and small political actions for small reforms (a street light here, a less offensive policeman there). Communist time is not the time of revolution alone – the excitement of the insurrection or even the demonstration, the heart beating fast in the chest, the bourgeoisie on the run. Revolutionary time is rare and haunting – it is when History speeds up and what one has wished for comes to pass.

This is not communist time. Communist time is measured in tea-cups and cigarettes, in party discussions over documents and door-to-door campaigns. Communist time is the time of eternal and circular effort. Days can pass by that resemble other days. The feeling of déjà vu can occur often in conversations – how often we have discussed this or argued over that?

From this working-class hall to that peasant hutment – here there are gatherings of real people, real comrades who have risked a great deal to fight against coagulated power that exists at the threshold of the meeting. There are men in the distance with lathis (sticks) in their hands, or others sitting in open jeeps, looking like the sullen villains of Indian films. There is eagerness in them to beat the communists out of history. Between the women who form the backbone of the Janwadi Mahila Samiti in Haryana and the men and women who form the marrow of the Adivasi Kshema Samiti in Kerala lie thousands of stories of bravery against dominant caste landlords and police officers, local thugs and national bureaucrats. Victories come at a very slow pace. Confidence is built up amongst people who have a general understanding of their situation but whose sense of historical agency has been dulled by the pressure of ruling class culture and power. To build leaders amongst the working-class and peasantry and then the socially oppressed sections requires consistent and patient work of ideological and organizational practice. It requires cadre, the persistence of party education, and the encouragement of consistent and regular work amongst the masses: communist time relies upon these elements. In 2012, when the CPI-M reviewed its work, the Andhra state report raised an important problem of the current context. Both the government and certain Non-Governmental Organizations had entered the areas of agricultural distress, for example, but along axes that divide classes and unite sects. They tend to organize their work and their service delivery along the axes of caste hierarchy or religious belonging – offering “uplift” programmes for this caste or that adivasi group. The RSS, for instance, has been active in adivasi areas through its NGO, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA). The VKA has humble origins in Madhya Pradesh, founded as it was as a genuine organisation by Thakkar Bapa’s devotee R. K. Deshpande. [73] It has since fallen fully into the web of Hindutva, being its most powerful entity in rural areas, where its influence has increased dramatically since its revival by the RSS in 1977. Less toxic NGOs, those that provide services,

for instance, are only slightly less detrimental to a transformational politics. B. L. Singhvi, a CPI-M leader in Rajasthan, said, “Although NGOs are involved in tribal development activities their networks and strategies are very different. The long presence of NGOs in the tribal area has, in fact, pacified the fire within the people and depoliticized development at the local level.”[74]

Neo-liberal policies create great new differences amongst the rural population: a new class of beneficiaries emerges out of the old privileged sections, and the working classes are more and more fragmented. “The divisions, inequalities, insecurities created by the neo-liberal policies,” warned the Andhra branch of the CPI-M, “are creating fertile ground for strengthening caste organisations, communal ideology and identity groups.”[75] NGOs of a certain kind end up paying attractive salaries to draw away talented people amongst the working-class and peasantry, many of whom are then cut off from the essence of building mass political organisations. Government service delivery, heavy handed at best and cynical at worst, is designed to fragment popular unity – provision of service tends to emphasize the “most needy,” who are then set apart from others whose needs are no lighter. The social basis for unity is undercut by these schemes and these arrangements. By 2012, the CPI-M state committees admitted that in many cases they had a hard time building campaigns and even struggles, while in some states weak party organization had not “made any serious effort at all.”[76] An agrarian crisis has swept the countryside, and yet, the CPI-M admitted, the party has “not been successful in building powerful agrarian struggles reaching wider sections.” Why is this?   Obviously, there are serious obstacles in the way – the differentiated nature of the adverse impact of the crisis among various sections among the peasantry, regions, crops and periods, the deep-rooted casteism which divides the peasantry, the strong influence of landlordism and feudal elements, the growing criminalization and resort to goonda violence, low level political consciousness – all these have to be surmounted by planned and determined organizational work and by raising correct slogans and building movements on the issues of land, wages, prices of crops, credit, social oppression, etc. [77]

 

Trade unions had been very active, working to build unity amongst all the major federations. The Left unions spearheaded the drive to hold a February 28, 2012 strike. Ten crore (100 million) workers took to the streets across the country. Nonetheless, since ninety per cent of the workforce is outside unions, the CPI-M worried that a large section of workers “still continues to be outside these actions and our influence.”[78] The social fragmentation of neo-liberal policy, with a dynamic against unions in the countryside and the factories, makes organizational work a challenge. Nonetheless, the brutality of neo-liberal policy sets in motion forces of disgruntlement and anger that could erupt at any moment. The CPI-M’s internal review worried that the communists were not prepared to harness such an upsurge. “Any weakness in intervention in the spontaneous protests and struggles will either give opportunities to the disruptive forces or to the enemies to intervene and lead the masses into divisive channels or the masses may again fall back to cynicism and inaction.”[79]

A new energy is necessary, a new enthusiasm for organizational work, drawing people from new areas. Work towards new mass fronts – for adivasis, for disabled people, for urban areas, for the free software movement – has begun, just as the 2004 On Approach to Mass Organisations calls for a dynamic approach to workers and peasants who have taken it in the neck from neo-liberal policy. One of the most crucial areas for work is amongst adivasi communities. The communist movement has had a long history of work among and with the adivasi communities – who formed a crucial part of the Telangana struggle, who fought alongside the communists in Warli to liberate the community from slavery, and who created the Ganamukti Parishad in Tripura to fight for the liberation of the region.[80] The communist bloc has also fought in and outside parliament for a Forest Rights Act and for its implementation. The CPI-M’s Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch battles the RSS and the mining mafia in the forests of India –encouraging wide mass mobilization of adivasis. In Kerala, the Left has led a land struggle across the state since 2012 under the banner of the Adivasi Kshema Sabha, the Pattika Jathi Kshema Samiti, the Kisan Sabha and the Agricultural Workers’ Union – with the Pattika Jathi Kshema Samiti a dalit only outfit.[81] In the adivasi regions, the Maoists have been very active. In the Maoist “red belt,” the CPI-M argued in 2012, the adivasis are “caught between Maoist terror on the one hand and the

repression of State forces on the other. In such a situation the formation of [the adivasi] platform has had a positive impact on advancing struggles of tribals for their demands and helped to draw more sections of the tribals towards the movement led by us.”[82]

The phrase “Maoist terror” is apposite. It has dogged the Maoist movement from its inception. Certainly the bourgeois media paints the Maoists as a terrorist movement, but that is to be expected. More importantly is the internal self-critique of Maoism. In 1970, Satya Narayan Singh, one of the founders of the CPI-ML, broke with his party, describing the line advocated by Charu Majumdar as “individual terrorism.”[83] The CPI-ML expelled Majumdar in 1971, but the germ of “individual terrorism” metastasized in the party. Nagi Reddy, who took his Andhra Maoists out of the CPI-ML complained that the policy of assassination would not “annihilate the system or the forms of exploitation” if they happen without “any relation to a mass revolutionary movement.”[84] The Maoists in India rehearsed a debate that the Chinese had in their revolution and that Maoists would have from Peru to the Philippines: does power grow from the barrel of a gun, or does power emerge from the people, defended by the gun? In the era before the 1970s, Marxist organizations and Marxist theorists wrote in exhilarating prose along the grain of violent action. The main texts were those of Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Võ Nguyên Giáp, with the experience of Cuba (1959) at the center of this political vortex. This wave broke somewhere between the death in combat of the Peruvian Revolutionary Left Movement’s leader, Luis Felipe de la Puente in 1965 and the crushing defeat of the Bolivian Teoponte foco in 1970. Regis Debray’s A Critique of Arms (1974) is its intellectual end-point. They had made violence the principle of their struggle, not the strategy.[85] It is at this time that Naxalism also began its decline. Maoist time attempts to short circuit by the gun the gap between communist time and revolutionary time. Harsh state repression of Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s, with almost twenty thousand Maoists in prison, sent many middle-class Naxalites to form organisations to defend civil liberties. Some, such as the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, would retain its links to the People’s War Group – a banned Maoist group; while others would move into human rights groups with other lineages, such as Jayaprakash Narayan’s People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). For the PUCL, this historical link has been an albatross – since it has allowed the security services to

continuously harass its workers (Binayak Sen in Chhattisgarh, and then Seema Azad and Vishwa Vijay in Uttar Pradesh). One of the most wellregarded of the civil liberties workers who did have close ties to the Maoists was K. Balagopal. Balagopal clearly understood that the Maoist presence in India’s heartland is a consequence of the failure of India’s state and society to attend to the grave inequalities in the country. That was the author of the crisis. He was also not naïve about the use of violence, since this was often a response to the structural violence of capitalism (the theft of resources from the adivasis by mining and clear cutting of forests) and the manifest violence of the security services against any kind of adivasi protest or assertion. All that was clear. Nonetheless, Balagopal had a front-seat view of the degeneration of the Maoists to “medieval forms of violence.”[86] By the late 1990s, Balagopal had become a clear-sighted critic of the lack of democracy in the armed movement, and the involution of its politics. Decisions, he wrote in 1997, are “taken and implemented over the heads of the people but justified in the name of the people.”[87] The problems of organization were compounded when the Maoists groups united to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in September 2004. Balagopal worried that the lack of any mechanism for internal discussion – largely due to the condition of being banned and under intense state scrutiny – led to the position where the masses became “receivers of justice rather than fighters for it.” Balagopal described the situation,   You only have to report to the militants and get them to put up posters with appropriate demands and threats, and you will get what you want, provided that in the meanwhile the police have not made it impossible for the militants to come to your area to hear your pleas and put up posters. Then, of course, you wait till the militants turn the tables on the police.

 

The Maoists, Balagopal conceded, “have developed considerable expertise of a military character, which is admired even by policemen in private, even as their political development has stagnated.” The situation resembles in great part the degeneration of the Maoist movement in Peru – with the targets not simply the police and the class enemy (landlords) but other social forces of the people and the Left. It has become commonplace to target the CPI and the CPI-M cadre in the adivasi areas, killing adivasi

cadre of these two parties who are seen as a threat to Maoist hegemony. This was already evident in the late 1960s, when Charu Majumdar’s assassination strategy meant the guns had to be turned at landlords and at the CPI and the CPI-M, his former comrades. The ferocity against the CPI and CPI-M would increase by the 1980s, when journalist Praful Bidwai wrote, “Often the affirmation of the revolutionary identity of Naxalism means singling out the CPI-M and CPI for an onslaught because, according to their theory, those parties are nothing but obstacles to the popular movement.”[88] In 2011, the Maoists assassinated Niyamat Ansari of Kope (Jharkhand) – a social welfare activist whose work had uncovered theft of money earmarked for the most wretched among the rural poor. In a factfinding report, Ansari and his associates suggested that the Maoists had colluded with the illegal contractors and the forest officials in the scam. The Maoists accused Ansari and his associates of being “police informants and cheating the local people of their forestland.”[89] The accusation was a death sentence. The connection to Peru is not made gratuitously. In 1990, Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) had decided to broaden their base out of the rural highlands of Ayacucho and into the urban pueblo joven (shanty town) of Lima. One of the most militant slums was Villa El Salvador, where the Federación de Mujeres de Villa El Salvador had worked hard to build power for the women of the slum. They created the Vaso de Leche program to supply children with milk, created public kitchens for communal meals and developed a health care infrastructure. The Federación pioneered a culture of mutual aid in this pueblo. Sendero entered in August 31, 1991 to assassinate Juana López, who ran the Vaso de Leche program. On December 6, 1991, Sendero killed Doraliza Esperjo Márquez, another coordinator of the milk scheme who had led a march against violence in the large pueblo joven of San Juan de Lurigancho. When Sendero shot her, they left a sign on her door that read, “This is how traitors who collaborate with the army die.” Sendero circulated a pamphlet that taunted María Elena Montoya. She was unfazed. The brutality of capitalism, the military rule and Sendero had destroyed the capacity of the people, she argued in defiance. On February 15, 1992, Sendero killed this thirty-three year old Afro-Peruvian community leader. They shot her and then blew up her body with five kilos of dynamite. She was the greatest threat to them. Three hundred thousand people marched behind her coffin in Lima.[90] Violence

was not a part of a larger strategy for Sendero. It was part of Sendero’s aesthetic, “The people’s blood has a rich perfume,” went the Sendoro song, Flor de Retama, “like jasmine, daisies, geraniums and violets.” “Blood will not drown the revolution, but water it” the cadre sang as they entered villages, guns with the safety off.[91] Violence was tactic, strategy and goal. It was everything.

María Elena Montoya is not an unfamiliar sight in West Bengal. She is in every hamlet, each town: activists who are hard at work building the social basis against the dynamic of anti-social capitalism. Many of them felt the cold steel of Maoism over the past decade. Between May 2009 and August 2009, just in West Bengal, the Maoists killed the following cadre and party sympathizers of the CPI-M and the CPI:   Dinesh Mahato, Purulia, May 23. Salku Soren, W. Midnapur, June 11. Asit Samanta, W. Midnapur, June 14. Debabrata Soren, W. Midnapur, June 14. Dhiraj Manna, W. Midnapur, June 14. Keshab Manna, W. Midnapur, June 14. Mohan Singh, W. Midnapur, June 14. Naru Samanta, W. Midnapur, June 14. Probir Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 14. Sanjoy Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 14. Sanjoy Pratihar, W. Midnapur, June 16. Sunil Das, W. Midnapur, June 16. Tapan Das, W. Midnapur, June 16. Abhijit Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 17. Anil Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 17. Badal Chandra Ahir, W. Midnapur, June 17. Niladri Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 17. Sisir Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 18. Keshab Das, E. Midnapur, June 20. Buddheswar Mahato, W. Midnapur, June 21. Pranesh Ghosh, W. Midnapur, June 21. Moloy Mahato, W. Midnapur, July 5. Motilal Mahato, W. Midnapur, July 5. Baren Mahato, W. Midnapur, July 10.

Gurucharan Mahato, W. Midnapur, July 10. Swapan DebSingha, W. Midnapur, July 12. Tarini DebSingha, W. Midnapur, July 12. Gangadhar Mahato, Purulia, July 15. Ashok Ghosh, W. Midnapur, July 18. Jaladhar Mahato, W. Midnapur, July 18. Brishaspati Mahato, Purulia, July 18. Fagu Baske, W. Midnapur, July 22. Ananda Das, Jalpaiguri, July 28. Sagar Chandra Masanta, W. Midnapur, July 30. Nirmal Mahato, W. Midnapur, August 1. Sankar Adhikari, W. Midnapur, August 5. Mohitosh Misra, W. Midnapur, August 10. Ramakrishna Dule, Bankura, August 15. Mangal Soren, W. Midnapur, August 28. Bidyut Das, W. Midnapur, August 29. Gobinda Singh, W. Midnapur, August 29. Bharat Hembram, Purulia, August 29.

 

The Maoists of West Midnapur went after the entire apparatus of the Left – assassinating one party member after another. On June 14, in one of the incidents that gives us the names of some of the dead above, Maoists entered Dharampur, in West Midnapur, and attacked the CPI-M offices there – fighting back to protect their offices, three CPI-M members were killed (Harinagunj branch secretary Asit Samanta, Democratic Youth Federation of India local leader Probir Mahato and CPI-M’s Naru Samanta, all in their mid-twenties). The Maoists abducted six CPI-M workers, only later disposing of their bodies – Keshab and Dhiraj Manna, Sanjoy and Swapan Mahato, Debabrata Soren and Mohan Singh. Dharampur was the last outpost of the CPI-M in the Lalgarh region, which the Maoists claimed to have turned into a liberated zone. Not long after, when journalists visited the area, they found the reality much more complex. Manek Singh, who lives in Bhumidhansola, told one journalist, “The Maoists forbade us to enter the forests to cut wood. The Forest Department used to pay us R. 70 a day for this work. Now, no one even enters this area to purchase the leafplates we make. We have been left with nothing.” Why did the Maoists gain such influence in the area? They had killed off or expelled anyone who

challenged them. The Jharkhand Party’s Chunibala Hansda said of the Maoists, “People are scared of them.”[92]

The error for the growth of Maoist “influence” lies also in the Left Front government, which had abandoned the area at the first sign of Maoist activity – not wanting to replicate the police firing in Nandigram of November 2007. Local CPI-M leaders, such as Anuj Pandey, had a terrible reputation for heavy handedness and use of force. But the Maoists did not only go after the CPI-M; they also subordinated the People’s Campaign Against Police Atrocities (PCPA), pushing it to form an armed wing – the Kanhu Jana Militia – led by the Maoist leader Sidhu Soren (killed by the Central government forces in 2010). The Maoists and their Trinamul associates went after communist elected officials, women leaders in the panchayat, and women activists with the Mahila Samiti. There are some pretty ghastly stories of violence against women – including rape and immolation.[93] Politics had been set-aside in Lalgarh. Violence had “cleansed” the landscape, preparing it for the kind of authoritarian populism of Mamata Banerjee. She need not promise an improvement in livelihood. It is enough for her to promise stability. From 2007 onwards, the Maoists entered the western reaches of West Bengal to attack the leaders and cadre of the CPI-M. The Maoist attacks weakened the Left in that area, killing off hundreds, ejecting thousands from their homes, and opening the door to the Trinamul Congress to establish its hegemony once the central troops came in to push the Maoists back. Mamata Banerjee had accused the CPI-M of using its armed militia to create terror in this region. She called this militia harmad, which – in Bengali – means goons. In the 16th century, Portuguese pirates would harass the shoreline dwellers in the Bay of Bengal. Francois Bernier, the physician traveler, noted in 1655 that these Portuguese pirates “made women slaves, great and small, with strange cruelty, and burnt all they would not carry away. And hence, it is that there are seen in the mouths of the Ganges so many cities quite deserted.”[94] The Portuguese word for their ships (Armada) found its way into Bengali, as harmad. Mukunda Ram’s 1577 ballad tells the story of the sea voyage of Dhanapati Sadagar, of whom: “The captain left the country of the phirangis [foreigners],/ and steered the ship day and night for fear of the harmads.”[95] It is this word that Mamata Banerjee used to classify an imaginary armed militia of the CPI-M. It is the

word that entered the street, and allowed her to justify her crackdown on the Left’s apparatus across the state.[96]

Mamata Banerjee’s deployment of the concept of harmad allowed for a series of opportunities. Firstly, it reduced the CPI-M and the Left Front in general into a brutal force, goons and thugs who terrorized the countryside and slums. Such a description allowed her to neutralize liberal opinion when she stepped in to unleash violence against the CPI-M – first in alliance with the Maoists, then with her own party’s armed gangs. Liberal opinion hastened to say that the CPI-M had brought this on itself. It had ruled by the fist for thirty-four years, and this was simply the coin that it would have to accept. After all, it was the CPI-M’s cadre who beat up Mamata Banerjee in 1990.[97] West Midnapur was also the battleground for fierce CPI-M/Trinamul political battles since 1998.[98] What has been stunning since 2009 is the asymmetry of the death and destruction – with the Left bearing the brunt of the intimidation, the assaults, the expulsions and the murders. It is at a scale comparable to the Congress-led violence of the early 1970s. In 1972, the editors of the Economic and Political Weekly would write, “The CPI-M Party has been subjected to organized political terror with the connivance of a pliant governor’s administration.”[99] Nothing like that came from the left-liberal press in recent years. Human rights organisations maintained a studied silence, as hundreds of Left leaders, cadres and supporters were put to death and as thousands were expelled from their homes. Secondly, the scale of the violence allowed the bourgeois parties to draw in terrified supporters of the Left into the Trinamul or into the BJP. Mamata Banerjee’s adjutant Firhad (Bobby) Hakim drew in a prize from Kolkata’s Mominpur-Kidderpore area by recruiting from the Forward Bloc into the Trinamul the sons of Kalimuddin Shams – Moinuddin and Nizamuddin. Kalimuddin Shams was a lion in the Forward Bloc, with a lock on this working-class area that abuts the wealthy Alipore neighbourhood. When he died in March 2013, his sons inherited his power base – one of the grave cultural aspects of Indian politics. They did not share their father’s commitments. What they sought was power and privilege. That would no longer come from the battered Forward Bloc, an important constituent of the Left Front. When Bobby Hakim reached out to them, the sons left the Forward Bloc and brought their apparatus to the Trinamul. The Trinamul used the Shams’ in areas where the Forward Bloc

has a base, particularly in Cooch Behar, North Dinajpur and Birbhum and especially amongst the Muslim community.[100] CPI-M party supporters joined the Trinamul in the Khanakul area of Hooghly in 2014, while CPI-M councillor Chaya Doluri from Chandrakona left her party and joined the Trinamul.[101] More strikingly, across West Bengal, the violence has brought fifteen hundred Forward Bloc members to the BJP. Former General Secretary of the Yuva League (the Forward Bloc’s youth wing) Anirban Chowdhury was among those who joined the BJP. “Our party workers were attacked and our leadership did nothing,” he said. “But when the BJP workers were attacked, their leaders stood behind every party worker. It is this security which the BJP will ensure.”[102] Over two days in August 2014, the district committee of the CPI-M in North 24 Parganas met. District Secretary Goutam Deb said it was a “risky” business being a communist these days. The level of violence made it “rather natural” that party supporters and members would either become inactive or join another party. “The same thing happened during the violence in the 1970s,” said Goutam Deb. Later, the party was able to rebuild its strength.[103]

Thirdly, the license to the Maoists to operate in Lalgarh and elsewhere in the western districts allowed Mamata Banerjee, when the time was right, to send in the armed forces of the state and her armed Trinamul militias to crack-down on anyone on the Left. This produced a bloodbath not simply for the Left Front but also for the Maoists. The state violence in West Bengal came alongside Operation Green Hunt, set in motion by the central government in 2009. By 2013, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Muppalla Laxman Rao (alias Ganapathi) wrote a seven thousand word letter to his comrades, in which he admitted that the party had taken an enormous hit from this violence. Of the 40 Central Committee members and fourteen Politburo members of the Maoists in 2007, only twenty CC members and seven PB members remain out of custody. Even worse, Ganapathi admits that the membership has slipped well below the 10,000 to 12,000 cadres that they had estimated during the merger. “We are suffering loses,” wrote Ganapathi. To stem this, he argued that the party needed to free their jailed comrades, and “get rid of sectarian and bureaucratic trends in internal party relations that are harming the unity of the party, isolating us from the masses and helping the enemy.”[104] There is a fear for the Maoists that a decade into the unity of the People’s War Group with the Maoist Communist Centre a split might take place. This

break-up would happen along the geographical fracture, with the Andhra unit (PWG) and the eastern unit (MCC) going their own ways. In 1951, the CPI’s “Statement of Policy” warned against too great emphasis on the peaceful road to socialism. Violence is not the essence of communism, the party argued. “It is the reactionary ruling classes who resort to force and violence against the people and who create the issue of whether our creed is violence or non-violence.”[105] The terms of the debate are set by a violent social order, that is defended by the ruling classes through various forms of structural and surface violence. If the Maoist pendulum met the ruling class on its terrain, a tendency operates on the Left to go in the reverse direction – to non-violence, to Gandhian ideology, “which, in practice, misleads the masses,” noted the CPI.[106] Why should the communist movement accept the terms of the ruling ideology, when another approach is possible? “All actions of the masses in defence of their interests and to achieve their liberation are sacrosanct. History sanctions all that the people decide to do to clear the debris of decadence and reaction that blocks the path to progress and freedom.” Violence might occur. It remains in the arsenal of popular insurrections. Parties do not operate with violence as the strategy and tactics, but they do not negate the actions of the masses who have few options before them. Inside the Maoist camp, from the 1970s, concern about a politics led by the gun took hold in the organization created by Satya Narayan Singh. In 1982, the CPI-ML (Liberation), now led by Vinod Mishra, created the Indian People’s Front, as its legal platform – contesting Bihar’s assembly elections three years later. The experience of above-ground work led Vinod Mishra’s party to emerge to the surface in 1992. The futility of the armed road had become apparent to Liberation. In late July 2014, the CPI, the CPI-M and the CPI-ML (Liberation) announced that they would contest the Bihar 2015 assembly polls in a Left alliance. “The grand alliance is a political compulsion,” said CPI-M state secretary Vijay Kant Thakur. These three Left parties will begin to work together from 2014 onwards and will “function as one party.” The hope is that “camaraderie will continue till the next state Assembly elections and even beyond that.”[107] Such initiatives would help move forward working-class political action and culture – enhance the confidence of the working-class and peasantry to forge ties in a world that has reduced them to disaggregated individuals. Gone are the robust kisan sabhas of Bihar, and gone are the old bastions of communist

politics. These will have to be patiently rebuilt against a dynamic of neoliberal capital that opposes the social fabric of workers, and against a Maoist tendency that seeks dominion by the gun rather than the incubation of working-class creativity. The time of communism, the long-term and patient work of building the bases of working-class power, will take a while. There are no shortcuts to the time of revolution, not even in the barrel of a gun.

GOVERN AND MOBILISE

Democratic institutions in India are flawed, but their utility is undoubted. They have a great resilience and people continue to believe that these institutions could be efficacious. In the early decades of the Indian Republic, the Election was a fundamental process – deeply felt by a population that had fought against colonialism. The communist movement, after a brief leftward turn against the democratic institutions, came to terms with their social reality. The Communists adopted the view that multi-party democracy had to be utilized for now.[108] In the 1951 Statement of Policy, the CPI recognized that although “the masses have lost faith in the present Government,” “it would be a gross exaggeration to say that the country is already on the eve of armed insurrection or revolution [the Russian Way], or that civil war is already raging in the country [the Chinese Way].” Nor should the party succumb to the illusion that India is a fully functional democracy “with rights and liberties and nothing need be done … With such an outlook, we shall get smashed and will be able to build nothing.”[109] What the party had to do, the 1951 statement suggested, was to work toward strengthening the party and to close the divides among the progressive forces. “We must fight in the parliamentary elections and elections in every sphere where the broad strata of the people can be mobilized and their interests defended,” the Statement noted. “We must be wherever the people are and would like us to be.”[110]

In the first general election of 1951, the communists came a very distant second with sixteen seats (the Congress won 364 seats and the socialists won twelve). These sixteen seats, strikingly, came in states that would remain core bastions of the Left – Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura (where the electoral advantage would remain) as well as Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu (where the electoral gains whittled away). Electoral

victories do not come from nowhere. What explains the translation of mass movements to electoral gains in these parts of India? Firstly, it is, of course, the case that these areas had powerful workingclass and peasant struggles in recent memory. In West Bengal, the Tebhaga movement initiated by the Kisan Sabha and the communists ran from 194647 drew vast support from share-croppers for a greater share of their harvest. This came right after the communist-led relief effort during the diabolical famine of 1943.[111] In West Bengal, three hundred thousand people gathered in central Calcutta on August 31, 1959 at the high-point of the food movement – the police opened fire on them, injuring thousands (eighty people died in this agitation). “The people wanted food,” recalled Jyoti Basu, “but what they got instead were teargas and bullets.”[112] The food movement built on the railway worker agitations, the labour unrest in the factories along the Hooghly river, the fight for land distribution in the 1960s, the fight against the authoritarian presidential rule in the early 1970s – all paving the way for the growth of the communist movement in the state toward electoral victory in 1977. In Kerala, the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising after the Travancore Maharaja’s Prime Minister Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer oversaw the killing of two hundred communists in 1946 drew in mass peasant and working-class support. Travancore Coir Workers strikes and the South Indian Railway Labour Union strike of 1946 drew the organized working class into the orbit of the communists.[113] In nearby Andhra Pradesh, the Telangana uprising of 1946-51 drew mass peasant support against the power of jagirdars and deshmukhs – feudal landlords who dominated the politics, economics and society of the dominion of the Nizam of Hyderabad.[114] It helped, of course, that the communist leadership was seen as utterly incorruptible, carrying the personal mantle of Gandhi – the ascetic’s staff alongside the communist’s hammer and sickle. But the obvious explanation – working-class and peasant struggles seed the terrain for the communists – is insufficient. After all, the workingclass struggles in Bombay Presidency did not deliver the state so firmly to the communists. Secondly, in these states (bar Tripura), the entirety of the Congress Socialist Party apparatus came over to the Communist Party of India – led by such stalwarts as E. M. S. Namboodiripad and A. K. Gopalan, P. Krishna Pillai, K. Damodaran (for Kerala), P. Sundarayya and M. Basavapunnaiah

(Andhra Pradesh), P. Ramamurti, P. Jeevanandam, Srinivas Rao, C. S. Subramaniam, K. Murugesan, A. S. K. Iyengar, Janakiammal (Tamil Nadu), Pramode Dasgupta, Manikuntala Sen (West Bengal).[115] Basavapunnaiah would later say that there was never really a socialist movement in the Madras Presidency that was not already communist – “Socialists were limited,” he said. “It was mainly Communists who were taking the name of Socialists.”[116] In West Bengal, the CSP had drawn in the most active members of the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti – although many bypassed the CSP to go right into the CPI as well as Subhash Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc or to form the Revolutionary Socialist Party, all key constituents of the Left Front.[117]

Thirdly, in the lands that would become Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, the communists took leadership roles in the fight for the formation of linguistic states. Drawing from the experience in the Soviet Union of a multi-national federation, the communists argued that the most appropriate way to organize the states in India would be along the lines of nationalities – with language, not “race,” as the cultural glue.[118] “India,” for the communists was a federation, not a nation. It would be more democratic, it was argued, if the linguistic nationalities had their own administrative units, could use their own languages to govern themselves, and would have control – as a nation inside the Indian state – of their own resources. Anything short of that would mean that geographical inequities would not be addressed, and the Indian bourgeoisie would be able to dominate regions against the best interests of the people.[119] The proof of this argument came in the active resistance to the idea of linguistic states from business lobbies (All India Exporters’ Association and All India Manufacturers’ Association) and from the parties of the right (the Jana Sangh and Swatantra Party).[120] Their resistance to linguistic states stemmed entirely from their anti-democratic desire for a strong central government. Militant mass struggles for Kerala (Aikya Kerala movement) and Andhra Pradesh propelled the Left to prominence. In Punjab, where the linguistic question got intertwined with religion (Sikhism and Hinduism) the communists floundered. In the 1940s, before the partition of India, the CPI had championed a Sikh homeland – “the cradle of the Sikh people” which would nonetheless be a state of Punjabi speaking peoples, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.[121] By the time Punjab came into existence in 1966

through the Punjabi Suba movement, the toxic alliances between the Akali movement and the Hindu Mahasabha had swallowed linguistic nationalism into communalism.[122] The CPI had taken the same position for Baluchistan, Bengal, Kashmir, Pathanland, and other places that could have been organized based on language not religion – but of course this was not to be and these places on both sides of the partition line remain tense on these issues till this day.[123] In the Gangetic belt, such democratic national struggles around language simply did not develop. Language politics was either suffused with anti-Muslim tension (as in Uttar Pradesh) or it remained the realm of the aristocracy and its intelligentsia (as in Bihar, with the Raja of Darbhanga’s close relationship with the Mithila cultural movement but utter detachment from the people – he could not win in the parliamentary seat in his ancestral home in the Lok Sabha of 1952). Fourthly, brings us to Tripura, whose story is unique in so many ways. The roots of the communist movement in Tripura were neither in the Congress Socialist movement nor in the fight for a linguistic state. In 1945, Dasarath Deb and his comrades formed the Janasiksha Samiti to bring literacy to the various adivasi communities – to enhance and develop their own multiplicity of languages and enrich their literary traditions. A communist unit had already been formed in 1938 in Agartala, and several of its members – led by the secretary Biren Dutta – got involved with the Samiti. Through the linguistic movement, the Samiti forged ties with the peasantry, whose uprisings had already been organized into the Jangalmahal Samiti and the Tripura Rajya Praja Mandal. As the struggles against feudal oppression of the Raja of Tripura intensified, the various movements coalesced to form the Ganamukti Parishad, which moved toward an armed struggle that ran from 1948 to 1950 against the Manikya dynasty of Tripura. The fall of the dynasty and the literacy-political movement amongst the adivasis delivered the mass struggles to the communists and to their allies. During the tail end of the armed uprising, the Parishad went wholesale into the CPI, which is when it two main leaders – Deb and Dutta – won the parliamentary election on the CPI ticket in 1951. The massive adivasi rebellion in Tripura echoed a similar rebellion in the Thane area of what would become Maharashtra. The Warli community suffered deep oppression from their caste Hindu landlords. They sent fifteen delegates to the founding conference of the Maharasthra Kisan Sabha in January 1945. Mahya Dhangda, one of the delegates and a bonded labourer,

spoke to his new comrades about the miserable conditions of daily life. He appealed to the communists to come and assist their struggles. Godavari Parulekar of the CPI toured the area, and she, along with her husband Shamrao, lived with the Warlis. In May 1945, the Warli communists held a conference in Zari, which was attended by five thousand workers. They launched the Warli Adivasi Rebellion that lasted till 1947 – not before great loss of life at the hands of the British Raj and the interim Congress government.[124] The dynamic of this rebellion could very well have delivered the region to the Left. Indeed, as in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, the communists took an active and leading part in the 1956-57 Samyukta Maharashtra movement, a linguistic nationalist movement for the Marathi speaking people. Electoral gains were not far behind, with the CPI winning both seats from Thane in the 1957 Lok Sabha (Shamrao Parulekar and Matera Laxman Mahadya). The CPI was able to win two more seats from Bombay in 1957, that of Dange in Bombay and Nana Patil (hero of the Prati Sarkar of 1943-46) in Satara – both beneficiaries of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement and the working-class and peasant struggles of the 1950s. Tragically, the heartland of the CPI, the Warli region was divided between Maharashtra and Gujarat. This had an impact on a potential breakthrough for the communists. Fifthly, when the CPI split in 1964, the CPI-M held a discussion about how to build the party in perilous times. The general consensus reached by November 1967 was to develop the mass base and the party in “compact and contiguous areas.”[125] No wonder then that the Left would grow in these pockets, since the party resources had been diverted to build them up. In 1957, the CPI won the most seats in the Kerala state assembly – forming a government with E. M. S. Namboodripad as the Chief Minister. From 1957 to the present, the alliance of the Left Democratic Front has governed Kerala for about half its existence – 1957-59, 1967-81, 1987-91, 1996-2001 and 2006-2011. When it has gone into the opposition, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) came to power. That the names of their fronts is so similar gives a flavor of the role the Left has played in the state – pushing a Left culture as the dominant culture for much of the 20th century. In Tripura, the Left took state office for the decade between 1978 and 1988 and then from 1993 to the present. In West Bengal, the Left was in government in a wide coalition in 1967 and 1969-70 and then as the Left Front for a long stretch, from 1977 to 2011. That the Left

Front was able to win seven consecutive assembly elections, beat back the logic of incumbency for thirty-four years, cannot be washed away because of the defeat of 2011. No other political party was able to increase its margins of victory through such a long, and unbeaten number of years. What requires explanation is both this long streak, and the precipitous decline. Governance for the Left in India came at the state level – not at the central level. Each of the state governments that have been ruled by the Left (Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal) has their policy space circumscribed by central government actions. In 1996, the West Bengal Left Front’s Minister of Industries Nirupam Sen pointed his finger at New Delhi’s refusal to allow the state to create a public bank. “One may dream that a left-led government should at least follow a non-capitalist path,” he said. “But it is neither possible theoretically nor practically.”[126] The Left has had to govern following the Indian Constitution, which is a generous document but is certainly skewed to the propertied classes. The central government is the one that controls the purse strings, and it is the one that – until the 1990s – determined economic policy through a framework of licenses and subsidies. Autonomy for the state governments is limited – they have no ability to raise funds for themselves, and only a very narrow road upon which to drive alternative policies. Evidence of central government discrimination – whether by omission or commission – against the states governed by the Left is substantial. Little wonder then that the Left accumulated a corpus of grievances against the central government, each of these injuries repeated with greater outrage as the years went by. As economist Prabhat Patnaik put it, “If socialism in one country has its problems, then so too does redistributionism in one province of one country, especially a country developing along capitalist lines.”[127]

In its 1964 Programme, the CPI-M laid out the principles for taking power in a state within the Indian union. The party should use “all the opportunities that present themselves of bringing into existence governments pledged to carry out a modest programme of giving immediate relief to the people.” This was the bare minimum that the Left could do – use all constitutional measure to provide “relief” for struggling people. Taking power, however, should be for more than merely relief. It should “give a great fillip to the revolutionary movement of the working people and thus help the process of building the democratic front,” namely a

coalition of forces that would be able to transform the bourgeois-landlord system and provide a genuine socialist alternative. The government, then, was an “instrument of struggle,” and the main slogan for the period was to “govern and mobilise” – to provide relief, run a rational system of administration and use extra-parliamentary means to build power among the working people.[128]

FIELDS

“We are aware, no real land reform – land reforms that

could really solve the land problem by giving land to the rural poor,

by totally eradicating the exploitation by landlords and moneylenders –

is possible within the framework of this Constitution

and within this socio-political structure.” Harekrishna Konar, CPI-M leader, 1969[129]

  The most tangible struggles and gains from the experience of the Left Front governments have come in the fields. The April 1967 Tasks of the Kisan Sabha, through the experience in peasant struggles laid out the two principle areas for action:   (1) “For strong, militant and well-organised movements of the poor peasants and agricultural labourers to force the unwilling Government and landlords to distribute fallow lands to some extent.” In other words, land reform. (2) “Through effective mass struggles, to prevent the eviction of tenants from the land they are cultivating, and to achieve land or house-sites for the rural poor, free of cost, to a limited extent.” In other words, registration of sharecroppers.

 

These tasks emerged out of the analysis of the Indian rural landscape and of the experience of the CPI government in Kerala in the late 1950s. It is precisely these two tasks that detained the Left Front in West Bengal during its two turns at a United Front government in the 1960s and in the long stretch of Left Front governance from 1977 to 2011. These two aspects (land reform, registration of tenants) would not make sense without a third element – the establishment of institutions of democratic government, the panchayat (local self-government) system. As the former Minister for Land Reform, Rural Development, Panchayat and Health, Surjya Kanta Mishra

put it, this was the “policy of walking on two legs” – reforms in the field itself (land reform and tenant registration) and the panchayat rule.[130]

Why was it important to conduct land reforms, register tenant farmers and establish panchayat rule? Mishra and the economist Vikas Rawal laid out five objectives for the Left’s programme in West Bengal’s fields:[131]

  To weaken the domination of landlords in rural West Bengal. The land reforms would redistribute agricultural assets, and diminish the economic power of the landlord class – established during the British Permanent Settlement to consolidate the power of the zamindars, the landlords with economic, political and social power over the countryside. To unleash the productive forces in agriculture. West Bengal, according to the S. R. Sen Committee report (1983), suffered terribly from low agricultural growth rates between 1947 and 1977 largely due to pre-capitalist relations in the countryside, underdevelopment of productive forces from lack of landlord incentive and usurious control of credit by landlord-moneylenders.[132] The only way to unleash the productive forces would be to change the correlation of classes in the countryside. To create a market in the rural areas. Low remuneration meant slack demand. The agrarian bourgeoisie often sought its markets elsewhere than in its own locality – exports to cities or to foreign lands. If the purchasing power of the rural poor was increased, they would be able to buy goods and draw capital to develop rural industries. To empower Dalits and Women. Most landless labourers and many day labourers are dalits and women. To give them rights to the land and to raise wages, as well as deliver political power to them through the panchayats would strengthen their hands against dominant castes, patriarchy and class power. To provide basic conditions for the expansion of health care and education. The wretched social relations in the countryside had maintained low rates of literacy and the basic indicators of health. The Left believed that if it could help break the feudal structure, it would be able to begin a process for delivery of these social goods.

 

Just after taking his oath of office in 1957 to be not only the first Chief Minister of Kerala, but also the first communist head of government in India, E. M S. Namboodiripad announced his government’s Statement of Policy. He pledged to conduct agrarian reform speedily, with bills for “fixing fair rent, giving fixity of tenure to the tenant, fixing a ceiling on landholdings in keeping with the peculiar conditions of Kerala, distributing surplus land above the ceiling, giving such safeguards as are legitimate for

those small landholders who stand to lose by the above mentioned reforms.”[133] Six days later, the CPI government issued an ordinance that prohibited eviction of tenants, sub-tenants and occupants of homestead land for any reason, including failure to pay their rent. This ordinance put the stamp of seriousness on the process to write an actual Agrarian Relations Bill. Kerala’s Kisan Sabha and Agricultural Workers’ Union went to work to defend landless and tenant farmers from the power of the janminaduvazhi-medhavitwam (landlord-upper caste-chieftain) bloc, theorized by E. M. S. Namboodiripad in his minute of dissent to the report of the Malabar Tenancy Enquiry Committee (1937).[134]

The Agrarian Relations Act that followed at the end of 1957 tread carefully through the variety of land tenure arrangements across the new state of Kerala, drawing together old princely deeds with imperialist commercialization of land in the three provinces of Cochin, Malabar and Travancore. The land reforms minister – K. R. Gowri Amma – spent “sleepless nights,” E. M. S. Namboodiripad recalled, as she worked to make sense of the fragmented reality. But the outcome of the bill was not timid. It protected all those who worked the land. The power of the bill is what stoked the rebellion of the landlords against the CPI government, leading to its removal twenty-eight months later. Almost two million acres of land went to 1.3 million households and tens of thousands of acres of household land went to over three hundred thousand households. Extreme concentration of land and the power that came with that eroded across Kerala.[135] When the Congress came to power after the CPI government was removed, it rolled back a number of the provisions (and in the early 1960s, the courts struck down land reforms) – but it could not wrest the dynamic from the Left. When the United Front government of the Left came back to power in March 1967, it once more promulgated an ordinance for land reforms, and then passed a bill in October 1969 – after a fierce fight against the landlords and their parties. The Left was voted out the following year, but kept up the fight through the agricultural workers union (Karshaka Tozhilali Union) for full implementation of the law. Jathas traveled across the state, as the CPIM launched the “excess land agitation” – a demand for land seizers by the state and by the landless peasantry. Pressure on the Congress government forced it to implement the act, abolish the rentier class and free at least three hundred thousand kudikidappukars, the bonded workers. The laws

advantaged 1.3 million tenants.[136] Although because of the gap between the first inkling of land reforms in 1957 and their enactment in 1970, many landlords hid their surplus land under false names (behami) or “gifted” the land to family members.[137] Agricultural growth rates went up, landlordism deteriorated, caste power was eroded, and peasants felt emboldened.[138] Efficiency in the land, however, freed people from the land – which fueled the sojourner migration to the Gulf that cemented Kerala’s place as a remittance-reliant economy.[139]

Landlord power in West Bengal was considerably weakened by the growth of peasant struggles, aided by government policy. The West Bengal Land Reforms Act of 1977, hastened through by the Left Front government, provided the legal basis for Operation Barga, the registration of 1.4 million sharecroppers (bargadars) in the state – of whom more than half a million were dalits and adivasis. The mechanics for Operation Barga came from an adivasi sharecropper, Sambu Tudu. Land and Land Reforms Minister Benoy Chaudhury set up conscientisation camps across the state; the idea of the conscientisation came from the Brazilian educator Paulo Friere, who laid out a process to create critical consciousness amongst the oppressed. Tudu came to one of these camps in Halushai. Tudu proposed that the revenue officials should come to the fields, meet all the sharecroppers at one time and register their claims communally. Otherwise, the landlords would adversely speak for them.[140] Using provisions in the Constitution and older laws (West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act of 1953 and West Bengal Land Reforms Act of 1955), the Left Front government seized lands above the allowed ceiling, acquired them and turned them over to 3 million landless and marginal cultivator households. More than half the beneficiaries of this redistributed land came from dalit and adivasi communities. Within the decade, production and productivity on the land increased, and poverty fell. Growth rate of rice production rose from 1.8 per cent during 1960-80 to 4.68 per cent from 1977 to 1994, while rural poverty rates fell from 73 per cent in 1973 to 31 per cent in 1999. Field surveys showed that agricultural productivity increased by 18 per cent. Why did this happen? The cultivators now had a right to their land. Their interest in production meant that they improved the land through inputs (irrigation, better seeds) financed to some extent by rural credit schemes developed by the government. Increased growth rates on an equitable foundation meant

that more money went into the hands of the producers, who ate better and were less poor. An ineffective Tripura Land Reforms and Restoration Act passed in 1960 provided the legal framework for the communists to fight for rural rights in this small state, tucked away in India’s north-east, enveloped by Bangladesh. The second word in the act is the most important – restoration. Tripura’s tribals and other peasants had lost their land to the erstwhile monarchy and the process of commercialization. To bring this land back to the actual cultivators was the main task of the rural struggles led by the communists and by the Tripura separatists (Tripura Upjati Juba Samiti, TUJS). The latter, the TUJS, had a disruptive politics of land restoration – they turned on the Bengali peasants, including those who had come into Tripura as refugees after the Bangladesh war of 1971. The communist struggle, therefore, was both for the rights of the tribals and the peasants (including Bengali peasantry) as well as against the armed xenophobia of the TUJS (which was in alliance with the Congress Party). Security concerns enveloped the land reform agenda, and complicated it. Twice the Left government amended the 1960 law to strengthen the land restoration provisions and to highlight the land reclamation and redistribution sections. Using this law and the Forest Rights Act (2006), Tripura has been able to restore 7,147 acres to tribal families. Secondly, the Left government redistributed state-owned khas land and ceiling-surplus land – turning this land over to landless and homeless peasants. Almost 35,000 acres went to 37,000 families – small-holdings, no doubt, but essential for homesteads and small cultivation for a land starved population. [141] To turn over land to people with minimal resources is hardly a panacea. In 1995, the CPI-M leader Dasarath Deb (and Chief Minister of Tripura from 1993 to 1998) complained to the central government about the lack of adequate support for the new peasants. The government has not been able to “protect tribal interest on land,” he wrote to Home Minister Y. B. Chavan because “it is unrealistic to assume that the ownership of land can be seen in isolation from other economic aspects.” One of the main reasons for loss of land, Deb noted, is that the tribal farmers cannot find the “resources to put the land to productive use.” Government schemes have been “ineffective.”[142] It was toward that end that the state government tried to mobilize resources towards making owners “viable cultivators.” How effective these schemes have been against the tide of commercialization and

neo-liberal speculation in land will have to be seen, since these pressures have only now begun to assert themselves in rural Tripura.

Land reforms and tenancy registration did not come with illusions. What had to be curtailed was the political and muscle power of the local, dominant classes. It is to this end that the Left moved an agenda to devolve power to local self-government, panchayati rule. In Kerala, the Left government set up an Administrative Reforms Committee (1958), which recommended the creation of a two-tier system – panchayats and municipalities at the local level, and district councils. This recommendation would reappear in 1967, 1971, 1978, 1981, and 1991 – each time being cut down by opposition from the Congress and its landlord allies. When the Janata government set up the Ashok Mehta committee on panchayati raj, E. M. S. Namboodiripad wrote a note in which he described the Left’s urgency for local government,   Our experience of working this system proves that since the parliamentary democratic system as it prevails today provides the exploited majority a powerful weapon with which to fight the exploiting minority, the latter does its utmost to reduce democracy to a mere formality, to subvert it whenever and wherever the exploited majority uses it to get anywhere near the seats of power … My faith in democratic decentralization arises from the fact that it helps the working people in their day-to-day struggles against their oppressors and exploiters.[143]

 

The tussle between the Congress and the communists in Kerala prevented the agenda for decentralization – whenever the Left put a bill forward, the Congress would dilute it during their turn in power. It was not till 1996 that the Left was able to push forward on this agenda in Kerala.

In West Bengal, the three decade-long rule allowed the panchayat agenda to take hold in a more long-lived and deeper way. The Left Front government brought out the mothballed 1973 West Bengal Panchayat Act, and called for elections to the panchayats in June 1978 – the first of a cycle of elections for local democracy (1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, and 2013). In the first term of the panchayats, the task was to implement the land reform agenda – with the panchayats as the spear to identify illegalities and promote the new agenda. The upsurge of the Left in this period ensured that the winners of the panchayat seats were largely from the peasant movement.[144] Three quarters of the panchayat members owned

less than two acres of land, while in some districts (Burdwan and Jalpaiguri) over ninety per cent of the members were landless or small cultivators.[145] The power of the panchayat was demonstrated during the catastrophic flood of 1978, which would ordinarily have wiped out livelihoods and created grave social distress. The panchayats swung into action – proving that management could be turned over to these local bodies, which ran programmes such as Food for Work, National Rural Employment, and Rural Restoration. Government bureaucrats hesitated to turn over these tasks to the people. Prabir Kumar Sengupta, an MLA from Banseberia (Hooghly) recalled that in the early years of the panchayat system, government officials had “been working all these years without any sense of involvement, as mere formal workers.” They took “no marked initiative in implementing the policies” that the Left government and the panchayats initiated.[146]

The road from the Diamond Harbour train station to one of the villages in the district in 1994 was barely paved. But along the road ran an irrigation canal. At periodic intervals, sturdy but cheap aluminum bridges spanned the long canal. The local panchayat officials muttered apologies for the state of the road. It was pitted and untended. One of the elected panchyat officeholders was in her thirties, a small-holder and member of the CPI-M, who had already been a veteran leader in the panchayat. Then she said, “The money we got for road construction was of no use to us.” There are only a few cars, and the trucks that carry agricultural goods to the train station could drive on the dirt track. “We used the money for the roads to build the bridges across the canal,” she said. Otherwise the residents had to walk a long way to go around. This was the best use of the money, and it was the panchayat that decided to shift the money to their priorities. She was not bothered about the legalities. At the panchayat office, as we sat and discussed these issues, three people walked right in, saw the panchayat head and began to pillory him. One woman, a small cultivator, spoke in a continuous stream – angry that he had not attended to a complaint she had made. She shook her fist, raised her voice. The matter would be attended to, he said. This was not enough for her. She wanted to have him turn his attention to it now. She was not obedient. She knew, in her bones, that the old right to abuse by the powerful had been suspended. The year before, in 1993, the Indian government’s former secretary to the Ministry of Rural Development D. Bandhopadhyay

and former civil servant Nirmal Mukharji wrote a report for the West Bengal government on panchayats. The report found that more than the economic benefits to the rural poor, the panchayats “have helped to generate social and political awareness among the people and facilitated the development of a new leadership. This intangible achievement has strengthened the roots of democracy.” This new kind of democracy emerged, the report argued, because land reforms, tenancy registration and the panchayats “weakened the hold of big landlords who had traditionally led rural society.”[147]

Tripura inherited an old set of monarchical institutions, which had to be set-aside in 1983 through the Tripura Panchayati Raj Act. The panchayats alongside the Tribal Development Councils helped the Left devolve power to the locality (including over resources, via the Panchayat Development Fund), who was now not only tasked with economic development but with engineering social peace. It is important to recognize that the Left operated in Tripura during a major insurgency that ran from 1989 to 2012. Violence against the Left picked up in the 1990s. The insurgents saw the communists as the main threat to their agenda. Nonetheless, the Left Front continued to work for peace through development and the use of the police force (not the army) to quell the armed violence. The Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council Bill of 1979 was strengthened, and elections held for tribal control of the countryside alongside the panchayats. Drawing people into local selfgovernment, even in a time of insurgency when the temptation to centralization is very strong, provided the best tonic against the separatists. It is what took the sting out of their politics, drawing them back to the political process. The Congress government in the 1980s had tried to rely upon the policies of violence, namely the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which resulted in such terrible incidents as the 1988 gang rape of 14 tribal women in Ujanmaidan by the Assam Rifles soldiers. For the Left Front, AFSPA is not the main policy platform, although the Left government did not suspend it (Manipuri human rights activist Irom Sharmila has been on hunger strike against AFSPA since 2000). The Left has been gradually ending the use of AFSPA across Tripura.[148] The panchayat experiment in Tripura was not only about building rural power

against entrenched landlordism; it was to undermine the dangerously xenophobic violence of separatism. The land reform and tribal councils strategy helped dramatically reduced poverty rates in the state. Between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the Planning Commission numbers show a decline in Tripura’s poverty rate from 40 percent to 17.4 percent. That is a drop of 22.6 percent: the highest decline in poverty figures for the country during this past decade. The Tripura decline is not shared by its neighbors: Manipur (from 37.9 percent to 47.1 percent), Mizoram (15.4 percent to 21.1 percent) and Nagaland (8.8 percent to 20.9 percent).  The politics of basic needs and of peace play a very large role in this reduction of poverty. While the rest of India whittles away at the Public Distribution System (PDS), Tripura has enhanced it to the betterment of people’s lives. Not only can one get basic foodstuffs at subsidized prices, but one is also allowed to procure light bulbs through the PDS system. Bread alone is not enough for human dignity. Education is one of the most sought after public goods with schools as one part of it and reading at home another. Without light bulbs and electricity, intellectual development is harder. By making sure that the PDS system is not simply for the survival of people, but also for their enhancement, the Left dignifies the role of the State. Such improvements are widely commented upon inside Tripura, where the development model has struck a chord with the public. The slogan for the Tripura Model is simple: people’s growth before the GDP. Power to the workers of the soil gave the Left an enormous constituency in Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal. The Congress in Kerala used clever tactical alliances and indulged full-bore in the politics of religion and caste to prevent the long-term ascendency of the communists. The literate population of Kerala also did not brook any nonsense – quick to disparage cant and unwilling to let the Left rest on its laurels. In West Bengal, rural West Bengal turned red. It was also clear that for the first time in several generations, social peace began to settle in the countryside. Unlike in much of the country, the suffocation of landlord power did not allow violence to run riot against the cultivators. Unlike in Bihar, there was no landlords’ Ranvir Sena to bring terror to the peasantry. The outraged punitive landlords had been constrained. It was a historical achievement.

By the late 1990s, the literature of the Left began to speak of the agenda of land reforms as “limited.” It had been constrained by the

limitations of the Constitution, but also crucially of the power of the Left and of the outcomes of the reforms themselves. The Left Front in West Bengal, for example, had been unable to generate a substantial rural credit infrastructure to allow small cultivators easy access to loans for upgrades to their farms (by creating, for instance, a collective credit system), the government could not find the means to develop publically financed irrigation on a mass scale, and it could not create a policy to sustain wage rates for agricultural workers, or to ensure that employment days (especially for women) remained high.[149] More seriously, the land reforms had not fully eroded the possibility of a resurgence by the old social classes and the newly embolden upper end beneficiaries of the land reforms. The old landlords moved to non-farm related rural industries and service delivery. Alongside them, the new rural rich who, like the old landlords, diversified from farming to agricultural trading – namely, the establishment of cold storages to rent to potato farmers, the sinking of tube wells to sell water to others, and the rental of tractors and power-tillers. As Mishra and Rawal put it, the old landlords lived remote lives and were “easily isolated, a man against whom you could unite the peasantry easily.” The new rural rich, on the other hand, have deep roots in the countryside, manage their own land, are linked to the agricultural workers and marginal cultivators through the sale of services and the provision of credit. These are, in many respects, capitalist farmers – not the standards of socialism.[150]

Mishra, as Minister for Land Reform and Rural Development in West Bengal, worried in 2001 about the tide of the countryside. In the essay with Rawal, the information provided suggested that the neo-rich and the old social classes might provide the basis for the penetration of the Trinamul Congress and the BJP into the countryside.[151] This is precisely what happened over the subsequent decade.

FACTORIES

Kerala’s historical tilt to the left was produced in large measure by the people’s movements that continue to mark its culture. When the CPI won the elections in 1957, the state had eight hundred trade unions, which doubled by 1959. In 1957, there were one hundred and thirty thousand union members, which grew to three hundred and twenty thousand unionists by the end of 1959. Eighty per cent of the trade unionists

belonged to unions controlled by the CPI (the national average was thirty per cent). The CPI’s early policy once in govermment was to remove, as much as possible, the police from the center of industrial disputes – these were contract negotiations between the management and the workers, where the police would have no role. The police was also forbidden to do background political checks for new employees on behalf of firms. Left governments in Kerala struggled to produce a proletarian culture in its relationship to industry. With few state resources, Kerala was never able to develop a robust public sector. It had to rely upon private monopoly capital for large enterprises (such as the Birla-owned Gwalior Rayons), and it pushed to create mass cooperatives in such industries as coir, handloom and toddy.[152] Capital simply did not appreciate Kerala’s rational labour market. “In the north, management is concerned with inventories and accounting,” an experienced manager told sociologist Patrick Heller. “They don’t understand industrial relations because they are used to getting their way with unions. When there is a problem with unions, they just fire or buy off the leader. Such practices are impossible in Kerala. In Kerala, you have to adopt modern management techniques.”[153] It was Kerala’s modernity – produced by the Left – that sent firms to Gujarat, for instance, where the brutality of social relations tilted the balance in capital’s favour.

West Bengal, on the other hand, had been the center of a great deal of industry. In 1951, a quarter of the country’s total industrial output was produced in the state. Unfortunately, the old colonial firms developed a vast industrial apparatus in sectors that had become anachronistic by the 1950s – indigo, jute, and paper – with heavy industry burdened with out of date machinery – iron & steel. The partition of British India sundered the fields of East Pakistan (where the jute was grown) from the factories of the River Hooghly (where the jute was processed). It did not help that the Nehru government pushed a freight equalization policy that meant raw materials from Bihar could travel to Maharashtra and Gujarat at the same price as to the factories of nearby West Bengal.[154] Capital slowly fled the state, and then with the violence of the 1970s, left in a great hurry. By 1978, West Bengal’s share of the country’s industrial output declined to 11.9%. One of the most fascinating elements of the Indian communist movement’s history has been its creative and dynamic rural policy and its inability to develop as imaginative an industrial policy. The Left Front in

West Bengal produced an industrial policy document in the autumn of 1977 with seven important points:   1. Reverse trend of industrial stagnation. 2. Reverse the trend of unemployment. 3. Encourage small-scale and cottage industries. 4. Encourage indigenous technology and industrial self-reliance. 5. Gradually expand the public sector. 6. Lessen the “stranglehold of the monopoly houses and multinational firms on the economy of the state.”

7. Increase the power of the working-class over the industrial sector.[155]

 

Nothing in these seven points directly threatened capitalist social relations. The first two points had become commonplace by the 1970s across the political spectrum. The next two (cotton industries and indigenous technology) would have provided the productive capacity to fulfill the demand of the rural population. Goods would be provided at a cheaper cost since their production would not be reliant upon high transport costs and rents for intellectual property. The question of the public sector against monopoly and multinational firms would exercise the Left Front government, but absent investment this was more rhetoric than reality. The only point that led the Left Front government away from the bourgeois parties was the importance of strengthening the power of the workers. The fact that the list of items suggested a social democratic agenda should not be construed to mean that the Left Front had both come to terms with the failure of a socialist agenda or that it had reconciled itself with merely the reform of capitalism. It was certainly the case that the Left Front’s industrial policy remained at the level of trying to change the material conditions of West Bengal’s de-industrialization. This was inevitable for any government, but more so for a Left government. It had to find a means to deliver reforms, but not lead the people to the view that it could solve the acute crisis of capitalism by these reforms. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in her polemic against Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, “the socialist significance of trade-union and parliamentary activity is that it prepares the proletariat – that is, the subjective factor of the socialist transformation – for the task of realizing socialism.”[156] The Left Front committed itself to the

transformation of the subjective situation of socialism – to enhance the power of workers, who had been put on the defensive for a generation. Could the Left Front government augment the socialist capacity of West Bengal’s working class?

The governments in Kerala and West Bengal correctly worked to enhance the power of organized industrial labour, and provided legal mechanisms to strengthen worker power. In the 1960s, in West Bengal, the Labour Minister Subodh Banerjee of the Socialist Unity Centre of India, a United Front partner in 1967, told a union conference in Rourkela, “I have allowed a duel between employees and employers in West Bengal and the police have been taken out of the picture so that the strength of each other may be known.”[157] Banerjee promoted the gherao, the strategy of physical encirclement of the managers and owners of industrial firms by their workers. A thousand gherao episodes in the first month of the 1967 government chilled investment into the state. The Left set the gherao aside, but of course continued to take the side of the workers in an increasingly militant set of fights through into the 1980s. Anachronistic industries whose products could not find markets, and whose machinery had been worn through sustained depreciation, set the padlock at the gate. The old colonial industrial belt that ran from Kamarhati to Bhatpara slowly lost its shine – decline set in fast, with the courts caught in treacle for decades as the land sat unused and the machines became a home to rust. By the end of the 1990s, industrial units went idle more frequently than workers went on strike, indicating the power of the owners.[158] By 1995, West Bengal’s share of total industrial output for India fell to eight per cent. Power came to the workers, but power was not depleted from capital – it simply locked its doors and departed the state. A long history of neglect informs this anger: documents from the communist movement suggest a deep conspiracy by the Congress and the dominant classes. The Nehru government’s freight equalization scheme, the refusal to sanction Soviet financing for power plants, the hold-up of the Haldia Petrochemical project for eleven years, the rebuff at all plans to jointly finance an Electronics Complex at Salt Lake, and then the decline of Central government investment in West Bengal (from 11.7 per cent in 1970 to 7.1 per cent in 1980) as compared to Maharashtra (from 3.1 per cent in 1970 to 16.1 per cent in 1980).[159] The proof of any collusion against the Left Front-ruled states is in these statistics. It is also found in the fact that

other non-Congress state governments did not face the kind of sustained humiliation that West Bengal had to suffer.[160] There is no public correspondence to prove this, as we had between G. D. Birla and Purshottamdas Thakurdas (filed in New Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Museum and Library). There are also no files from the Ministries of Finance or Commerce and Industry that reveal a paper trail of denials – nothing with an explanation for why the decisions had taken so long, and why they almost always resulted in refusals (these would have ordinarily been filed in the National Archives of India). When files are not opened and a fair, judicious investigation of the documents cannot be made – it is reasonable to judge central government policy by outcomes. The upshot of central government policy was that West Bengal, unlike Maharashtra and Gujarat, was starved of investment. The Left Front government was simply not able to drive an industrial policy – neither one that mimicked the capitalist path nor along an alternative axis. There was simply no coherent industrial policy till 1994. The Left parties did attempt to make an issue of this discrimination, with campaigns over the Bakreshwar Thermal Power Station and the Haldia Petrochemical project. Massive blood donation programmes to symbolically raise funds came alongside state-wide jathas. But the politics was not able to move the roadblocks of power. The Left was also not able to use the blockage as a way to revive faltering working class unions, with the left unions in danger of being outflanked by workers’ organisations that developed outside the Left bloc (such as the Sangrami Shramik Union at the Kanoria Jute Mills in 1993).[161]

Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s attempt in the 1980s to woo private capital did not succeed. Deteriorated industrial infrastructure alongside a lack of capital pushed the more skilled workers to leave the organized sector – where there were no jobs – for the unorganized sector – where they remained underemployed.[162] Lack of capital, shifts in labour patterns and a general deterioration of the work environment made quality control difficult to manage. Amongst capitalists, Bengal’s workers developed a reputation for a poor work ethic.[163] While central government investment policy engineered the deindustrialization of West Bengal – under Left Front rule – it enhanced the industrialization of Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Left’s attempt to “govern and mobilize” within the domain of industry in both Kerala and West Bengal crashed hard upon what Frantz Fanon called “the old granite block upon which the nation rests.”[164] More

latitude was given to the Left for its agricultural reforms, but not by much. In Kerala, the government faced great resistance to its agricultural policy, but the Left Front in West Bengal was able to make some space for itself. Perhaps the emergence of Naxalism – the extreme threat of all out rural violence – opened the space for a more managed land reform programme. Landlords lost their land either way, but the industrial bourgeoisie and the political class was able to save itself from wave upon wave of revolutionary violence. But that is speculation. What is clear is that a cognate industrial strategy of the Left was quite simply blocked. It could not take place. It is what produces the conjunctural crisis for the Left Front’s defeat in the 2011 West Bengal Assembly elections.

CULTURE

In 1957, Chief Minister E. M. S. Namboodiripad assembled the staff of the Secretariat, the civil servants of the government of Kerala. He admitted the lack of experience in his cabinet (except C. Achutha Menon, who had been in the Travancore-Cochin State Legislature in 1952). “We have a lot to learn from you,” Namboodiripiad said. Nonetheless, “we have opportunities to feel the pulse of the people,” he noted, from which bureaucrats were often insulated. “You will have a lot to learn from us. The old social order is changing. You must correctly understand this change.”[165] Namboodiripad chaired an Administrative Reforms Committee, whose 1961 report came out two years after the CPI government had been ejected. Its two volumes are worth reading even today. They provide a cogent analysis of the old colonial inheritance – the iron cage of the bureaucracy, whose senior personnel of the Indian Administrative Services had been trained in New Delhi – often under the eagle eye of conservative administrators – and who brought none of the élan of popular movements to their jobs. The conservatism of the bureaucrat is legendary. Twenty years after the Kerala report, the Left Front government in West Bengal commissioned a similar study. Finance Minister Ashok Mitra chaired the committee. It was an aggressive choice. Mitra was well-known for his sharp words against the bureaucracy – notably the IAS’s S. M. Murshed.[166] Most of the report is as one would expect. Annexure V is the most striking part of the report. It is called “The Movement of a File.” Murshidabad’s Additional District Magistrate (Land Reforms) writes a

letter to the Land Reforms Department about an accusation of misappropriation of funds by two employees. The letter, in its departmental file, went across 104 desks, with signatures flowing off the file’s cover. Eventually the file landed at the Public Service Commission, who sent it to the archaic sounding Legal Remembrancer for an opinion. The answer, “No further action is taken.” The employees involved had retired by the time the answer came back to Murshidabad.[167] Departmental vanities and anxieties shuttle files for fear of making the wrong decision. West Bengal’s secretariat is called Writer’s Building – it was certainly not easy to make it act. Namboodiripad worried that communists might not properly understand the dialectic between a permanent bureaucracy and the government. The left ministers should not, he wrote later, “interfere in the day-to-day administration which should of course be left to permanent officials who are after all trained to do the job.”[168] If the ministers interfere, then the checks and balances that are essential to the proper functioning of the government could be compromised. At the same time, it is impossible to function if the bureaucrats come from a cultural universe whose class and social biases interfere with their ability to enact the new policies. The blindness of class and social privilege and the lure of corruption posed a serious problem for the communists, who could not succeed in finding an easy solution to their need for a rational administration. In the 1957 statement of policy, Namboodiripad warned ministers not to indulge in nepotism or to make decisions that could be interpreted as corrupt. They were the people’s delegates. Not so the bureaucrats, who had no such cultural expectation. This remains a great problem. If the culture of the permanent bureaucracy blocked the ability of the Left governments, it was essential for the active mass movements to create space for an alternative social agenda. It was after all, the mass movements of peasants and workers in both Kerala and West Bengal that enabled the governments to act on their behalf. The land reform policy is credited to the Left governments – as it should be – but the policy is mainly the product of the communist organizers who raised the subjective confidence of the majority of the peasantry to demand an objective change in their circumstances. An active party, activating society, would be necessary to help a Left government from whittling down the old granite block. Over time, particularly in West Bengal, the agitation of the masses by the party

began to slow down. A long, unbroken period in government attracted those who sought power, and weighed down the value of political struggle. Administrative behavior entered the party apparatus, with agitation now an instrument of government rather than the government as an “instrument of struggle” (the phrase that reoccurs in communist literature). Nonetheless, social change did not depart from the agenda.

The 1961 Kerala report on administrative reforms welcomed the reservations for adivasis and dalits, and wondered if the OBCs should be added to the list (this predated the Mandal Commission by two decades). There was also a question raised about affluent members of the “backward” castes overwhelming others to take government posts. Should there be a class test? At the same time the report discarded all the colonial era rules, such as the provisions that the Muslims of Kerala cannot hold government jobs because they were classified as a “criminal tribe.” A left government had to be used to promote the rights and hopes of the oppressed communities, as well as women. They had to be brought into government, said the 1961 report, although this was more often the recommendation than the reality. The rural agenda certainly put the oppressed castes into new positions of material power, from which they could assert their own social and cultural worlds. It is important to recognize that the fiercest defenders of the communist movement in rural West Bengal remain the most socially oppressed castes and the adivasis.[169] By the mid-2000s, panchayat representation by dalits (37 per cent) and adivasis (7 per cent) was well above their share of the population. In 1995, the Left Front instituted a policy that a third of all the seats in the panchayats had to be reserved for women. At that time, however, over 35 per cent of the gram panchayat members were women, while seven of the seventeen zilla parishads had a woman sabhdhipati (head), and almost half the panchayat samitis had women as leaders. Social power for oppressed castes and women in rural West Bengal made inroads into Brahmanism and patriarchy, with the road ahead long and hard. It is difficult to break down old hierarchical systems, even over thirty years. Both Kerala and West Bengal put the fight against communalism to the fore. It is one of the hallmarks of the experience of Left rule in these two very large and diverse states. West Bengal, which had experienced the terrible riots in the pre-independence period, has seen no communal

conflagration since 1964.[170] In Kerala, there were no riots after independence until 1971, when the RSS made its transit to Thalassery (Kannur) to dispatch CPI-M cadre and inflamed communal tensions. Not long after the riot, Justice Joseph Vithyathil traveled in the region, reporting that when “the RSS and Jana Sangh set up their units and began activities” in the area, it frayed the fabric of conviviality. RSS anti-Muslim propaganda, Justice Vithyathil wrote, sent Muslims to rally around the Muslim League in defence, which “prepared the background for the disturbances.”[171] Bitter, armed battle between the CPI-M and the RSS (who would drive down from Karnataka) prevented the latter from creating a base in Kerala. It is the kind of battle that the communists staked to prevent the growth of communalism in the state. When the BJP and its allies pushed for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in 1992, and when its people destroyed the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, it was the Left that took the clearest stand against communalism. No other formation in the country was as forthright in opposition to any compromise with the Ramjanamabhoomi agitation as the communists – and no other party worked harder on the ground against it. On December 19, the Left held a convention to form the Rashtriya Ekta Abhiyan (CNU), which conducted a mass campaign for the next six months. From one end of West Bengal to another (on January 26), and from one end of Kerala to another (March 30), the communists mobilized people to hold hands and create a human chain as a symbolic wall against communalism. The West Bengal chain pulsated with energy – I recall standing at Hazra More, seeing the chain run along the road to infinity. It felt as if this chain would be capable of shackling the Sangh Parivar’s advance. The CPI-M itself collected half the seventy-five lakh signatures against communalism, which were handed to the President of India. The Left’s secular allies – the Janata Dal and the DMK – did not have the same kind of mass participation; their leaders came to the April 14, 1993 rally in New Delhi, but they did not enthuse their party members to go into society and insist on a secular compact. Only in Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav – Jayaprakash Narayan’s disciple – staked a great deal of his prestige against the BJP’s communalism. What did all this do for the Muslims who live in Kerala and West Bengal? When the Rajinder Sachar Committee report was published in 2006, it was closely scrutinized for data on the Left states. The general sense was that West Bengal had failed to provide equal opportunities to

Muslims in education and government employment. In fact, a close reading of the report shows that the Sachar Committee derived conclusions from data sets that it admitted were “incomplete” or “unavailable.”[172] The data for most of the report was taken from the 2001 Census, but subsequent much more fine-grained studies found that the Sachar Committee might have been hasty in its conclusions. A close look at the Sachar findings and subsequent discussion by Maidul Islam and Subhashini Ali found in 2011 that the situation was much less dire. Muslim households in rural West Bengal – thirty per cent of total households – access twenty-six per cent of total cultivated land. This is second only to Jammu and Kashmir, which, as Islam and Ali point out, has a much higher percentage of Muslim citizens. Data on primary school attendance from the National University of Educational Planning and Administration shows that Muslim children attended at rates greater from 2007 to 2010 than their percentage of the state’s population. The situation is the same for upper primary school enrollment and for number of teachers. Even the Sachar Committee had admitted that in West Bengal Muslims had risen to leadership positions in government employment, something that is not general across the country. [173]

More pointed social policy certainly should have been on the cards in West Bengal, Islam and Ali noted, but “it is important to set the record straight. At a time when incorrect data are being used as part of a propaganda offensive against the Left Front government, this has become even more essential.”[174] The record, however, did not stand. It was clouded with a thick cloud of erroneous fog. Islam and Ali’s final comment is apropos of the virulent wave of propaganda that swept through the state, largely fueled by the Trinamul Congress. The 2007 police firing in Nandigram, a largely Muslim area (60 per cent of the population) and the allegations of police intimidation of Rizwan ur Rehman, which led to his tragic suicide in 2007, cast the Left Front government in ill-light. Rehman had been married to Priyanka Todi, whose wealthy Hindu parents involved the Kolkata police to separate her from her Muslim husband – despite the fact that she was an adult. The police intervened, and a heartbroken Rizwan ur Rehman committed suicide. It was a tragic case. Mamata Banerjee framed this case as evidence of an anti-Muslim seam in the Left Front. She campaigned alongside Rizwan ur Rehman’s mother Kishwar Jahan, and alleged a deep conspiracy in the Left Front for the murder of the young

man.[175] It was remarkable theatre, but it went down well before the television cameras (since 2007, and in particular, since her victory in 2011, nothing has been done for the family of Rizwan ur Rehman, least of all any justice or any revelation of the alleged deep conspiracy; Mamata Banerjee’s actions were entirely an electoral stunt). Muslims form twenty-seven percent of West Bengal’s population. The majority of Muslims had voted for the Left. This provided the TMC with fodder for the electoral mill.It paid off. Memories of the human chain across West Bengal in 1993 faded before the sight of the Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee on September 23, 2007 saying, “If police does not interfere in these matters [an inter-faith marriage], who will do it? PWD [Public Works Department]?”

Tripura’s Chief Minister Manik Sarkar of the CPI-M is known as the “poorest chief minister” in India, a tag that reminds one of Uruguay’s President José Mujica who has no palace, no motorcade.[176] What are Sarkar’s vices? “A small pot of snuff and a cigarette a day.” When asked about the press attention to his modest means, Sarkar replied, “The credit of all this goes to my party. The party has imbibed this culture in me.”[177] Sarkar has led the Left government in Tripura since 1998, during the heart of the insurgency. As with the other states in India’s north-east, militant separatism tore through the society from the 1980s onwards. The Tripura National Volunteers and the Tripura Tiger Force and the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) wreaked havoc in the state. They targeted the Bengali population, trying to sow the seeds of division between the “tribals” (the Kokborok speakers, the Reang, the Jamatia, the Chakma, the Halam, the Mog, the Munda, the Kuki and the Garo) and Bengalis, as well as between the Christians and the Hindus. That the Communists comprised people of all communities, and had been leaders in the early rebellions in Tripura against the King and for tribal rights in the 1940s and 1950s has always threatened those who believed in sectarian politics. Turning to the gun was a sure-fire way of trying to undermine the politics of amity that had begun to define the state. Here is a sense of the violence over October-November 1998, the early part of the current Left Front period:   October 7: NLFT fighters kidnapped seven-year old Keya Debnath from her home in Bagna in Udaipur.

October 19: NLFT fighters fired into a market in Dhumacherra (Dhalai district). Abducted Badal Roy, a laborer. October 20: NLFT fighters abducted five passengers from a bus near Kusumbar. November 3: NLFT fighters fired into a market place in Maynama, killing three people, including Subodh Kuri. Militants killed nine-year old Rupali Adhikary and Haradhan Debnath in a village in Madhya Barjala. Gunmen fired into a jeep on the AssamAgartala National Highway, killing Jagdish Saha. November 4: NLFT fighters killed six people, including a nine-year old girl in Dhalai district.

 

The habits of the modern State should have driven the government to send in the armed forces and push for the annihilation of the NLFT and its allied groups. [178] This is the approach that the Left Front rejected. The high point of the insurgency was between 1996 and 2004. During this period, the Left was in power. It was through the strategy adopted by the Left that the insurgency wasted away after 2004 (unlike in the rest of the north-east of India). Certainly police actions were used against the insurgents, but as the governor D. N. Sahaya wrote in 2011, these were not used in an “exclusive, hawkish, one-dimensional” manner. The Tripura government used its police force for these actions, and, according to Sahaya, “Their conduct was under close observation at the highest level (including at the level of the Governor and the Chief Minister), in order to check personnel from going berserk and being ruthless, trigger-happy, oppressive and violative of human rights. This paid off: no complaint of human rights violations, except one or two and that too minor, came up in the course of operations. No antipathy against the security forces or the establishment surrounded the minds of citizens.”[179]

Armed force was not the main instrument used by the Left Front government. Instead it pushed for a political solution, urging militants to give up their arms and take their views into the political domain, showing militants that their own leadership was less interested in their well-being than in an endless militancy that enhanced the lives of neither themselves nor their enemies. The Tripura government used Central Government money in the insurgency, not to fatten the pockets of its privileged classes, but to build roads into every part of the state. This was not just to allow the police access to remote areas, but also to bring people from those remote areas into active contact with the rest of the state. The dividend from these roads in the long run has been immense. Apart from the police and the

political leadership, the Left Front turned to its allies for help in the counterinsurgency. AIDWA worked in the most difficult circumstances, building confidence among women who had turned to militancy to come back to the politics of persuasion. “I had to stop school after standard ten as my father could not afford to pay my fees,” said Shobhamati Jamatiya in 2004. “A group from the All Tripura Tiger Force convinced me that my problems, and those of the tribal population of Tripura, would be solved if I joined their organization.” Shobhamati went to the Tiger Force camp in Bangladesh, where she trained as a militant and fighter. The work of groups like AIDWA and the corruption amongst the leadership of the Tiger Force moved Shobhamati to surrender two years later in October 2002. “I realize now that there is no shortcut,” Shobhamati said, now as an AIDWA activist. “You have to be in the democratic movement.”[180]

Former member of the Tripura Legislative Assembly from Takarjala, Bayjanti Koloi remembers how women in her district were excited that a tribal woman had been elected for the first time. As part of her work as a legislator, she held meetings with women in the district, many of whom would subsequently join with Koloi in AIDWA. “Many women who never used to go out of their homes or who never knew about government policies began to speak out strongly about their demands. Women then began to receive threats from activists of the NLFT to stop all political activities.” The NLFT tried to break the connections between tribals and non-tribals, forcing the latter to leave and the former to stop “selling rice to non-tribals. If a tribal woman wore a sari or a bangle, she was stopped and threatened.”[181] AIDWA’s activists held fast. Their bravery broke the cultural agenda of the militants.   ***   Over the course of history of the Indian republic from 1947 to 1991, the Left parties in governance provided the most significant land reform and agricultural worker tenancy programme, enacted deep local selfgovernment schemes and provided a safe haven from the toxic social agenda of political religion. Outside government, the Left participated in a wide range of struggles – for the rights of workers and peasants, for the defence of the good side of history against the bad. This was a period when the Left went through a series of major debates on its varied analysis of the

role of imperialism, the class character of the Indian state, the nature of Indian democracy and the strength of the popular classes. It is in this period that the communist parties split twice: first to create the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 1964, and then to create the Maoist movement after 1967. The splits in the 1960s had a major impact on the ability of the Left, which was divided amongst itself when faced with an increasingly united adversary – the forces that would be united in their approach to neo-liberalism. Whatever divides the Congress from the BJP or the DMK from the AIADMK, what unites them all is their basic approach to the process of liberalisation that begins in the 1970s and goes full throttle after 1991. In this new period, the era of neo-liberalism, the Left stood alone against a bloc for liberalisation which could not be relied upon for alliances and which became increasingly hostile to the role of the Left in Indian politics.     [1]

    Saibal Sen, “CBI clean chit to Buddha govt. on Nandigram firing,” Times of India, January 30, 2014.

[2]

    Prabhat Patnaik, “In the Aftermath of Nandigram,” EPW, vol. XLII, no. 21, May 26, 2007.

[3]

    C. Gouridasan Nair, “Pinarayi cleared of charges in Lavalin case,” The Hindu, November 6, 2013.

[4]

    CPI-M, Review of the 15th Lok Sabha Elections (Adopted by the Central Committee At Its Meeting Held on June 20 & 21, 2009), New Delhi: CPI-M, 2009, pp. 13-16.

[5]

    Ashok Mitra, A Prattlers’ Tale: Bengal, Marxism, Governance, Calcutta: Samya, 2006.

[6]

    “Left Parties Sweep Tripura Panchayat Polls,” Times of India, July 19, 2014.

[7]

    Government of Tripura, Tripura Human Development Report 2007, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2007 and Kerem Gabriel Öktem, “A Comparative Analysis of the Performance of the Parliamentary Left in the Indian States of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura,” South Asia, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012.

[8]

    CPI-M, Review of the Lok Sabha Election (Adopted by the Central Committee at its June 7-8, 2014 Meeting). New Delhi: CPI-M, 2014, p. 6.

[9]

    Bidyut Roy, “Is luxury only for TMC, Cong? Are we to go to Tapovan for sanyas?” Indian Express, May 13, 2010.

[10]

    Central Committee, CPI-M, “On Rectification Campaign,” The Marxist, vol. XXVI, no. 1, January-March 2010, p. 68.

[11]

    “Former CPI-M MP Lakshman Seth Expelled,” The Hindu, March 28, 2014.

[12]

    Central Committee, CPI-M, “On Rectification Campaign,” p. 67.

[13]

    CPI-M, Political Organisational Report. Adopted by 16th Congress of CPI-M, 5-11 October 1998, pp. 117-118.

[14]

    Biju Govind, “12 held guilty of T. P. Chandrasekharan murder,” The Hindu, January 22, 2014.

[15]

    “Chandrasekharan murder case accused appeal before HC,” Indian Express, February 21, 2014.

[16]

    K. Jayaprasad, RSS and Hindu Nationalism: Inroads in a Leftist Stronghold, Delhi: Deep & Deep, 1991,

[17]

    CPI-M, Review of the Lok Sabha Election, p. 9.

[18]

    CPI-M, Review of the Lok Sabha Election, p. 10.

[19]

    Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist. Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, 1913-1929, New Delhi: Tulika, 2011, p. 119.

[20]

    History of the Communist Movement in India, Volume 1: The Formative Years, 1920-1933, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2005, pp. 62-63.

[21]

    Irwin to Secretary of State, India, January 18, 1929, Home (Political), F. 18/xvi, 1928, KW, National Archives of India (NAI).

[22]

    Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist, p. 219.

[23]

    Neil Harding, Leninism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 86.

[24]

    History of the Communist Movement, p. 29. For more evidence of the impact of 1917, S. G. Sardesai, India and the Russian Revolution, New Delhi: Communist Party Publications, 1967.

[25]

    Satyabhakta, “The Future Programme of the Indian Communist Party,” June 18, 1925, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, 1923-35, ed. G. Adhikari, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974, vol. 2, pp. 631-632.

[26]

    Political Resolution. Adopted by the 9th Party Congress of the CPI-M, June 27-July 2 1972, pp. 10-11 and Bhabani Sengupta, CPI-M, New Delhi: Young Asia, 1979, p. 20.

[27]

    Sengupta, CPI-M, p. 54.

[28]

    February 21, 1938 AICC Resolution, A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, ed. B. N. Pande, New Delhi: Vikas, 1985, vol. 3, pp. 461-2.

[29]

    Ajoy Ghosh, Nehru’s Socialism: A Hoax, New Delhi: CPI, 1955.

[30]

    Sudipta Kaviraj, “Split in the Communist Movement in India,” Ph. D. Thesis, New Delhi: Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1979.

[31]

    CPI, Election Manifesto of the CPI, Delhi: CPI, 1971, p. 3.

[32]

    N. H. Bhagwati, et. al., Report of the Kerala Enquiry Committee, New Delhi: P. Trikamdas, Indian Commission of Jurists, 1960, p. 32.

[33]

    G. K. Lieten, The First Communist Ministry in Kerala, 1957-59, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1982.

[34]

    Mythili Sivaraman, “Gentlemen Killers of Kilvenmani,” EPW, vol. VIII, no. 21, May 26, 1973 collected in Haunted by Fire: Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2013.

[35]

    Chakravartty, Communist Women, p. 88.

[36]

    Nepal Majumdar and Atis Dasgupta, “Tebhaga: Bengal’s Most Militant Peasant Struggle,” People’s Democracy, November 9, 1997.

[37]

    Chakravartty, Communist Women, pp. 117-118.

[38]

    P. Sundarayya, An Autobiography, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2009, p. 221.

[39]

    “Letter to the New Central Committee to all Party Members and Sympathizers,” June 1, 1950, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India. Volume II, 1948-1950, ed. M. B. Rao, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976, p. 668.

[40]

    Manikuntala Sen recounts a sad story about personal discomfort. There was a storm as she, an MLA, left the West Bengal assembly. A full party car stood outside, with comrades who looked at her with unease. They should have made room for her. To save them the discomfort, Sen, very proud, walked through the waterlogged streets. It was a trivial incident. But as Sen noted, “Distances get created whenever there are differences of opinion within any Party.” In Search of Freedom, p. 274.

[41]

    At the 19th Congress of the CPI, its General Secretary A. B. Bardhan said, “From my point of view, ultimately it will have to be done, but that is a long way off.” Aarthi Ramachandran, “Unification talks rule CPI meet,” Business Standard, March 31, 2005.

[42]

    “Statement of Policy, 1951,” CPI-M, Programme (1964) and Statement of Policy (1951), Delhi: CPI-M, 1995, p. 51.

[43]

    Pradip Basu, Toward Naxalbari, 1953-1967: An Account of Inner-Party Ideological Struggle, Kolkata, Progressive Publishers, 2000.

[44]

    P. Sundarayya, “Seize the Land,” People’s Democracy, July 30, 1971.

[45]

    Amar Bhattacharya, Revolution Unleashed: A History of the Naxalbari Movement in India, 1964-1972, Calcutta: Sampark, 2007; Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: a history of the Naxalite Movement in India, Calcutta: Subarnrekha, 1980.

[46]

    Charu Majumdar, “Carrying Forward the Peasant Struggle by Fighting Revisionism (Eighth Document),” appendix to Marius Damas, Approaching Naxalbari, Calcutta: Radical Impression, 1991.

[47]

    Hiren Mukherjee, “On Mao Tse-Tung’s Death,” Mainstream, 1976, collected in his Under Communism’s Crimson Colours, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1982, p. 207.

[48]

    Majumdar, “Carry Forward.”

[49]

    Mao Tse-Tung, “Our study and the current situation,” Selected Works, vol. 3, Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965, p. 166.

[50]

    For an excellent and sympathetic account of Indian Maoism, see N. Venugopal, Understanding Maoists: Notes of a Participant Observer from Andhra Pradesh, Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2013, and see several of the essays in Discourses on Naxalite Movement, 1967-2009: Insights Into Radical Left Politics, ed. Pradip Basu, Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2010.

[51]

    This point was made forcefully by E. M. S. Namboodiripad in 1976, “Mao Tse-Tung’s Contribution to Theory and Tactics of Revolution,” Selected Writings, p. 126. Also see Isaac Deutscher, “Maoism – its Origin and Outlook,” Ironies of History, Berkeley: Ramparts, 1971. This is also the assessment of Jairus Banaji, “The ironies of Indian Maoism,” International Socialism, issue 128, 2010, p. 146. For a thorough assessment of Indian Maoism, see P. M. S. Grewal, “Indian Maoists: Flawed Strategy and Perverted Tactics” and Nilotpal Basu, “The Tragedy of ‘Maoism,’” Maoism. A Critique from the Left. Ed. Prasenjit Bose, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2010.

[52]

    B. T. Ranadive, “Behind Revolutionary Phrases, Disorganizing Struggle Against Imperialism (July 2, 1967), Selected Writings. Vol. 1 On ‘Left’ Adventurism, New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1985, p. 2.

[53]

    Ranadive, “Logic of Anti-Leninism in Theory and Practice (July 9, 1967), Selected Writings, p. 15.

[54]

    Ranadive, “Phrase-Mongering Replaces Building Up of Struggles (August 13, 1967), Selected Works, p. 29.

[55]

    Ranadive, “‘Left’ Tactics will delink Party from Mass Struggles (August 13, 1967),” Selected Works, p. 36.

[56] 

  “CPI-M Condoles death of Naxal Leader Sanyal,” DNA India, March 23, 2010.

[57] 

  Sen, In Search of Freedom, p. 219.

[58] 

  Seetha Sarkar and Sonia Sarkar, “Fair is Foul,” The Telegraph, March 14, 2010.

[59] 

  On Party’s Perspective on Women’s Issues and Tasks (adopted by the Central Committee at its December 14-16, 2005 Meeting), CPI-M, 2005, p. 27.

[60] 

  Chattopadhyay, Early Communist, pp. 213-15.

[61]

    Sen, In Search of Freedom, p. 40.

[62]

    M. Basavapunniah, Oral History, acc. No. 735, p. 51, NMML.

[63]

    G. Ramakrishnan, “Tribute to a Valiant Fighter,” People’s Democracy, April 22, 2007. I heard so many stories about BSR while in Madras and in Thanjavur – this paragraph is based on my recollections of what I had heard in 2006.

[64]

 

 

EMS Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, Trivandrum: Chinta, 1976 and

Reminiscences of an Indian Communist, New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1987; A. K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People: Reminiscences: New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973; Muzaffar Ahmad, Myself and the Communist Party of India, 1920-1929, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1970; N. K. Krishnan, Testament of Faith: Memoirs of a Communist, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1990; Mohit Sen, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist, Delhi: Rupa, 2003. [65]

    N. Rama Krishnan, B. T. Ranadive, Hyderabad: Prajashakti, 2003, pp. 14-15.

[66]

    Putchalapalli Sundarayya. An Autobiography, ed. Atlury Murali, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2008, pp. 12-13.

[67]

    S. A. Dange Oral History, acc. No. 823, June 21, 1981, p. 37, NMML.

[68]

    Sen, In Search of Freedom, p. 26.

[69]

    S. A. Dange, Oral History, p. 2.

[70]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad Oral History, acc. No. 794, October 25, 1970, p. 43, NMML.

[71]

    EMS Oral History, p. 54.

[72]

    EMS Oral History, p. 43.

[73]

    Archana Prasad, Against Ecological Romanticism. Verrier Elwin and the Making of an AntiModern Tribal Identity, New Delhi: Three Essays, 2003, chapter 3 and Vir Bharat Talwar, Jharkhand ke Adivasi aur RSS, Chaibasa: Ekta Prakashan, n. d.

[74]

    Sarbeswar Sahoo, Civil Society and Democratization in India, New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 9.

[75]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 90.

[76]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 91.

[77]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 91.

[78]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 92.

[79]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 93.

[80]

    Archana Prasad, Environmentalism and the Left, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2004.

[81]

    When the CPI-M created this outfit, it was strongly (and to my mind erroneously) rebuked by other left parties for casteism. “CPI-M flayed for floating Dalit-only body,” The Hindu, December 12, 2012. N. S. Sajith, “Land Struggle Begins in Kerala,” People’s Democracy, January 6, 2013.

[82]

    CPI-M, Draft Political-Organisational Report for the 20th Congress (Adopted by the Central Committee Meeting: March 17-19, 2012), p. 61.

[83]

    Manoranjan Mohanty, Revolutionary Violence: A Study of the Maoist Movement in India, New Delhi: Sterling, 1977, p. 121.

[84]

    Mohan Ram, Maoism in India, Delhi: Vikas, 1971, p. 146 and Prakash Karat, “Naxalism Today; an ideological dead end,” The Marxist, vol. 3, no. 1, January-March 1985.

[85]

    Vijay Prashad, “The Antinomies of ‘Maoism,’ Maoism: A Critique from the Left.

[86]

    K. Balagopal, “Andhra Pradesh: the End of the Spring?” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXV, no. 34, May 26, 1990, p. 1885. An excellent companion to Balagopal’s work is that of Nirmalangshu Mukherji, The Maoists in India. Tribals Under Siege, London: Pluto, 2012.

[87]

    K. Balagopal, “Naxalite Terrorists and Benign Policemen,” Economic and Political Weekly, September 6, 1997, vol. XXXII, no. 36, p. 2254.

[88]

    Praful Bidwai, “From Thunder to a Whimper,” Times of India, January 11, 1983.

[89]

    K. Balchand, “Maoists Must Apologize for Niamat Murder,” The Hindu, November 13, 2011 and Kunal Majumder, “First, They Killed Him, Not They Threaten Activists. No Fig Leaf for Maoists Here,” Tehelka, August 6, 2011.

[90]

    Maria Elena Moyano, The Autobiography of Maria Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activist, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

[91]

    Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies. Violence and Reconciliation in Peru, Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania, 2013, p. 3.

[92]

    Praveen Swami, “Lalgarh: is it liberated or ruled by fear?” The Hindu, June 26, 2009 and Bela Bhatia, “The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar,” Economic and Political Weekly, April 9, 2005, vol. XL, no. 15, p. 1546.

[93]

    AIDWA, The Truth Behind the Violence in West Bengal, New Delhi: AIDWA, 2009.

[94]

    H. J. Rainey, “What was the Sundarban originally, and when, and wherefore did it assume its existing state of utter desolation?” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, December 1868, p. 271.

[95]

    Dineschandra Sen, The Ballads of Bengal, Delhi: K. K. Mittal, 1968, p. 23.

[96]

    It is a sign of the times that Arundhati Roy could so cavalierly write of the “Harmads, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India (Marxist),” without any investigation into its existence. Walking with the Comrades, Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

[97]

    The man who beat her, Lalu Alam, apologized to her in 2011 after her victory. Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey, “Lalu Alam apologises to Mamata Banerjee,” Times of India, May 17, 2011.

[98]

    Sumanta Banerjee, “West Bengal: Violence Without Ideology,” EPW, vol. XXXV, no. 34, August 19, 2000.

[99]

    EPW (4 March 1972).

[100]

    “Shams son quit Bloc,” The Telegraph, October 27, 2013.

[101]

    “TMC scoops MLAs from opposition,” Times of India, July 22, 2014.

[102]

    “Forward Bloc leaders join BJP,” Business Standard, July 20, 2014.

[103]

    “Being a CPI-M worker risky in present situation: Goutam,” The Hindu, August 4, 2014.

[104]

    Ushinor Majumdar, “Top Maoist Leader Ganapathi Admits to Leadership Crisis in Party,” Tehelka, September 19, 2013.

[105]

    CPI, “Statement of Policy, 1951,” p. 55.

[106]

    On the Left there is now a tendency to give too much value to non-violence, such as in Etienne Balibar’s edited, Violence et civilité, Paris: Galilée, 2010, which is an attempted synthesis of Lenin and Gandhi. The Indian version is Dilip Simeon, “A Hard Rain Falling,” EPW, vol. XLVII, nos. 26-27, June 30, 2012.

[107]

    Vithika Salomi, “Left alliance to continue in 2015 assembly polls,” Times of India, July 30, 2014.

[108]

    In the new CPI-M party programme, the idea of multi-party democracy is championed not simply for the present but also in a future “people’s democracy”: “The people’s democratic State shall strive to infuse in all our social and political institutions the spirit of democracy. It extends democratic forms of initiative and control over every aspect of national life. A key role in this will be played by the political parties, trade unions, peasant and agricultural workers’ associations, and other class and mass organisations of the working people. The government will take steps to make the legislative and executive machinery of the country continuously responsive to the democratic wishes of the people, and will ensure that the masses and their organisations are drawn into active participation in the administration and work of the State. It will work for the elimination of bureaucratic practices in the State and administration.”

[109]

    CPI, “1951 Statement of Policy,” New Delhi: CPI-M, 1995, p. 57.

[110]

    CPI, “1951 Statement of Policy,” p. 58.

[111]

    On the famine, see Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, Chennai: Tranquebar, 2010.

[112]

    Jyoti Basu, Joto dur mone pore, Kolkata: National Book Agency, 1999, p. 170-71.

[113]

    EMS Namboodripad, The National Question in Kerala, Bombay: Peoples Publishing House, 1952.

[114]

    Ravi Narayan Reddy, Heroic Telengana, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972.

[115]

    EMS Namboodripad, “The Congress Socialist Party and the Communists,” The Marxist, vol. II, no. 1, January-March 1984.

[116]

    Reminiscences. Interview with Comrade M. Basavapunnaiah, Hyderabad: Prajashakti, 2012, p. 47.

[117]

    Jogesh Chandra Chatterji, In Search of Freedom, Calcutta: Firma Mukhopadhyay, 1967 and Buddhadev Bhattacharya, Origins of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Calcutta: RSP, 1982.

[118]

    Prakash Karat, “Theoretical Aspects of the National Question,” Social Scientist, vol. 4, no. 1, August 1975.

[119]

    The general tenor for the communists’ approach to nationalities had been set by V. I. Lenin in his message to Russians and Ukrainian workers: “Russia’s revolutionary democrats, if they want to be truly revolutionary and truly democratic, must break with that past, must regain for themselves, for the workers and peasants of Russia, the brotherly trust of the Ukrainian workers and peasants. This cannot be done without full recognition of the Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession. We do not favour the existence of small states. We stand for the closest union of the workers of the world against “their own” capitalists and those of all other countries. But for this union to be voluntary, the Russian worker, who does not for a moment trust The Russian or the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in anything, now stands for the right of the Ukrainians to secede,  without imposing  his friendship upon them, but  striving to win  their friendship by treating them as an equal, as an ally and brother in the struggle for socialism.” Pravda, June 28, 1917. Collected Works, Moscow: Progress, 1977, vol. 25, pp. 91-92.

[120]

    Prakash Karat, Language and Nationality Politics in India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1973.

[121]

    G. Adhikari, Sikh Homeland: Through Hindu-Muslim-Sikh Unity, Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1945.

[122]

    Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, Part IV and EMS Namboodiripad, Kerala: Society and Politics, New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1984, p. 180.

[123]

    Adhikari, Sikh Homeland, p. 3 and Romesh Chandra, Salute to Kashmir, Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1946.

[124]

    Godavari Parulekar, Adivasi Revolt: The Story of the Warli Peasants in Struggle, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1975.

[125]

    Our Tasks on Party Organisation, CPI-M, 1967.

[126]

    Nirupam Sen, Industralisation in West Bengal and the Left Front Government, Kolkata: West Bengal State Committee, CPI-M, 1996, p. 9.

[127]

    Prabhat Patnaik, “Four Comments on Kerala,” Monthly Review, vol. 42, no. 8, January 1991, p. 33. The other three comments came from Maria Helena Moreira Alves, Samir Amin and Carlos M. Vilas.

[128]

    CPI-M, Programme (1964), paragraph 112, p. 46.

[129]

    Harekrishna Konar, “Present State of the Peasant Movement,” Agrarian Problems of India, Calcutta: Harekrishna Konar Memorial Agrarian Research Centre, 1979, p. 78.

[130]

    Surjya Kanta Mishra, An Alternative Approach to Rural Development, Land Reform and Panchayats, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1991.

[131]

    Surjya Kanta Mishra and Vikas Rawal, “Agrarian Relations in Contemporary West Bengal and Task for the Left,” The Marxist, vol. XVII, nos. 3-4, July-December 2001, p. 26.

[132]

    S. R. Sen, Report of the Committee on Agricultural Productivity in Eastern India, Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1984 and Amit Bhaduri, “Agricultural Backwardness under SemiFeudalism,” Economic Journal, March 1973.

[133]

    S. Ramachandran Pillai, “EMS Namboodiripad and the Communist Government of Kerala,” The Marxist, vol. XXV, no. 3, July-September 2009, p. 37.

[134]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “The Question of Land Tenure in Malabar,” The Marxist, vol. XXV, no. 3, July-September 2009.

[135]

    P. Radhakrishnan, Peasant Struggles, Land Reforms and Social Change. Malabar, 1836-1982, Delhi: Sage, 1989, p. 185.

[136]

    Ronald Herring, “Abolition of Landlordism in Kerala: A redistribution of privilege,” Economic and Political Weekly, June 1980 and Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

[137]

    P. S. Appu, Land Reforms in India, Delhi: Vikas, 1996 has a full explanation of the limits and advances of land reforms.

[138]

    Richard Franke, “Land reform versus inequality in Nadur village, Kerala,” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 48, no. 2, Summer 1992 and K. P. Kannan and K. Pushpangadan, “Dissecting Agricultural Stagnation in Kerala: An Analysis Across Crops,” EPW, vol. XXV, nos. 35-36, September 1, 1990.

[139]

    K. P. Kannan, “Kerala’s Turnaround in Growth: role of social development remittances and reform,” EPW, vol. XL, no. 6, February 5, 2005.

[140]

    D. Bandyopadhyay, “Land Reform in West Bengal. Remembering Hari Krishna Konar and Benoy Chaudhury,” EPW, vol. XXXV, nos. 21-22, May 27, 2000, p. 1797.

[141]

    Tripura. Human Development Report 2007, Agartala: Government of Tripura, 2007, pp. 60-64.

[142]

    Manas Paul, The Eyewitness. Tales from Tripura’s Ethnic Conflict, New Delhi: Lancer, 2009, p. 48.

[143] 

  E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Note on the Report of the Asoka Mehta Committee on Panchayati Raj Institution,” Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 271.

[144]

    G. K. Leiten, Continuity and Change in Rural West Bengal, Delhi: Sage, 1994.

[145]

    Mishra and Rawal, “Agrarian Relations,” p. 29.

[146]

    Sen Gupta, CPI-M, p. 28. Also see Arun Ghosh, West Bengal Landscapes: November 1983 to February 1986, A Travel Diary, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1989.

[147]

    Nirmal Mukharji and D. Bandopadhyay, New Horizons for West Bengal’s Panchayats, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1993, p. 3; Sunil Sengupta and Haris Gazdar, “Agrarian Politics and Rural Development in West Bengal,” Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, eds. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 159; G. K. Lieten, Continuity and Change in Rural West Bengal, Delhi: Sage, 1992; Neil Webster, Panchayati Raj and the Decentralization of Development Planning in West Bengal, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1992.

[148]

    “Tripura shrinks scope of AFSPA,” Indian Express, June 5, 2013.

[149]

    Mishra and Rawal, “Agrarian Relations,” pp. 33-41; S. Bhattacharya, “Evolution of Agricultural Credit Markets in West Bengal since 1977,” Economy of West Bengal, eds. A. Raychaudhuri and D. Sarkar, Delhi: Allied, 1996; N. Webstar, “Institutions, Actors and Strategies in West Bengal’s Rural Development: A Study of Irrigation,” Sonar Bangla? Agricultural Growth and Agrarian Change in West Bengal and Bangladesh, eds. B. Rogaly, B. Harris-White and S. Bose, New Delhi: Sage, 1999.

[150]

    Mishra and Rawal, “Agrarian Relations,” p. 43.

[151]

    Mishra and Rawal, “Agrarian Relations,” p. 51.

[152]

    Pillai, “EMS Namboodiripad,” pp. 42-44.

[153]

    Patrick Heller, The Labour of Development. Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 217.

[154]

    A Study of the Industrial Scene in West Bengal, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1988, p. 3.

[155]

    Industrial Policy, Calcutta: Information and Public Relations Department, 1978.

[156]

    Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2014.

[157]

    C. R. Irani, Bengal. The Communist Challenge, Bombay: Lalvani, 1968, p. 67.

[158]

    Ratna Sen, The Evolution of Industrial Relations in West Bengal, New Delhi: ILO, 2009, p. 55.

[159]

    A Study of the Industrial Scene, p. 4; Sen, “Industrialisation in West Bengal,” p. 4; Policy Statement on Industrial Development, Government of West Bengal, September 23, 1994, pp. 2-7; The Challenge of an Alternative Experience, Kolkata: CPI-M West Bengal State Committee, 1993, p. 35.

[160]

    Aseema Sinha, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

[161]

    Interview with Anil Biswas, Calcutta, June 24, 1995.

[162]

    Dipayan Datta Chaudhuri, “Problems of the Electronics Industry in West Bengal,” New Technology and the Workers’ Response, ed. Amiya K. Bagchi, New Delhi: Sage, 1995. Compare this to Radha D’Souza, “The Introduction of Microelectronics Technology and Its Impact on Collective Bargaining in the Bombay Region,” New Technology.

[163]

    Nandini Gooptu, “Economic Liberalisation, Work and Democracy: Industrial Decline and Urban Politics in Kolkata,” EPW, vol. XKLII, no. 21, May 26, 2007.

[164]

    Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove, 1963, p. 109.

[165] 

  T. J. Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, London: Pinter, 1988, p. 77.

[166]

    Murshed’s animosity to the Left Front government comes out in his brief memoir, “How to avoid politicisation of babus,” The Telegraph, May 21, 2011.

[167]

    Report of the Administrative Reforms Committee, Government of West Bengal, Calcutta: Department of Home (Personnel and Administrative Reforms), 1983.

[168]

    Pillai, “EMS,” p. 47.

[169]

    Dayabati Roy, “Political transformation and social mobility in West Bengal. A village study,” Contemporary Politics in West Bengal. Glimpses from the Left Front Regime, eds. Dayabati Roy and Partha Sarathi Banerjee, Kolkata: Purbalok, 2012, p. 14 and p. 17; Dayabati Roy and Partha Sarathi Banerjee, “Left Front’s Electoral Victory: An Ethnographer’s Account,” Contemporary Politics in West Bengal, p. 79; Dayabati Roy, “Politics at the margin: Tales of two villages,” Contemporary Politics in West Bengal, p. 111.

[170]

    Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905-1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 for the pre-independence period.

[171]

    Report of the Justice Joseph Vithyathil Commission on the Tellicherry Riots, 1971.

[172]

    At one point, the report notes, “West Bengal failed to provide data in a usable format; while the data on the number of Muslim workers was made available, the absence of information on total workers and employment of other SRCs [socio-religious categories] did not allow meaningful analysis,” Socio-Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India. A Report, Prime Minister’s High Level Committee, Cabinet Secretariat, New Delhi: Government of India, 2006, p. 169.

[173]

    Socio-Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community, pp. 171-73.

[174] 

  Maidul Islam and Subhashini Ali, “Status of Muslims in West Bengal,” The Hindu, April 14, 2011.

[175] 

  “Mamata Stirs Up Emotion at Rallies,” Times of India, May 18, 2010. In fact, one of the police officers – Gyanwant Singh was promoted to DIG Mushidabad Range. Rizwan ur Rehman’s brother, Rukban ur Rehman had been made an MLA for the Trinamul. When his mother complained that nothing had been done in the investigation of her son’s death and to hold accountable the policemen, such as Gyanwant Singh, MLA Rehman said, “I feel that whatever the state government has done is right.” His mother said, “I don’t know why I didn’t get justice from the Chief Minister. When I meet her I ask her. In fact, nowadays I don’t meet her often. I was promised by her that I will get justice.” “Rizwanur’s mother demands justice from Mamata,” Times of India, July 17, 2014.

[176] 

  Prabin Kalita, “Manik Sarkar: Poorest CM in the country,” Times of India, January 26, 2013; Jonathan Watts, “Uruguay’s president José Mujica: no palace, no motorcade, no frills,” Guardian, December 13, 2013.

[177] 

  “Manik Sarkar: the ‘poorest CM’ is really appreciative of tag,” The Hindu, December 18, 2013.

[178] 

  Paula Banerjee, “Gendered Face of Extraordinary Powers in North-East India,” Human Rights and Peace, ed. Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Delhi: Sage, 2009; Human Rights Watch, Getting Away with Murder. 50 years of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, New York: HRW, 2008.

[179]  [180] 

  D. N. Sahaya, “How Tripura overcame insurgency,” The Hindu, September 22, 2011.   Prafulla Das, “Keep communal forces at bay, women’s organisations told,” The Hindu, November 19, 2004.

[181] 

 

  Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay, “Invincible Left,” Frontline, March 9-22, 2013.

6.  Communism in Neo-liberal Times

At a large right angle from each other in Calcutta sit the CPI-M party office at Alimuddin Street and Mother House, the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, on Lower Circular Road. The area is awash with Calcutta’s mixed class reality – the auto parts dealers along the main road who share the sidewalk with the urban poor, washing at the hand pump, and with the teashops that cater to the taxi drivers and the pedestrians. The CPIM office, tucked inside a side street, is on the edge of Taltala, a neighbourhood of great history – home to the descendants of Muslim khalasis (dockworkers) and lascars (sailors), now a lower middle class area. In 2003, six years after her death, the Catholic Church beatified Mother Teresa as “Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.” Everyone loves Mother Teresa. Homes of the haute bourgeoisie, where M. F. Husain’s famous series of portraits of her adorn the walls, hold soirees to raise money for her various institutions. It is fitting that this would be the reaction to her from the elite. “We have no right to judge the rich,” wrote Mother Teresa. “For our part, what we desire is not a class struggle, but a class encounter in which the rich save the poor and the poor save the rich.”[1] Charity helps the poor survive and it allows the rich to feel human. That is the limit of Mother Teresa’s horizon.[2] It is also the tradition she left behind, around the corner from the CPI-M office. Her successor, Sister Nirmala said, “Poverty will always exist. We want the poor to see poverty in the right way – to accept it and believe that the Lord will provide.”[3] There is no liberalism of the Cross, the liberation theology that enveloped Latin American Catholicism, nor is there a substantial liberalism of Hinduism or Islam. Mother Teresa scorned this approach; “You have not become priests to be social workers,” she said.[4]

Anil Biswas did have something of the priest in his demeanor. He was serious and sharp, a young leader of the CPI-M in West Bengal in the early 1990s when the Left Front faced serious challenges. By the late 1980s, the

main points of the agenda that had brought the Left to power had been achieved: land reforms, tenancy registration and panchayats. The Left, unlike Mother Teresa, fought to end poverty by a transformation of the social system. Sitting in his unprepossessing office in Muzaffar Ahmad House in Alimuddin Street, he wanted to talk about Karl Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune (1871). There was a paragraph he wanted to highlight. The Commune had declared an end to private property. The “mouthpieces of present society” gasped, “but this communism, impossible communism!” Biswas had read these texts carefully. They amused him for their style and their prescience. “The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune,” Marx had written in 1871 two days after the Commune had been defeated.   They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple [by decree of the people]. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.[5]

 

Biswas had a wry smile when he summarized the passage above from memory; the phrase he recalled – they have no ideals to realize – captured his toughness. Liberal ideals were all very well, but they are not what motivate the working-class. Workers are motivated by the desire to break the dead shell that prevents a full understanding of real humanity. Sustained struggles were necessary, he said, and for that the CPI-M’s cadres “had to be creative.” Our government, he said in one late afternoon in 1995, “needs to be a product of the movement. The government must maintain its revolutionary character”; it has to be ready for popular spontaneity. There is unevenness, he said. The Left Front had set in motion a revolutionary dynamic in the countryside. But more was needed. “We are not complacent,” said Biswas. “We may be weak anytime.”[6]

Biswas’ caution was reasonable, even though in 1995 the electoral map suggested that the Left would be in power forever. But beneath the surface, social processes set off by the Left’s rural agenda and neo-liberal policy would threaten the coalitions of the Left. In West Bengal, the solution to these crises would be placed in the lap of a new strategy of

industrialization (1994). It had occasioned a great debate inside the Left Front, and within the CPI-M. “We are the red flag,” Biswas said. “We have to first go to the people.” The implication was that this is not how the policy had developed. In Kerala, meanwhile, the Left coalition also saw that the neo-liberal policy of the central government had put new challenges before the communists. It was impossible to pretend that the collapse of the Soviet Union, the defeat of the Third World Project through the debt crisis, and the ascendency of IMF-style neo-liberalism had not made a deep impact on the range of possibilities before the Left in India. Discussions in that state led to a mass campaign for participatory planning (1996). The third reaction of the Left had been to strengthen its struggles against neo-liberal policy, to put on the table the deep brutality of the new order, and to push for an alternative policy agenda where possible. Creative struggles emerged from Andhra Pradesh to Rajasthan. A fourth response, in the republic’s capital, is on the terrain of culture – to refract current realities and to imagine, through the theatre, other social realities. These are the four of myriad responses of Indian communism to the new epoch.

INDUSTRIALIZATION IN WEST BENGAL

“We do not say that the Chinese model is our model.”   Buddhadev Bhattacharya,

Chief Minister of West Bengal, 2007[7]

  In March 1988, on the threshold of the liberalisation era (1991 onward), West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu delivered a lecture at the National Development Council. Basu dissected the Seventh Five Year Plan (19851990) – showing that it made “no serious attempts to alter the existing unequal distribution of assets, specifically in land in agriculture and capital in industry.” He noted that the entire development agenda was premised on “a tendency to adopt technology which is capital-biased with inadequate absorption of labour force in production, causing unemployment and insufficient generation of purchasing power of the common people.” Such an expensive production process would price out the ability of the working class and peasantry to purchase the new goods. The “tendency that emerges in this planning approach is towards seeking salvation through exports.”[8]

A June 1988 report from the West Bengal government saw “signs of recovery from industrial stagnation.” Clearly the investment climate had not changed, and nor had the policy incentives from the central government. The government suggested that it was looking closely at “industrial cooperatives of workers,” hoping that this could be an avenue to help rejuvenate a declined industrial sector.[9] The indicators on the ground did not favour the workers’ cooperatives idea. In 1988, capital continued its process of euthanasia of West Bengal’s industry – of the total 228 episodes of work stoppage eighty-five per cent were lockouts (a strike by capital). The Bangodaya Cotton Mills, Bengal Lamp, Eastern Papermill, Kolay Biscuit, Metal Box, National Tannery, Sulekha Works, Usha Sewing Factory, and a slew of others padlocked their doors. Industrial sickness across the country had shone the amber light of caution at the Reserve Bank of India, which constituted the Tiwari Committee on Rehabilitation of Sick Units in 1981.[10] Out of its report came the Industrial Reconstruction Bank of India Act of 1984 and the Sick Industrial Companies (Special Provisions) Act of 1985. Before these developments could help the West Bengal government treat the disease of industrial sickness, neo-liberal policy arrived. It eviscerated the new apparatus for industrial revival. A new government committee, the Goswami Committee, studied the problem of industrial sickness once more. Its 1993 report candidly pointed to the seamy side of globalization – firms decide that it is more profitable to their capital if they can simply close a factory and sell its assets (including the land) rather than plough in more capital to refurbish it. The theory of “creative destruction” morphs into the theory of “asset stripping” – it was not necessarily new technology that wiped out West Bengal’s industry, but the desire to make a hasty profit through sales of assets even if this meant sustained deindustrialisation. The Goswami Committee struggled with two barriers – the Industrial Disputes Act (which gave labour power over closures) and the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (which prevented firms from selling the factory land for speculative purposes).[11] Policy space for the revival of sick units simply closed off. The central government began to pressure states to reconsider their restrictions on factory land sales and land acquisition, with sharp moves afoot in the parliament to eat into worker power by the amendment of the Industrial Disputes Act.

In speech after speech, meeting after meeting, the CPI-M’s B. T. Ranadive, as head of the Centre for Indian Trade Unions, cautioned about the dangers of the emerging policy, and how this would weaken workers’ power. At his 1989 presidential address to CITU in Kalyani, West Bengal, Ranadive dissected the implications of the new policy. An induced international debt strike on the Third World pressured an already willing Indian government to run deficits, generate inflation on common people, cut back on public distribution, threaten the livelihood of people who would then be desperate enough to take any work. The closure of “sick units” allowed capital to shift to new concerns (often with dispersed production units), where they hired desperate temporary workers who had no protections and no benefits. This was two years before liberalisation. Things would be much worse as neo-liberal policies unfolded in the next decade. Ranadive posed an alternative, nationalization of certain industries (cotton textiles, for example) with workers’ participation. The government, he argued, had a “plan for massacre of jobs.” That was plain to see.[12] Even the unions in West Bengal had no stomach for the fight. They toiled in the heartlands of defensiveness. In September 1994, the government of West Bengal announced a new industrial policy. It appeared as if from nowhere. There had been no discussion in the CPI-M state committee about this document, and nor did the Central Committee have a chance to go over it.[13] The policy statement made the following points:[14]

  West Bengal welcomes foreign technology and investment when these are mutually advantageous to firms and the public. West Bengal sees the public sector as an “important vehicle for ensuring social justice and balanced growth.” West Bengal welcome joint ventures to mobilize “necessary resources and expertise.” West Bengal welcomes private and joint venture capital to undertake the massive investments needed for industrial infrastructure. West Bengal will concentrate its resources toward the education, health and other social needs of the population.

 

Just as the CPI and the CPI-M seeded the trade union movement and the Left parties to take on the neo-liberal policy agenda across the country,

West Bengal seemed to have accepted its parameters. In October the CPIM’s leadership studied the West Bengal document and its Central Committee released a statement of concern. “While implementing policies for industrial expansion and inviting private capital both Indian and foreign into West Bengal,” the CC noted, “care should be taken to see that our government and ministerial spokesmen do not subscribe to any policy statement which justify the liberalisation policies and the economic reforms set out by the government.” Certainly, given the investment strike on West Bengal, the government had to canvas for fresh investment toward electronics, petrochemicals and other new industries (all frozen by the central government) but at the same time it had to defend the public sector, “retaining the state intervention in the infrastructure development and in social infrastructure like health and education.”[15] The unions and the Left cadre were confused by the new policy. Had the Left Front government abandoned socialism for neo-liberal industrial development? West Bengal State Secretary of the CPI-M Anil Biswas admitted that the industrial policy did not seem clear – it had not properly charted a critique of liberalisation, nor had it pushed for a coherent alternative. The need to attract investment meant that the government seemed to be “hobnobbing with industrialists.” “Sometimes mechanical directives can produce misunderstandings,” Biswas said in 1995.[16]

The context of the sick industrial sector was only one half of the dilemma for the Left Front government. In rural West Bengal, by the 1990s, a crisis had developed that threatened the stability of the countryside. Agricultural growth rates had begun to decline, with the rate of growth of rice production falling from 6.28 per cent in the 1980s to 2.19 per cent in the 1990s. Neo-liberal agricultural polices on the global stage decreased the prices for agricultural goods at the same time as neo-liberal economic polices of the Indian government has worn out the ability of the state to intervene on behalf of small and middle farmers who faced an across the board crisis. The rate of poverty eradication began to slow down as agricultural production itself declined (it was 5.4 per cent in the early 1980s and only 2.99 per cent a decade later). In 1993, a committee set up by the West Bengal government reported that agricultural stagnation was inevitable, as the land reform agenda had been exhausted. In the absence of technological inputs (including integrated pest management), a set of influential economists argued, “West Bengal is heading where other

successful states like Punjab and Haryana have ended up – in a plateau of close to zero growth.”[17]

D. Bandyopadhyay, who had advised the West Bengal government in its earlier generation of land reforms, now proposed three elementary policies – make the sharecroppers full owners of their land, encourage collectivization as an antidote to fragmentation of land holdings, and organize a cooperative credit supply system to enable small farmers to improve their lands.[18] West Bengal’s Land Reform and Rural Development Minister Surjya Kanta Mishra concurred with these suggestions, including calling for a land bank corporation to help sharecroppers buy their land and for more state-funded cooperatives and self-help organisations to enhance the capacity of the farmers. Mishra further argued that new strategies were needed to increase the employment days for agricultural workers, notably women and to push for mass-adult literacy. If this was not to be done, Mishra suggested, the old social classes in the countryside in alliance with the new rich would turn sharply against the Left, emboldened by its failures.[19] Some of these reforms came on the table, but not sufficiently to circumvent the openings for new political alignments in the countryside.

The debate within the Left and inside the Left Front government between 1985, when the Haldia petrochemicals project was first suggested, till 1994 had been sharp. Many within the Left took the view that West Bengal should emulate the Chinese experience after 1992, to develop the productive forces so as to be able to enhance the lives of the workers and peasants. It was no point in trying to “socialize poverty.” It had not been sufficiently clear yet that the Chinese path would end with remarkable growth rates but also very high inequality. The Chinese idea that growth would provide social wealth which would later be socially utilized meant that the state had to alienate itself from the people (by generating inequality) with the promise that it would later adopt the people’s will (by socializing wealth). Such a strategy, whether correct or not, was not politically available in India, where the Left would not be able to hold power through elections in a period of sustained distress in anticipation of future well-being. It would be voted out of power. The other view was to create employment via new programmes to enchance the health and education of the population – to train and hire large numbers of public health providers and literacy teachers who could go to every corner of the state and work to improve the health and educational capacity of the people.

Such use of social wealth would improve the social world of the people, create employment and provide the basis for growth. This second path was set aside. Few dispute the importance of infrastructure or take the view that the goal of the left is to “socialize poverty.” But on the question of infrastructure, there is a valid discussion about its neutrality. A power plant that provides energy for heavy industry that is largely mechanized and geared toward the export sector is not infrastructure that benefits the working-class and peasantry. On the other hand, power plants are necessary for the well-being of the people. Could other means to generate power – which also generated employment and did not damage the environment – be considered? Would a public debate about the practical applications of the various approaches alongside their politics have helped germinate public interest in the contradictions that lay before the Left Front government? Could a political campaign by the Left parties and their mass organisations have brought people into a public discussion about infrastructure, about participatory planning, and therefore drawn mass consensus for decisions that needed to be taken by the government? This is precisely the kind of experiment undertaken in Kerala through the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning from 1996, to which we shall turn subsequently. In 2007, West Bengal’s new chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya addressed the Central party units in West Bengal. Unemployment posed a serious threat to the state’s people. The tendency, he argued, is for the economy to move from agriculture to industry and to urbanize. This was not a choice. “Urbanisation cannot be stopped,” he said.[20] The problem was not whether to maintain the rural in undeveloped limbo, but how to effect the transition. Bhattacharya argued that the Congress-led government had “a kind of unbalanced zeal” over Special Economic Zones. In states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu the number of SEZ proposals dwarfed the plans for West Bengal. “The opposition is of the view (and a few Left Front partners) that the foreign capitalists are rushing in on their own to exploit us,” he said. “The actual picture is different. There is tough competition all around. We cannot discourage investment. Had there been an alternative to the present form of investment we would have opted for it. The idea is that we do need private capital, with limits set, and not everywhere.”[21] The situation had been grim for some time yet. No alternative sources for finance seemed on the table. In West Bengal, seventy

per cent of the population used public health facilities – much greater use than in other states. The central government had cut public spending on health from 1.6 per cent of GDP (1986-87) to 0.9 per cent of GDP (2004). Public finances in West Bengal had to make up the difference. Loans from multilateral agencies went toward social services, not only for industrial development. The question of an alternative is significant. Bhattacharya is not saying that there is no alternative to capitalism or to neo-liberal policy. “Is it possible to talk of socialist development in one state of our country?” Bhattacharya asked. The constitutional constraints and the reliance on the central government for disbursement of taxation made it impossible for the West Bengal government to move to socialism on its own; socialism in one province, as it were. Neo-liberal policy gave capital untrammeled control over economic growth. That was not the wish of the Left Front government.   It is generally acknowledged that we have no ‘model’ in front of us to emulate and follow. It will indeed be a mistake to follow a specific model. We have closely observed and seen the changes in and the development of the Chinese economy and the Vietnamese economy. We are trying to ascertain facts there. In Latin America, a kind of new leftism has appeared and changes have occurred. We have gone through an interesting book called Dispatches from Latin America. We have gathered from the book the thoughts and ideas of the Brazilian president Lula, of the Venezuelan head of state Chavez, and of the Chilean Socialist Party. We are trying to understand and realize the purport of the changes taking place. However, the fact is that we have to determine our own path, taking into account the reality of the present framework. We have to offer a workable alternative.[22]

Easy answers were in short supply. No clear path emerged. What Latin America had pioneered – huge investment in public health and public education – was funded by high commodity prices. None of that was available to the Left Front government in West Bengal. The gap between the West Bengal industrial policy statement of 1994 and the CPI-M Central Committee statement of 1995 suggests that the latter had misgivings about the political implications of the policy direction. A fog descended on the discussions – the prejudice of expertise silenced too many from entering the conversation, at the same time as all the old prejudices against the CPI-M in particular and the Left in general flooded in for an opportunistic attack. Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, who had closely studied the impasse in rural

West Bengal and had very strong things to say about the Left Front government’s policy, nonetheless correctly identified the terrain of the debate.[23] At one end of the debate stood a “yearning, in essence, for the preservation of older rural forms,” whose standard bearers were “various creeds of romantic anti-developmentalists, environmentalists, and radical left outfits as well as some political opportunists.” The range went from Mamata Banerjee to Medha Patkar – an alliance that stood against the Left from the preserve of “common people.” This was an attack that appeared to defend the class interests of the poor, but had not articulated an alternative solution to the blocked development path for the majority.

The second pole comprised those who draw “a rosy picture of rapid transformation,” who believe that neo-liberal policy will be just the panacea for West Bengal’s development.[24] The best example of this view was the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, whose secretary general Amit Mitra would become Mamata Banerjee’s Finance Minister. Both sides would claim the mantle of democracy. As Dwaipayan Bhattacharya put it, “In this sharply polarized world carving a morally acceptable route for development, without compromising its electoral prospect, is the greatest challenge for the CPI-M and its coalition.” Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s attempt to create a West Bengal model for industrialization had to go through this highly charged political and ideological context. Over the first decade of the new industrial policy, the movement was slow. Capital was simply not keen to enter West Bengal, largely because of concern over a lack of infrastructure that favoured business.[25] The Left Front appointed senior parliamentarian Somnath Chatterjee as the Chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation – to be the public, sophisticated face of West Bengal’s industrial policy. In 1999, the government teamed up with the consultancy firm, McKenzie, to organize a conference on “Destination West Bengal.” Despite the glitz of the marketing programme, an example of the problems with the policy had already become apparent in Kharagpur. The Government had approved a sponge and pig iron factory, owned by the Birla’s Century Textiles, to be built on over a thousand acres of land in 1992. As the process unfolded, the peasants in the district began a low-key protest. In January 1996, they prevented the soil from being tested, and in March they came in a large group to the District Collectorate to demand land-for-land compensation or

else employment in lieu of land. The government went ahead, despite calls by the peasants for poll boycotts and more protests. Abhijit Guha, an anthropologist who studied the Kharagpur episode closely, proposed four important lessons from the process:[26]

  1. The project-affected people had not been given any role in the process. 2. That the company could not buy the land in private contract negotiations showed that the peasants were reluctant to part with it.

3. The

company had selected fertile land, when even a cursory look at the area showed the

presence of “undulating lateritic non-agricultural” land nearby. The peasants had pointed to that land as a possible site, but the company had been adamant.

4. The

government “seemed to be a prisoner in the hands of the bureaucratic machinery in

dealing with this kind of problem of land acquisition.”

 

The Kharagpur experience could have been an early warning when the industrial policy was at its infancy (an even earlier warning lay in the Falta Export Processing Zone, acquired in 1983, but with lingering protests from peasants over rights to the land). It showed how the corporations and the bureaucracy had taken charge of the land acquisition process, and that the peasantry was reluctant to part with its fertile land. The Left Front government needed to chart an alternative strategy for land acquisition, which was the root problem posed by the Kharagpur experience. Unfortunately, despite very clear direction from the Left parties, the lessons of the dangers of land acquisition for Special Economic Zones and for large factories were not heeded. Or were heeded too late. In 2008, the West Bengal State Committee of the CPI-M, after Singur and Nandigram, put the main lessons from Kharagpur into one of its documents on the Left Front government and its tasks. The first lesson is about the high level of consciousness of the peasantry toward land. “The fear among the peasantry of losing their land has to be addressed in a serious manner. Although the amount of land required for industries and infrastructure is meager compared to the total amount of land and cultivated area in the state, the matter needs to be considered with seriousness.” Compensation is a major issue, but so too is alternative income. The first lesson from Kharagpur is highlighted in the document, “The local people need to be involved in the process.” The second lesson (“c” from the list above) is that “caution is also

required in changing land use for the purpose of industry. Priority should be given to setting up industries on relatively less fertile land.”[27] These lessons would have been more useful had they been digested in the 1980s than in 2008, when the penalty inflicted upon the Left as a result of Singur and Nandigram was so severe. In 2004, the Left Front won a landslide election to the Lok Sabha – it won 35 out of the 42 seats; again, in 2006, the Left Front won a landslide in the Assembly elections – 233 out of the 294 seats. The cabinet of chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya understood these two verdicts to mean validation for the industrialization strategy.[28] Bhattacharya seized seriously the section in the 1994 Industrial document to take “fullest advantage” of the neo-liberal agenda (such as the revocation of the freight equalization and the licensing policies that had hampered West Bengal’s industrialization plans for twenty years). There was the urgency of Chinese industrialization in the manner of the roll-out of the project. But how does a government take “fullest advantage” of a global situation where the short-term interests of finance capital utterly eclipse the longer-term commitments of industrial capital? The spatial and temporal barriers that held industrial capital to its obligations no longer applies, and now states feel obliged, as economist Prabhat Patnaik put it in 2007, to pay a “social bribe” to corporations for their investments. Because these bribes (tax concessions and other giveaways) impact on the finances of state governments, they adversely impact the working class and the poor. Within the Left Front there had not been the kind of robust discussion on this theme that there should have been. The principle debate had to be around the question of whether corporate industrialization, and the SEZ strategy in particular, generates employment. An 8 per cent growth rate in India since 1991 has created no absolute increase in manufacturing jobs. As Patnaik pointed out, corporate industry,   not only generates little additional employment; but in addition it uses its monopoly position to carry out primitive accumulation of capital (or more generally, what I would call ‘accumulation through encroachment’): by demanding concessions from the state exchequer; by imposing ‘conditionalities’ on the state government to the detriment of the people, including dispossession from their land and displacement from their habitat; and by engaging in land speculation.[29]

 

The Left parties had been very critical of the way the SEZ policy had been framed. Across India, SEZs had become a prime policy for real estate speculation. Because of this distortion, the share of SEZs in exports was only 5 per cent in 2004-05 (in the same year, only 1 per cent of factory employment and 0.32 per cent in factory investment came through SEZs).[30] Could the Left use the SEZ programme without allowing land speculation, could it produce more Shenzhen than Shanghai? In 2003, before the electoral mandate, the Left Front government passed the West Bengal Special Economic Zone Act. The government passed the law “to accelerate economic reforms.” The problem for West Bengal had been a lack of “social bribes” to industry and the lack of confidence by industry of the Left government as well as the trade unions. To raise their confidence, Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya seemed to tread on the basic ideology of communism – “The world is changing. We are also changing. If you follow our party literature you will see our attitude towards investment and foreign capital.”[31] What he implied was that the Left would greet capital with a fulsome handshake and not the fist. “Our old dogma will not work,” he said, as he poured cold water on strikes and labour actions.[32] The rest of the CPI-M reacted sharply, as did the trade unions. But Bhattacharya’s statements were not for the party or the unions. They were designed to attract capital, which has very sharp hearing when it comes to questions of labour discipline and social bribes. If a major corporation came to West Bengal, it might encourage others to do so. That is what Bhattacharya had in mind. The Tatas, India’s gold standard in industry, sought land for a factory to produce its new car, the Nano – purportedly an affordable car for the emerging middle class. The government and the Tatas settled on the land in Singur, not far from Calcutta. Singur turned out to be a disaster for the Left Front government. One of the problems lay in the success of the land reforms, which had distributed a very high percentage of fallow land (less than 1 per cent in West Bengal, compared to 17.6 per cent in the rest of India). There was simply not very much unclaimed land available for industry. The old factories in the rust belt had land under legal challenge. They could not be touched, although it would have been a perfect site for the new industries. The farmers had a strong sentiment of ownership, and were loathe to sell their land. Former Land Reform Minister in the Left Front government

Abdur Rezzak Molla said of the problem of land acquisition, “We are taking away from the farmers by the left hand what we once gave them with the right hand.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but it would have been more accurate to say that the Left Front was taking away with the right hand what it had delivered with the left hand.

The political problem emerged not only in terms of the policy, but also in its implementation. Fragmentation of holdings meant that there were far more people holding the land that the Tatas wanted to acquire (in Gujarat, the same amount of land would have been held by a third or less of owners).[33] This meant that settlements on land sales would have to be conducted with more people. To enable these settlements to take place, the Left Front set up a local office to deal with compensation claims. The government organized meetings in the area with owners and sharecroppers. But what was lacking was an attempt to ascertain the mood of the peasantry in the first place, to ensure that they saw themselves as part of the process. A leader of the All India Krishak Sabha complained that the government “didn’t consult us before acquiring land in Singur. Had they told us, we would have done the groundwork and made sure there wasn’t any confrontation. Instead, they acted in haste.” The Chief Minister, said this anonymous leader, “relied more on bureaucrats than us and we are paying the price.”[34] Bhattacharya came to bear the brunt of the anger – but of course this was not his doing alone. The Left Front government had neglected to build a political campaign for mass support towards industrial reform – in the same way as the rural politics of the 1950s and 1960s created a coalition in place to defend to the end the land reform agenda. No such political platform existed. When Mamata Banerjee led the opposition to Singur, no mass movement emerged to push back against her. Her slogan of Maa, Mati, Manush (Mother, Land, People) drew an emotional response from the public. The Left’s space had been usurped. It had no comparable slogan. Was there an alternative to the Singur policy? Instead of corporate industrialization, Prabhat Patnaik argued for industrialization by cooperatives or the public sector, “where the peasants themselves could collectively own industry by organizing themselves into cooperatives, then these costs to the people could be minimized or even avoided.”[35] The problem for these alternatives was lack of access to finance. Both state governments and private capital turn to banks to finance large projects – by

the 2000s, no bank in India would finance a project that did not reek of neoliberalism. An employer’s militancy has set in, with the bourgeoisie emboldened by the new policy space. This patriotism of the bottom line is quite different from the enforced national patriotism of the importsubstitution era. At another project pushed by the Left government from 1985 – the Haldia petrochemical hub – the financing came from the government (including the Indian Oil Company, a public sector unit, which was an anchor investor). If the Left had produced a people’s militancy to counter the employer’s militancy, a small space could have been wrested as a model against the neo-liberal compulsions. In 2006, the government announced that it had been able to secure a major investor for the hub – Indonesia’s Salim Group.[36] Capital is capital – it is an illusion to believe that there is “good” capital versus “bad” capital. On the other hand, politically the Salim Group’s entry was a gift to the opponents of the CPI-M. Sudono Salim, the head of this vast conglomerate, had close ties to Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia from whose hands dripped the blood of at least half a million communists.[37] The year before, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez visited West Bengal, spoke to tens of thousands of people at the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium, to whom he said, ami apnader bhalobhashi, I love you all.[38] Venezuela’s public sector firm – Petróleos de Venezuela – has considerable expertise in refineries and oil services, as well as funds to invest in such enterprises. If the Left Front had turned to Venezuela for financing, this would have undercut some of the sting – and it might have modeled a globalization of socialist construction as an alternative to capitalist globalization.

The Left Front government had hoped to set up the chemical hub as part of the Haldia Development Authority in Nandigram, about 150 kilometers east of Calcutta. Nandigram is an economically weak region, but it is within sight of major industrial growth, exemplified by the Haldia Petrochemical refinery and by a Mitsubishi chemical factory. When word got out of the likelihood of land acquisition for the hub in November 2006, street meetings began.[39] A local CPI MLA, S. K. Ilias Mohammad led part of the demonstration against the possibility of acquisition. In December, the Haldia Development Authority posted a notice for land acquisition. Later, the Left Front government said that it had not authorized the notice. At any rate, the politics flashed forward.

Reading the reports from Nandigram produce a great deal of confusion. The events are so gravely contested that it is not easy to isolate the most basic facts. Plainly, there are two almost diametrical views to the events between January and March 2007. The first is the view of the CPI-M and substantial parts of the Left Front, which suggests that the problem began as an error in an announcement of the land acquisition. Then the local CPI-M leader, Lakshman Seth, unnecessarily fanned the flames of distress amongst the farmers. This was an opening utilized by the local Maoists and the Trinamul Congress, which brought the Singur agitation to Midnapore linked up with the Maoists and used immense violence to remove the CPI-M from the district. The police firing of March 14 was, as CPI-M General Secretary Prakash Karat wrote at that time, “deeply regrettable.”[40] It now turns out that the order for the police firing was given by an executive magistrate – separate from the Left Front government.[41] The second view, that of the right-wing bloc (Trinamul Congress, Congress and BJP) with their left allies (including the Maoists), was that the CPI-M had ordered its armed force to push through land acquisition by force. This was a morality play, with the CPI-M as Evil and the People as Good. There are no other interests at play, no class dynamics served by the Trinamul Congress, no Maoism with its own sectional interest. These reports are informative but somehow colourless – there is no nuance, no sense of the complexity of the ground-level politics.[42] Both approaches have allowed me to try and reconstruct a narrative of the events in Nandigram – although as is clear, there is no objective view here. Any attempt to tell the story of such a contentious event will find its feet on one or the other side of the fence.

On January 3, the Kalicharanpur Panchayat Samiti’s pradhan (and CPI-M member) Samiran Bibi called the police as she felt threatened by a protest that had gathered outside her office. The police arrived, and dispersed the crowd with a lathi charge, firing into the air – injuring some protestors in the bargain. It was an indication of the kind of violence that would define Nandigram. Already, the Maoists had moved in; Sumit Sinha of the CPI-ML (Santosh Rana faction) was on hand.[43] The opportunity for Maoist intervention presented itself. As the police returned to the station, they faced an armed crowd of several thousand. The clash resulted in injuries to several policemen and a destroyed police jeep. An armed crowd of two thousand people attacked a relief police force from Khejuri. Their jeep was burned and their weapons stolen. A large crowd attacked Health

Department officials who had come to inspect public toilets (toward giving the district a Nirmal award – for excellence in sanitation, the first district in India to get that award).[44] The crowd destroyed the Kalicharanpur panchayat office. The police was chased off. Nandigram was now isolated from the rest of the state. The Left Front government met but could not find a way to deal with the situation. Nor could Arun Gupta, Inspector General of the Western Range, responsible for Nandigram. The Trinamul Congress, the Congress party, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, and the Maoists as well as some local activists formed the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC). Violence between the BUPC-Trinamul and the CPI-M cadre escalated. Dead bodies lay on both sides, as the clashes moved to guns and swords. Each side accused the other of murder. It was hard to make sense of the events, as the police hid in the Nandigram police station and no press could get to the scene. Benoy Konar, State Secretariat member of the CPI-M, said, “if they want to do things democratically, we shall reciprocate. But if they want to make things difficult for us, we are prepared to make life hell for them.”[45] In all the anti-CPI-M reports, it was only the second, more sinister sounding sentence from Konar that was quoted (if they want to make things difficult for us, we are prepared to make life hell for them), not the first part (if they want to do things democratically, we shall reciprocate). It would be less ominous if the entire context of the statement were reproduced. The tension had reached remarkable proportions in just a few days. On January 8, the various political parties pledged to the District Magistrate that they would try to dampen the violence. Not long afterwards, a CPI-M office in Basulichak was burnt to the ground and a police patrol was attacked.[46] The Trinamul refused to cooperate with the local bureaucrats, who were eager to broker peace. The District Magistrate Anup Agarwal had told the parties that no “large-scale arrest” would be conducted. The police arrested one Trinamul worker. That was a sufficient provocation for the Trinamul’s Sheikh Sufian. When Trinamul boycotted the talks mediated by the Magistrate, they fell apart. Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya announced that it was a “mistake” by the Haldia Development Authority to have put up the notice, and he asked the District Magistrate to “tear it up.” “The first task is to restore normalcy in the area,” he said. Mamata Banerjee said that if anything was to be torn up, it should be the Land Acquisition Act. Two Left

Front partners – the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the CPI – said that they are “united on the question of land,” and warned the government to back off. The CPI-M removed party authority from Lakshman Seth to Dipak Sarkar. “We cannot disown our responsibility,” said CPI-M state secretary Biman Bose. “If our activists and our leaders were cautious, last Sunday’s tragedy could have been averted.”[47] On February 4, the Chief Minister went to Nandigram and said, “No industry in Nandigram if people don’t want it.” On March 1, the Chief Minister went further, “We have made a mistake in Nandigram. We won’t proceed a step further. But we want a chemical hub. Haldia is our future.”

On February 7, Sadhu Chatterjee, a sub-inspector of police was abducted, killed and his dead body thrown into a river.[48] He had been tortured with knife wounds, then killed, his body stuffed in a sack. It was another sign of the kind of violence that would erupt. There is no question that the way Chatterjee had been killed bore the marks of professional killers, a small indicator that this might be the Maoists.[49] Gunfire ran from February into March. Nandigram’s villages and town became dangerous. For every quote from a CPI-M leader that provoked violence, there was at least one from the Trinamul leadership.[50] The agitation had been joined by thousands of ordinary peasants who felt afraid that their land would be seized. They were joined by Trinamul’s Sufian, the Maoist’s Sinha and local gangsters associated with the Trinamul such as Khokan Shet and “Dacoit Imran.”[51] The police increased its forces in the area (more than three thousand entered the district). It had become clear that the police planned to reclaim the area, isolated from the rest of the state for over a month. On March 14, three hundred police personnel led by Additional Superintendent of Police Debashish Boral entered the Nandigram area from the Tekhali Bridge. From Bhangebera Bridge, Inspector General Arun Gupta led five hundred police into Nandigram. The fog of the clash that follows provides two different narratives: one says that the police, along with CPI-M cadre (the Harmad Bahini of Lakshman Seth) dressed in police uniforms, fired unprovoked, and the other says that the police was fired upon, at which point they retaliated. Fourteen people died (eight killed by the police). Several women accused police officers of sexual violence. This was the most damaging incident in the Left Front’s thirty years of government.

Over the course of 2007, the death toll rose to about sixty – half from the CPI-M and half from the other groups involved in the agitation (including the BUPC). People who lived side-by-side fled from each other. The CPI-M supporters took refuge in Khejuri, where the party had built a relief camp. The BUPC and the Trinamul also fled the area, and then returned. Slowly the evictees returned home. But the violence did not abate. It had already spread to Lalgarh, where the Maoists had taken charge after assassinating Sudhir Mandal, leader of the Bharat Jakar Majhi Marwa Sangathan. Mandal’s Sanghathan is an adivasi organisation that had protested the entry of the police into their area after an assassination attempt on Buddhadev Bhattacharya in 2008.[52] He had become an obstruction to the Maoists.

Maoist justice ruled in the badlands of Midnapur’s adivasi belt. In early January 2010, Maoists entered the village of Joynagar, and killed four CPI-M supporters. They beheaded two of them – Ananth Singh and Hiteshwar Singh, sons of Gopal Singh, who the Maoists had already killed in 2007 during their first foray into Lalgarh. Ten days later, the Maoists sometime ally, the Trinamul Congress members attacked a group of CPI-M supporters who had just filed their nomination papers for a local election. Dinesh Haldar, Khairul Jamadar, Bishwanath Gayen and Salim Jamadar were killed, two of them with revolvers fired into their mouths. On the morning of June 9, 2013, as he left his home for his morning walk, the Communist leader Dilip Sarkar, age 65, was shot by four “unidentified miscreants,” as the national news agency (UNI) put it. The finger of suspicion pointed to the Trinamul or the Maoists. No-one else had a motivation for his death. The murder took place in Burnpur, an industrial city in Asansol district, which is the home of the IISCO steel plant. Sarkar’s political career began there as he rose amongst the ranks in the trade union to become the head of the Steel Workers’ Union. A member of the CPI-M, Sarkar would act for the interests of workers in West Bengal’s legislature, where he represented the steel workers’ district. His was the third political murder in this working-class district, after the murder of CPI-M activist and employee at the Lisco steel plant Nirgun Dubey, age 50, in July 2011, and the murder of CPI-M activist Arpan Mukherjee, age 54, in May 2012. This systematic cleansing of the Left organizers continues, increasing in momentum.

In 2005, a Maoist leader, “Comrade Dhruba” told a journalist in the forests of Purulia that his forces had prepared themselves across the western districts of West Bengal. If the government would come after them, he said, “It will help us gain more support from the people. Comrades have been working hard for those who don’t know what a full meal is.” “Give us five years,” Dhruba said, “We will make sure you spend sleepless nights.” The reporter asked the Maoist if his party had any plans to attack Calcutta. “We do not plan violence in Calcutta because we know when we establish our base here, people will be forced to obey us.”[53] This was a year before Singur, two years before Nandigram. Remarkably, the writer Arundhati Roy told CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar that the Maoists are justified in their killings, “You have an army of very poor people being faced down by an army of rich that are corporatebacked.”[54] But the army of the poor in West Bengal has taken to assassination of working-class and adivasi organisers of the poor, at the behest of the ruling party who has little interest in a social democratic programme despite its hyperventilation for the cause of Singur and Nandigram in the lead-up to the polls. The loud mass rallies and the quiet assassinations served their purpose. They put the Left Front out of office. The steady commitment to land reform remained undaunted. In three years toward the end of the Left Front government’s long tenure in West Bengal, land transfers continued – 8,136 acres (2005-06), 10,848 acres (2006-07) and 10,953 (2007-08). As economist V. K. Ramachandran put it, “Even in 2006-07, when [land] acquisitions [for various purposes] peaked, the extent acquired was 4,135 acres, and the extent distributed under land reform was 10,848; in other words, in that year, the extent of agricultural land distribution under the land reform programme was no less than 2.62 times the extent acquired for industry and infrastructure.” To put this into the national context, the total land redistributed to cultivators accounted for twenty-three per cent of all land redistributed in India, with fifty five per cent of all beneficiaries of land redistribution in India living in West Bengal. Land redistribution, in its final years, had become an intense political struggle, rather than an administrative process. The Left parties worked through the peasant organisations to identify landlords’ surplus land and developed struggles to acquire and redistribute this land. This remained the bedrock of the Left’s work. The neo-landlords and the older social classes reasserted themselves through the Trinamul Congress and the BJP in

the countryside to drive a hard agenda against the Left. It helped them that the Left’s industrialization policy alienated many people and provided the basis for a new anti-Left coalition. The industrialization policy was not itself the reason for the undoing of the Left; it was the spur.

DECENTRALIZED PLANNING IN KERALA

Tremors of the new policy orientation in Delhi began to come to Kerala by the late 1980s. The CPI-M led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government faced some serious challenges. Social indicators – mainly education and health – remained very strong in Kerala, with poverty reduction taking place one hundred and twenty times faster than in Bihar.[55] Economic growth, meanwhile, plummeted. Industrial growth rates fell from 4.97 per cent in the 1970s to 3.36 per cent in the 1980s. The “Kerala Model” rested on this paradox – very strong social indicators, with compromising economic growth data.

The CPI-M had been aware of the problem of economic decline in Kerala, one that came to critical proportions during the two Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) ministries from the end of 1981 to the middle of 1987. In 1992, at the CPI-M’s 14th Congress, the party reported, “While facing a critical financial situation and a decade of near negative economic growth, the LDF government [in power from mid-1987 to mid1991] had been able to improve the growth rate and open up a wide range of avenues and opportunities to the people especially the weak and poor.”[56] Just as the LDF came back to power in 1987, T. J. Nossiter noted that the CPI-M, the largest party in the LDF, appeared lackluster and he wondered if the “CPI-M unit in Kerala had the programme or the personnel to advance the popular cause.”[57] The scholarship on the Left was not prepared for what Kerala unleashed. The temptations of seeking a silver bullet to push up economic growth did not detain the LDF. It had just come off an exhilarating stretch in the opposition, from where the Left movements pressed the Congress-led UDF on land reforms. It was communist pressure that forced the UDF to live up to the new agricultural workers acts, to register tenants and provide them with social services. Sweaty with this campaign, the Left was not willing to turn its back on popular revolt when it came to seeking a new pathway to increase economic growth.

The road chosen was the People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning (PCDP), which went into motion in 1996. But it did not come out of nothing. It was borne through a century of popular initiatives to solve basic problems, a hallmark of Kerala’s cultural development. There is a streak of ingenuity in this part of India, and it was to that creativity linked to the appetite for mass action that defined the PCDP.

An early indication of this approach can be seen in the process by which rehabilitation of the coir industry took place. Kerala’s coir, a traditional industry, was under intense pressure from Tamil Nadu’s machine-based coir. Kerala’s coir was simply too expensive, and of an inferior quality. What does one do for the struggling coir industry, where the government – under worker pressure – had banned mechanization in 1967? The government held discussions with the unions and with industry experts, and eventually set up a Task Force to look into the problem. The Task Force was chaired by the CPI-M’s T. M. Thomas Isaac. When the Task Force reported back to the government it suggested modest improvements in the process of production, including the use of “intermediate technology” machines to enhance productivity in fiber removal and in spinning.[58] Stagnant demand for coir fiber might be enhanced by the finer quality produced by machines. The entry of machines into the industry had mixed results. It certainly revived production and brought better quality goods to the market. The production process using the newer machines created less waste. However, the social implications needed more study. The workers in the coir industry had been largely dalits (Pulayas), with a large number of women (including Ezhava and Pulaya women). The old technology had cut the work year to six months. The workers had already been hit hard. Now machines threatened their employment. As machines entered the factory, dalits and women found themselves being replaced by dominant caste men – machines have a tendency to upgrade the status of work.[59] The question of power on the work-floor in decision-making came onto the table. But the Task Force did not work independently of the unions. They worked closely with them. In fact, while the CPI-M’s Thomas Isaac chaired the task force, he worked with his colleague Pyarelal Raghavan to produce a policy paper developed with the Kerala Coir Workers Centre – the research had been done through “a series of discussion with the trade union activists.”[60] When the Task Force reported its findings, it was not a surprise to the workers’ union. The union

and the researchers worked together to find the best possible policy to save a faltering industry and the livelihood of its workers. Coir was not modernized through technocratic decision-making. Change came in a participatory manner. Kerala’s Left government, as in West Bengal, understood that in this new dispensation certain sectors (such as electronics, light engineering, and rubber processing) would not be able to attract public finance, nor would they be able to sustain themselves without investment. The general sense in the Left was that the need to attract private capital should not take up the entire space of economic planning for development. The cornerstone of the new paradigm had to be decentralization of decision making through mass participation to enhance the small-scale sector and to improve public services. The Left was present in a series of important new political projects across the state – among others, the 1990-91 Total Literacy Campaign (alongside the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad) and the fights against dowry deaths, sexual harassment and violence against women led by the Kerala branch of the AIDWA. The experience of popular knowledge of everyday needs and the energy of participation had to somehow be brought to the center of planning.

The Left forces, as early as in the 1958 Administrative Reforms Committee, argued for the decentralization of political power. Contesting the Left’s view of panchayati and district devolution of power was the Congress, which was not keen to allow any democracy of the grassroots. Several attempts by the Left to drive a panchayati devolution plan into law were blocked until 1991, when discussion of the Eighth Five Year Plan allowed the Left to set up district councils. Earlier attempts at local planning – the Tribal Sub-Plan of the 1980s for instance – had given the Left and the bureaucracy experience in harnessing popular input for planning. With the Left in power to drive the Eight Five Year Plan process, the government decided to use the opportunity not only to create devolved local institutions, but also to use these institutions for popular planning.[61]

One major reason that Kerala could not move a full agenda for panchayat rule or indeed for decentralized planning was the political imbroglio. By the 1980s it had become clear that neither the Left Democratic Front nor the Congress-led United Democratic Front could break the forty-five per cent barrier – both blocs had their core constituency, and it was only tactical alliances or small swings that enabled one or the

other to win the state government.[62] To move an agenda for genuine popular participation, the Left decided to offer something quite spectacular when it took power in 1991 – if the entire political spectrum agreed to the policy of decentralized planning and local-self government, the Left government would devolve thirty-five to forty per cent of the state’s budget to the localities. The reason why this was of such significance is that the Congress-led UDF controlled about forty per cent of the local governments. Despite being out of power in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital, the Congress would benefit from the devolution. It was a calculated risk by the Left, which hoped that this immense gesture would draw the UDF into a partnership for decentralization of governance and planning. “How to build a bridge between the two contesting combinations has therefore been the principal question in Kerala politics,” wrote Namboodiripad, who worried that between this electoral bipolarity would fall the hopes and possibilities of the people of Kerala. “The merit of the people’s campaign for planning from below,” he wrote, “is that there is a growing realization that there is something more important for the two combinations than contesting for ministerial offices.”[63]

The main spur to move toward a new development culture in Kerala was that the economy had begun to stagnate, with unemployment three times the nation’s average and with remittance payments taking on a fundamental role for the state’s budgets.[64] The “Kerala Model” appeared to be in deep distress as social services deteriorated. There was no question that the “Model” – in literacy, education, and health – had made great gains: in 1901, literacy rates were nineteen per cent for men and just over three per cent for women, while by 1991, the numbers rose to ninety-four per cent and eighty-six per cent (the Indian average is an abysmal forty-nine per cent). Most social indicators remained high by the early 1990s, but the decline in state funds and the slow-down of financing for social services seeded doubt about the resilience of the “Model.” Meanwhile, Kerala’s robust civil society went to work with a series of experiments to revive the state’s society and economy. In the lead was the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP, the Kerala Science Literature Association), a vast network of forty thousand members committed to making the latest scientific developments available to people, to people’s science. In 1973, a decade after its formation, the KSSP launched “Science for Social Revolution,” geared to draw the practical science already at the

center of people’s lives – and using newly formed Rural Science Forums in every village to bring awareness of the ubiquity of science and its importance. Over the course of the next two decades, the KSSP conducted local surveys, ran participatory educational workshops and got involved in constructive work in the villages.[65] Between 1988 and 1991, the KSSP, with other partners, was involved in a Total Literacy Campaign (Ernakulam district), the People’s Resource Mapping Programme (in 25 pilot panchayats), and the smokeless chulha (stove) movement. Of these the Ernakulam experiment stands out. In December 1988, the KSSP cadre worked with local educators and activists to reach out to the 174,000 people in the district who were categorized as illiterate. From May 1989 to February 1990, the educators and activists held intensive classes with these people, learning about literacy and health care. At the close of the program, 135,000 of the 174,000 passed a literacy test with over eighty per cent marks. The rest went into a follow-up scheme. Prime Minister V. P. Singh declared the district totally literate. It cost between Rs. 205 and Rs. 333 to educate each student – remarkably inexpensive, and very effective.[66] What Ernakulam showed was that in partnership with activist organisations, people could surmount major challenges and succeed. The Mapping programme showed that people could do highly skilled work (to gather land and resource information in villages) with minimal technical help from activists, and the smokeless chulha experience showed that technological fixes for ordinary problems already existed. It needed popular initiative, activist energy and a helpful state to produce more than the status quo of passive development projects.

One of the key features of Kerala is that the urban-rural divide is not as stark as it is elsewhere, even in West Bengal. In driving through the state, one might be forgiven for the belief that the countryside seems urban and the cities seem rural – the interpenetration of each into the other is quite remarkable. A social outcome of this attachment between the rural and the urban is that the countryside is not denuded of intellectuals, and urban intellectuals are not far removed from the countryside. As a result, when problems arise in Kerala’s “rural” areas, there are always local intellectuals nearby and prepared to lend a hand in self-help schemes and local organisations that seek solutions. The existence of the KSSP is a good illustration of the network of such intellectuals. Elsewhere, external NGOs enter rural areas with their own agendas (often driven by their donors) and

with a need to make short-term changes in line with their short-term donor imagination. Such a situation does not befall the Kerala local experiments, since many of these are locally designed, with local intellectuals in close touch with the people who live in districts. When KSSP worked with the Thanalur panchayat in 1993 to send two hundred “barefoot doctors” across the district to do a preliminary analysis of health needs, it could rely upon local medical personnel and local advice. The panchayat was interested in vaccinations and primary healthcare, which would be delivered by people who did not have to come from afar, nor come with their own agenda. In the course of their public health intervention, they discovered that the panchayat had its own (now defunct) Primary Health Centre, which they revived.[67]

Panchayats of Kunnothuparambu and Olavanna suffered severe water shortages. Both, encouraged by local intellectuals (some affiliated with the KSSP), developed a mass public movement for water conservation. A theatre group (Jalaparvam) in Kunnothuparambu went around in 1995 to educate people to conserve their water during the monsoon, by growing saplings, building small check dams on village streams and by using conservation vessels. During 1996’s hot months, water was no longer a problem. Similarly in Olavanna, the panchayat encouraged rainwater harvesting in wells along the slope of the hillsides, and then raised funds to construct pumps and pipes to draw water into homes. In Kanjikuzhy, the panchayat began a campaign to revive its historic farming in individual plots, handing out seeds and bio-pesticides to encourage non-industrial inputs. The small gardens thrived, making the panchayat an exporter of vegetables.[68]

Participatory experiments such as these are not all located in the fields and villages. In 1965, owners of beedi firms in Kerala (mainly Mangalore Ganesh Beedi) decided to move from the factory production process to the piece-work (home work) system. This would cheapen the labour costs, and put the twelve thousand beedi workers of Kannur in distress. The workers wanted to resist the owners, but could not get the capital to make their own beedis. By 1968, the Industries Minister T. V. Thomas and the trade unions began to talk about a workers’ cooperative, which is what they set up the following year with government capital.[69] Cooperatives are a familiar sight in Indian manufacturing, with fifteen per cent of all units set up in this unique manner. The most famous cooperative is Amul (the Anand Milk

Federation Union Limited, set up in 1946), which ushered in the White Revolution in India. The Kerala Dinesh Beedi cooperative is part of that broad movement for cooperative control over production. What makes KDB unique is that its political culture remained alive. Through the decades, KDB created a set of spin-offs (Dinesh Umbrella, Dinesh Apparels, Dinesh Foods, and Dinesh Software) to create employment for oppressed castes and women, and to ensure its survival as beedi consumption declines.[70] It was not simply about production targets, but it was also about social development and employment generation. This is an important lesson for the kind of manufacturing that was also promoted in Kerala over the 1990s. As in West Bengal, finance was a serious problem – where could the state raise funds for the creation of cooperatives? What had been possible in 1968 was no longer so easily available in 1996. The energy of the cooperative movement and the rural social development campaigns inspired the Left to create an innovative policy. Namboodiripad, who had been the great champion of local selfgovernment, put the economic case plainly,   The unfortunate fact is that the vast natural resources of the state remain untapped, agricultural land is turned into non-agricultural land and human (labour) resources that can be used for increasing production and productivity in the state are being exported to the Gulf and other foreign countries. The state has immense resources by way of technical knowledge stored in numerous research institutions. The question is how to bring the untapped material resources together with the immense manpower that the state is forced to export.[71]

 

A vast survey of the “untapped material resources” combined with a study of how to exploit them in a careful and judicious way using the best of “technical knowledge stored in numerous research institutions” would allow human beings to work for Kerala’s social development. Export of labour and import of remittances are all very well, suggested Namboodiripad, but it is possible to exploit some of Kerala’s vast natural resources without great environmental damage and so help Kerala’s people become self-sufficient at least in foodstuffs. Wryly Namboodiripad wrote that the “much lauded ‘Kerala Model’ of economic development has put the state in such a situation that it has to depend on other states of India and even other countries for almost all its requirements including rice, the staple

diet of the people.” Kerala’s people focus on the social services sector, wrote Namboodiripad, thinking that “development means only more and more schools, more and more hospitals, more and more transport facilities.” What they do not grasp, he suggested, is that “although these are undoubtedly important, they cannot develop the state unless the productive sector – industries and agriculture in particular – is put on a healthy basis.”[72]

The LDF government from 1987 to 1991 rushed through a series of agricultural reforms to boost the anemic growth rate. The government suspended loans, extended fertilizer subsidies and offered cooperative workers generous pension funds. People’s committees were set up in each panchayat to conduct group farming so as to coordinate activities and share inputs. The success of these popular committees to help paddy farmers provided legitimacy to the importance of people’s mass participation in helping increase production. The agricultural growth rate rose to over nine per cent.[73] During these three years, the LDF government pushed for decentralization of administration, with elections to panchayats, municipalities and district councils. This set the tone for the campaign that was to come. Despite the fact that the LDF was voted out of power in 1991, during the sympathy wave for the Congress that followed the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the panchayat decentralization experiments continued. The Left had chosen Kalliasseri panchayat in Kannur District as the test site. The politics suited the experiment because the Kalliasseri panchayat was a reliable CPI-M stronghold. In June 1993, the panchayat created the Kalliasseri Development Society (KDS), which consisted of representatives from two hundred neighbourhood groups (each group consisted of twentyfive households). For three years, the KDS developed the plan for Kalliasseri. Its teams studied the layout of the district, made maps of its topography and lists of its resources. Another list was produced of its limitations, notably areas that needed immediate attention for development. While the plan was being developed, the panchayat decided to act on some of these immediate tasks, such as the repair on a canal and the construction of a road. Mass voluntary labour came out to work on these projects. It was a sign of the power of popular planning and its ability to enliven community development. By September 1995, a report on the plan was ready, and so the panchayat organized a seminar for its release. E. M. S. Namboodiripad

came to inaugurate the seminar, which he then wrote about in his very popular column in Deshabhimani. As the Kalliasseri project unfolded, the state went to elections and the LDF returned to power. The Left was now ready to take these lessons to all the people of Kerala. The People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning (PCDP) began in September 1996. The scope of the PCDP can be gauged in the numbers. Between September and November 1996, two million people attended 14,149 assemblies where 75,000 trained resource persons ran the discussions that went for at least one day. There were about thirty million people living in Kerala in 1996, which means that one person for every fifteen people came to the assemblies. That is the most remarkable democratic exercise to have taken place in India and perhaps in the world. These assemblies galvanized the moribund Gram Sabhas (Village Councils), where the first participatory discussions took place. The campaign, with direction from the State Planning Board, and technical input from the KSSP and others with experience running such mass exercises, made sure to undercut long speeches and developed small group discussions to bring in as many viewpoints as possible. The Gram Sabha discussions identified local needs in as concrete a manner as possible These assemblies now voted in delegates to go to the second phase of the PCDP – to prepare the Development Reports. The delegates met in Development Seminars to carefully study the needs and the resources. These seminars took the demands of the people and made an objective assessment of whether these demands could be met in the locality (based on what people had been saying at the Gram Sabhas). “Unlike the traditional rural development actions plans, which were merely a listing of certain proposals for employment creation or poverty alleviation,” Thomas Isaac and Franke note, the PCDP attempted to draw up and implement “comprehensive area plans.” The scope of the PCDP was not this irrigation system or that fishery, but it was to devolve to the locality the “major chunk of the development programmes in agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry, rural industries, education, health and social welfare.”[74] Preparing these plans, Thomas Isaac and Franke note, is “far more complex than teaching the alphabet. One third of the state budget was at stake.” A technocrat within the state apparatus typically handled the production of the plan, and as a consequence “the data management practices and institutions in the country were evolved to suit the requirements of highly centralized

systems of administration and planning.” The PCDP had to break this habit, but also create a methodology to translate data for a central plan into data for local planning. The PCDP devised new methods of collating data, such as use of maps rather than tables and other means to enhance and draw from peoples’ expertise. It was important not to alienate people who would not have the technical skills of statistical analysis. This was popular social science in motion. Yet, the PCDP was clear that “participatory studies could not compromise scientific rigor.”[75]

Data collection meant a careful study of the panchayat’s land and people, a look at the secondary data that was often hidden in myriad ledgers and the primary data that had to be collected through a mass exercise. The activists showed in their practice how an “apparently boring exercise such as data collection could be converted into a mass participatory event and an occasion for mass education.”[76] The data, however uneven, was now written up into a fifteen-chapter development report for each panchayat. After an introductory set of chapters on the history, geography and sociology of the area, the report would detail the agricultural, industrial, social and cultural aspects with a final chapter on resource mobilization. A fourth of the development reports would hold up to close academic scrutiny. This enormous self-study of the state of Kerala amounted to 100,000 of text – 106 pages per panchayat. The best analysis was of agriculture, followed by education (that school teachers play the role of local intellectuals weighs heavily on these reports). The chapters on industry, which E. M. S. Namboodiripad hoped would be the most helpful for increasing manufacturing, came out weak.

Camps across the state brought delegates from the panchayats into conversation with each other about their various findings and innovations. The class struggles in the panchayat that had rubbed through the discussions would here be muted.[77] Here are a few examples from the presentations:   The Chapparappadavu Panchayat President told a rapt audience how the panchayat had constructed a ‘people’s bridge’ with local materials, local labour, and the skills of local artisans: drawings were copied by hand by listeners who carefully inspected the wooden models after the discussion. Peelicode KSSP activists described the step-by-step procedures that they designed to survey the sanitation needs of their village, raising matching funds, instill

enthusiasm, and construct enough latrines to achieve virtual total coverage. Thykkattusseri representatives told of their lab-based orchid tissue culture experiment that offered new job and income possibilities for women.[78]

 

These plans went upwards to the blocks and the districts, to the expert panels and the State Planning Board. The plan was integrated at a very low level – it disappointed many of the architects of the process, although it might be said that they had unrealistic hopes. Such an experiment could not fully succeed in one year. It would have taken years to get the system in place, and years indeed for the class struggle in the countryside to push its visions through to the final plan. The Left was not given time. It had only three years before the next election. One of the limitations of the PCDP was the low participation rate of women in the process – just over a quarter of the participants were women, when the organizers hoped that at least a third would be women. In 1991, Kerala introduced the one third reservation for women in local bodies, and over the years this has come to pass. Thomas Isaac and Franke lay out the adverse environment for women in the process,   The newly elected women representatives faced numerous economic handicaps. Most were young, educated only up to matriculation or below, from poor or lower middle class backgrounds and without prior experience in elected office. Forty per cent of them did not have any previous exposure to public activity. They had to work in an unfriendly social environment and often faced slander and gossip. The triple burden of work, family duties and responsibilities of an elected representative gave rise to family tensions. Within these constraints, it is understandable that the elected women representatives’ involvement and leadership in the campaign did not rise to the desired levels.[79]

 

On the other hand, that these women had little experience meant that the process gave them new skills and new windows. Journalist Parvathi Menon reported that the PCDP had to deal early in the campaign with “the issue of women’s work, their contribution to production, the evaluation of their labour, the reasons for the falling work participation rate among women, and so on.”[80] When the gender perspective in the planning process did not come to fruition, the PCDP felt that “a conscious policy of activisation was required.” The campaign forged various strategies

(including mandatory sections of the reports on women) to integrate gender into the PCDP. Menon shows us that the strategies bore fruits. K. Sulochana, president of the Thiruvaly panchayat told Menon that “I had to bear constantly the barbs and insults of my male colleagues for being both a woman and a person from the Scheduled Caste. They tried to wear me down and make me resign. When that did not happen they tried other ways of preventing me from working.” She remained, and completed her term with pride. Fatima Abdul Qadir told Menon that when she got news of her victory, she greeted it with tears. As president of the Zilla Parishad she tried to break gender stereotypes in occupation, so that she encouraged the recruitment of women into the transportation sector (as bus drivers, conductors and doorkeepers) and in the construction sector (as masons, for example). These stories show us the depth of the PCDP and the dynamic impact that it has had on Kerala. What tangible goods did the PCDP produce?   306,288 houses in three years (compared to 269,988 in the five years of the 8th Plan, 1991-96). 117,173 homes for dalits and adivasis (compared to only 18,023 in the 8th Plan). 413,174 sanitary latrines (compared to 125,000 in the 8th Plan).[81]

 

These were a few of the tangible benefits. Production of these social goods did not come merely from allocation of funds. They also came from the immense “sweat equity” raised by the campaign. Old ideas of shramdaan – voluntary labour – came alive across Kerala as people enthused by the campaign gave their time and expertise to build roads, bridges and schools. Every rupee of the actual plan allocation was matched to some limited extent by the work of the people who saw its outcome as beneficial to them. But there were other developments – the new plans had investment priorities that are quite different from those in the 8th plan, which came from above (more interest in housing, drinking water, sanitation, animal husbandry, garden crops, minor irrigation); much more precise assessment of the needs of dalits and adivasis, both of whose strengths and weaknesses need special articulation; finally, the “one-size-fits-all logic of the past,” which had dominated planning, was now sidelined, with “significant interregional differences in the investment priorities of the local bodies.”[82]

Industrial growth rose to 9.91 per cent in the period following, although agriculture growth declined. This might not be directly attributable to the plans. Kerala’s economy is so structured by remittances from the Gulf that it is hard to disarticulate those fluctuations from any improvement through the PCDP.[83]

Not long into the PCDP, the Congress-led UDF felt that the CPI-M, in particular, had taken too much credit for the campaign. The Congress began, as K. P. Kannan put it, “a political attack on the people’s planning variant of the decentralization process.” The UDF called for an enquiry committee, which published a report that criticized the PCDP on grounds of corruption and mismanagement. Most of this was based on exaggerations and unfounded allegations. Certainly there were errors and there was some corruption – but to accuse the entire process of being a CPI-M scam seemed farfetched. But it broke the political consensus.[84] What was remarkable about this political attack was that the Congress party members at the grassroots level, who continued to share the commitment to participatory planning, did not share the ire of the UDF leadership. It was also the case that into the second year, the CPI-M had not been able to make political gains at the lower levels as a result of the campaign.[85] In other words, PCDP had major gains for working-class life and confidence, but it did not deliver political rewards to the LDF in the short-term. This did not matter to the UDF. What mattered was the danger of actual grassroots, working-class democracy. That had to be shut down.

When the Congress-led UDF came back to power in 2001, it began to undermine the institutions of the PCDP. Attendance in the gram sabhas declined, and the entire ethos disintegrated. Thomas Isaac, who was elected to the Kerala Assembly that year, told R. Krishnakumar, “Because of the arbitrary cuts in fund allocation, many local bodies are unable to implement the plans approved by the gram sabhas. Many elected representatives complain that they cannot face the gram sabha members because of this. The government is giving more importance to its officials over the elected representatives. Thus the government itself is dismantling the credibility of the local bodies before the people.”[86] It would have been too obvious if the UDF simply scrapped the entire apparatus. This they did not do. Instead they tried to shift the class basis of the gram sabhas and panchayats from being instruments of the working-class and peasantry to being complementary to the decentralized institutions of neo-liberal policy – to

fragment the people rather than unite them through struggle. Despite the promise of unity of the people of Kerala for social development, as E. M. S. Namboodiripad had hoped, the forty-five per cent/forty-five per cent divide widened.[87]

Few question the creativity of the campaign to decentralize governance. It enabled the Left Democratic Front to engage with the complex landscape of neo-liberalism from the standpoint of people’s needs. Without question, the campaign encouraged a great deal of inventive practice on how to develop regions of Kerala that suffered from joblessness. Hope was rekindled for a few years. What let the campaign down was the politics of the state, which remained divisive despite the good-faith devolution of funds to panchayats governed by all parties. New initiatives that resemble the campaign remain on the table. Their ability to draw in mass support is crucial to the creation of a genuine alternative to the onedimensional neo-liberal agenda to which the rest of the political class is committed.

CREATIVE STRUGGLES ACROSS INDIA

“Nandigram” placed a heavy penalty on the communist movement in India. When the Andhra Pradesh CPI-M conducted a brave and unrelenting campaign for comprehensive development and land rights, the local Congress politicians went for what became the general accusation across the country: “Dragging West Bengal into the campaign, they accused us of adopting double standards.”[88]

After 1991, as the impact of liberalisation struck the field workers and the factory workers, the unemployed and the slum-dwellers, the reaction came swift. There was the grief of farmer’s suicides – between 1995 and 2010, a quarter of a million dead.[89] There were the mass protests against encroachment of public land from the theft of the betel vineyards to Posco Steel in Orissa to the defence of farmland for a Special Economic Zone in the village of Bhatta Parsaul (Noida, UP). Every state in India has experienced unrest, as living standards for the many have deteriorated and as job prospects have remained stagnant. Journalists such as P. Sainath and Jaideep Hardikar document the way lives are torn apart to create values for the industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie, and for the multi-national and national firms that are linked to them. Both see the hammer of progress fall

on the adivasis, whose land is ground zero for exploitation, and on the dalits, whose field labour is now driven by unimaginable pressures. When faced with the deafness of a political class and the bulldozers at their land, or the foreman on their heads, writes Hardikar, “protest is their only resort.”[90]

But protest is not as commonplace as one imagines. In Madhya Pradesh, Hardikar encounters farmers who lost their land to the Bargi Dam. Each of the “oustees” has to break their back to earn a living – pulling rickshaws and being hired as domestic help. Many of them join the queues to work as day labourers. Hasanlal tells Hardikar, “Back in the villages, people would drink occasionally. But here, most of the migrants have become alcoholic.”[91] The occupants of Rani Taal would be familiar to Mohammed Ashraf, a day labourer in Delhi who told the journalist Aman Sethi, “When you first come here, there is a lot of hope, abhilasha. You think anything is possible, but slowly you realise, nothing will happen, and you can live the next five years just like the last three years, and everything will be the same. Wake up, work, eat, drink, sleep, and tomorrow it’s the same thing again.”[92] Resilience is certainly axiomatic to human lives. Nevertheless, the brutality of everyday life in today’s India should not exaggerate either the civility of social life or the potential for some kind of transformative politics. People like Hasanlal and Ashraf are buffeted by social insecurity – caught in the fragile membrane between legality and illegality, security and insecurity. Work is contingent and sometimes dangerous. Their neighbourhoods are often illegal settlements. The slum populations rely upon political patronage and so welcome the kind of political mafia that mimics the other mafia whose purpose is to traffic in illicit commodities (drugs, sex, weapons). Encounters in a Bombay slum led the journalist Katherine Boo to the unsettling conclusion about the ethics and politics of the poor,   Powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another … In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity stife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor

took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.[93]

 

Boo’s verdict about the slum-dwellers of Mumbai certainly rankles the liberal consciousness, which would necessarily blame the poor for turning on each other – but then be deeply anxious if the desired unity would threaten the power structure. Unity is of course not the natural course of action for the classes who do not control capital. The social order fragments social life, treating classes as individuals who bid desperately to sell their labour power in the marketplace. It is worse in a buyers’ market, where the masses of people find it torturously hard to find employment even for a day let alone for a career. Long-distance migration and long-daily commutes to seek tenuous jobs for low renumeration sets the bar for solidarity at a high level. “It is an arrangement that suits employers everywhere well,” writes journalist Siddhartha Deb, “ensuring that the workers will be too insecure and uprooted to ever mount organized protests against their conditions and wages. They are from distant regions, of no interest to local politicians seeking votes, and they are alienated from the local people by differences in language and culture.”[94]

In 2012, the CPI-M’s Prakash Karat assessed the impact that the neoliberal policies had had over the past two decades, including the rise of contract workers in the unorganised and organised sectors, the degradation of agricultural work, and the attenuation of the social sector. “It is necessary to concretely study the impact of the neo-liberal policies on different classes and sections of the people,” he wrote. This is precisely what the CPI-M and its mass organisations have been doing across the country, conducting surveys to uncover the hidden social relations and then build struggles around them. “The fight against neo-liberal polices can advance only when we take up the various local issues of the people,” he wrote, “and develop sustained struggles on their behalf.”[95] In districts across India, communist activists have thrown themselves at the small sparks of struggle that emerge, or try to kindle struggles in their own, small way. In May 2013, a thousand people organized by the local CPI-M unit in India’s southern most district of Kanyakumari (Tamil Nadu) blocked roads at twenty-eight places and courted arrest to call attention to high inflation, high unemployment and high incidence of corruption. In December of that year, in Kulgam, Jammu & Kashmir, at the other end of India, CPI-M activists demonstrated

against irregular power supply, dismal operation of the Public Distribution System (PDS) and scarcity of essential commodities and safe water. These are not bastions of the Left, and yet even here the Left activists go amongst the working-class and peasantry to engage them with creative tactics to lift their grievances from anomie to action. When workers movements grew in the 19th century and into the early 20th century, they concentrated their efforts on the organisation of trade unions in large factories, strategic sectors (such as transportation) and in the political fight for the nationalization of entire industrial sectors. Trade unions, Marx wrote in Value, Price and Profit (1865), protect workers from capital’s worst excesses, but then they are also necessary to build workers power to challenge capital politically. Trade unions, Marx said, “are not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady.”[96] Marx and the workers’ movement that adopted his science saw the factory as a strategic site to build power. Through trade unions, power was built at the site of production. These unions – including in India – became the school of the working-class, the leading edge of political militancy in society.[97] But with the demise of the old-style of factories and of trade unions, these schools are less influential than they were in the creation of a socialist culture in working-class communities.

In India, ninety per cent of the workforce is in the informal sector. This figure includes industrial workers, many of whom now work for subcontractors and not directly for the firm’s factory. Industry has been organized to make trade union politics very difficult. Unions cannot be rebuilt easily. Nonetheless, workers in various difficult circumstances have been bravely fighting. There are the workers of the Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar (Haryana) and of the Volvo Buses factory in Hosakote (Karnataka), the anganwadi workers of Gujarat and the ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers of Punjab. Harsh conditions with irregular contracts and low pay as well as with state authorities decidedly against them, the workers nonetheless have struck work and held protests to make small and important gains. Attempts for workers to form unions are treated as criminal actions. Maruti Suzuki’s Management Executive Officer S. Y. Siddiqui said in June 2011, “The problem at Manesar is not one of industrial relations. It is an issue of crime and militancy.” The firm would

not, he said, “tolerate any external affiliation of the union.”[98] In other words, the workers who had created their own union would not be allowed to find political allies amongst the national labour federations to help their fledgling struggle. Violence against union organisers along the GurgaonManesar-Dharuhera-Rewari stretch is mirrored in the Coimbatore-Chennai belt. The immanent violence in both these zones led to industrial actions that resulted in the death of managers – the 2012 murder of Awanish Kumar Dev at the Maruti Suzuki plant and the 2009 murder of Roy George of the Toyota-General Motors Plant in Coimbatore. Such violence is the outcome of the suffocation of worker power exemplified by the August 6, 2003 Supreme Court judgment on T. K. Rangarajan vs. Government of Tamil Nadu & Others – which suppressed strike actions. The general tenor of the courts matched the industrial lobbies. In 2009, after the uprisings in Coimbatore, Jayanta Davar, president of the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India, put it bluntly, “We can’t be a capitalist country that has socialist labour laws.”[99] State power has increasingly and straightforwardly put itself behind industry and against workers, making trade unionism and industrial action tantamount to criminality. If unions are on the backfoot, the old strategy of nationalization seems to have receded far into the background. Nationalization was a strategy to capture the investment of capital and turn it over to society and workers through public sector management. The global commodity chain – disarticulated production of the factory across many countries – has made nationalization almost impossible. In many cases, industrial plants no longer manufacture the entire final commodity – parts are made here, and parts are made there, with the various components assembled at a separate place. If a state government nationalizes one factory, it would not be able to capture the entire process but only a part of it. The nationalized factory would now at best be able to operate like a sub-contractor for global capital. Even if reservoirs of progressive nationalism were not depleted, the structural fragmentation of production has made this strategy of economic nationalism inert. Factory-based organisation and nationalization are not eternal strategies. They have been worn to the bone. Other ways to reach the working class in the informal sector are necessary, as are other ways to leverage worker power against the disarticulated production system.

Victorious capital has nonetheless not been able to vanquish the labour it hires. Suppressed wages, rising prices, and difficulty in gaining access to

basic needs creates the social basis for political unrest. Many of these struggles, however, have been at the point of consumption rather than the point of production. Worker housing built by factory owners or by the state no longer exist as they once did. In their place, the working-class now live largely in slums, where facilities for adequate survival are simply not available.[100] Where housing is built, it is not for families, with the expectation that single men and women will migrate to work – working for a few years before returning to their homes. In slums, entire families can live, but only barely. This is the reason why the fights over water and power, sanitation and safety take up the leisure time of India’s workers. It is in these zones that struggles break out at the level of popular frustration. The Left has been active in the politics of the slumlands – where the activism of women and young people has drawn in AIDWA and DYFI, as well as the trade unions and the left parties themselves. The politics of the slum-land was essential to the political victories in Venezuela and Bolivia – both countries where the fights over gas and water, the right to build settlements and the right to cheap public transportation provided activists with the opportunity to build local, militant organizations rooted in the slum-lands. In the Caracas barrios of 23 de Enero and Petare, the working-class that works in the informal sector created organizations to organize access to basic needs. These organizations operated first to bring Hugo Chavez to power and then remained in a conflicted relationship with the Bolivarian state. They demanded social goods and made sure that the state did not ignore them.[101]

What is most interesting in Bolivia and Venezuela is that it was veteran trade unionists who spearheaded the fights over basic goods. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, a US-based firm, Bechtel, took over the delivery of drinking water in 2002. They raised rates beyond the capacity of the city’s residents. The executive head of the Federation of Factory Workers, Oscar Olivera, was elected to lead the Coordinadora de la Defensa del Gas y Aqua, the movement for defence of gas and water delivery.[102] Olivera and the workers brought their expertise as trade union organizers into this working-class struggle – to defend their neighbourhoods and their livelihood. The Gas Wars, and then the Water Wars, were workers fights in a place where workers lives, where they already had a working-class community. It was this concentration of workers that allowed for their political consolidation. The 2002 Water War of Cochabamba created a

dynamic that linked the workers in cities to the workers in the countryside through the Movement for Socialism (MAS), led by Evo Morales, who had cut his teeth organizing coca farmers. MAS had close ties to the social movements in the countryside and the cities. It threw itself from the water wars and into the gas wars of 2003. Consistent protests alongside the building of social bases in the neighborhoods of workers pushed MAS to victory in the election of 2005.[103]

Workers movements might no longer grow only from the factory to the community; it might work the other way around. Workers are never only workers. They are also people, marked by community ties and gender, by the way they eat and the way they take their social pleasure. The divides amongst workers provide sufficient openings for Capital to break down the potential of united struggles. It is fear of disunity – and the legacy of Partition and communal riots – that had the Left insistent on united working class struggles to the detriment of close attention to caste, gender and religious hierarchies within working-class communities. But the people are fractured. It is part of their diversity and it is the mechanism of hierarchy. For example, in rural India, one of the most interesting features of the way in which politics works is that it does not run in a straight line with cultivators and landless labourers on one side and landowners and the state on the other. Fractures of caste and gender run deep, and are deepened in the agricultural crisis. Caste assertions emerge as one way that some landless labourers and cultivators have moved their agenda for dignity. This had been clear to the Kisan Sabha through its history in its practice. In 1987, Narendra Malussare of the Maharashtra Kisan Sabha recorded how the Sabha had formed a Bhoomiheen Suraksha Samiti (Protection of Landless Committee) to protect largely dalit and adivasi landholders from confiscation of their land by the state. The following year, under the auspices of the Samiti, the small holders and landless peasantry occupied six hundred acres of land.[104] Short of a decade later, in 1996, and in the thick of the neo-liberal policy impact on agriculture, M. V. Govindhan of Kerala told the All-India Agricultural Workers Union that they had to “mobilise more and more scheduled tribe and caste sections under our banner.” It was well-known to these delegates to the Union’s conference that the vast mass of the agricultural workers were dalits; the Union had not yet taken up their special grievances as the

demands of the Union itself.[105] The Union’s General Secretary, A. Vijayaraghavan, summarized the discussion on caste to say, “We should take up important issues like atrocities against scheduled castes and tribes, the struggle for house-sites, drinking water, lavatories, doing away with social disabilities of all kinds. So far, except in one or two states, we have failed to take up these issues as broad campaigns.”[106]

In Midnapur, West Bengal, land reforms and tenancy registration had had a major impact on the lives of the rural poor. But strikingly, the reforms and registration favoured men, those who worked the tiller, in the conventional phrase. Single women had little access to the land distribution, and since they did not have access to rural trades (carpentry, masonry), they suffered from the vagaries of wage work. The view that women did not use the plough was, as Jayoti Gupta put it, more a “social taboo rather than a physical inability.” Women did the hardest work in the fields, and merely because they had been forbidden in many places to use the plough they did not get rights to the land. Gupta’s close study in Midnapur uncovered something important. “This social handicap (of the plough) was used against strengthening the asset base of women,” she wrote. “It is only after the women’s organisation raised its voice and pressurised the government that provision was made to provide some land to the single women.”[107] The role of AIDWA here is underlined. If the mass organisation had not taken up the special issue of women agriculturalists, their grievance might have passed by unattended.[108] It was clear to the Agricultural Union’s A. Vijayaraghavan that while women comprise half the agricultural labour force “and have participated in our struggles, we have not been able to ensure equal wages for equal work on a countrywide basis or to deal with their specific problems as a priority.”

Vijayaraghavan had been pushed by the female delegates: K. Ramadevi (Andhra Pradesh), Bhuri Bai (Maharashtra), K. Leela (Kerala) and Meena Kumari (Punjab). Ramadevi pointed out, “Women took initiative in framing the wage demand, organising the strikes and in final discussion with the landlords. Even though the majority of the committee members in rural organisations are women, that is not reflected in mandal and district organisation, which is to be rectified.”[109] All these women who raised the issue of equal wages and leadership for women were also members of AIDWA. They brought their AIDWA assessment to their union

work, showing the power of the mass organisations in developing leadership and cross-fertilising movements.[110]

In 2003, the CPI-M Central Committee reviewed the work of the Kisan Sabha and the Agricultural Workers’ Union. The report opens with the admission that despite the rising agricultural distress neither the Sabha nor the Union has been able to grow. This “constituted one of the most important weaknesses of the democratic movement in the country.”[111] Why have these two mass fronts not been able to grow in this period? Two explanations are offered. The first is about organizational matters, since there remains confusion in the mass fronts over their relationship to the Communist Party. In some part of the country “Party decisions are mechanically imposed on mass organisations giving an impression that the mass organisations have no independent stature or existence.” This diminishes the democratic needs of the front, and alienates it from those who would like to fight against the attack on their class but would not necessarily like to do so as communists. The Sabha and the Union should be able to “rouse and activise its members from its own platform and earn the confidence of the masses. The true democratic functioning of the organisation alone can build class unity and develop democratic consciousness, which requires collective functioning at every level of the organisation.” Class unity is built on the ground, in struggle, against the landlords and the landlord-controlled state authorities. This review urged the mass organisations not to canalize this class unity into narrow political gain.[112]

The second reason for the weakness was that these mass fronts had failed to take up the tangible struggles of the people apart from questions of wages and land reform. Failure to address issues of caste and gender discrimination, the review found, “had contributed to the slow growth of the movement in many parts of the country.” Where these issues had been taken up, the Kisan Sabha and the Agricultural Workers’ Union had “been able to expand their influence among these sections.” What has held back the Sabha and the Union? Caste prejudice and patriarchal attitudes play a large role. In terms of caste, there is a genuine – but misplaced – worry that taking up dalit issues would alienate the other sections of the peasantry and weaken the union. “The hesitation to take up social issues,” the review concluded, “should be examined concretely in the states.”[113]

The previous year, in 2002, the CPI-M assessed the work of the trade union front, the CITU, and reached a similar conclusion. “Experience has shown that by taking up only economic issues based on class exploitation, an important dimension of the dalit problem is ignored. This alienates them from the general trade union movement.” Since dalits comprise a large section of the workers, it is self-defeating to disregard the most pressing issues for dalits – namely social suffocation. The same goes for issues of gender oppression. Trade unions had ignored the fight against dowry and had not taken seriously issues of sexual harassment. “Apart from adopting resolutions against caste oppression, the trade unions led by us have done little to educate the upper caste workers to shed caste prejudices,” noted the review. Struggles against caste and gender oppression are “part of the working class struggle against feudal, bourgeois and extra-economic forms of exploitation.”[114]

These fights, just as more conventional trade union fights, are part of the horizon of socialist struggle. This is the reason why the CPI-M has been an active participant in the temple entry movement in southern Tamil Nadu. Gender questions have come to the fore in Haryana, where the khap panchayat has re-emerged as a central locus to fight a restive population made so by the agricultural crisis and the new cultural identities unleashed over the past few decades. It is here too that the Left has led from the front, with AIDWA in the lead drawing in women to fight for their dignity alongside their livelihoods. The Left has to deepen its role in these sorts of “social” fights, because it is in these arenas that broad questions of rural power are being contested. To step away from this arena is to ignore the most important social struggles of our day, which are not merely about identity but always about dignity and survival, as well as the expansion of the imagination – the elements of socialism. One of the consistent self-critiques made by the communists in the course of their assessments of the work is that there is no translation of the struggles into electoral gain. There seems to be a general feeling that whether the Left is voted into office or not, it would continue to lift up the banner of these struggles. The struggles that the Left leads are not premised on the communists winning elections. The limitation of the Left to the level of social struggle has not occasioned the kind of debate that it perhaps should. What the Left has not been able to do is to make the case – within the limitations of bourgeois democracy – of why its delegates should be

voted to the houses of the people. Certainly the Left’s parliamentarians have been able to block initiatives that go against the interests of the workingclass and the peasantry. But what the Left has not been able to develop is a coherent narrative that motivates people to vote communist. There is no captivating sense that the Left is the future – that the Left can indeed take power and that only the Left can find solutions to the pressing problems of today. The compelling urgency to believe that the future is the arena of the Left is no longer in place. It has to be created not merely by the struggles in the present but by a more robust and confident assertion for the future. The remarkable struggles in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Delhi that I recount below would be given a major boost by an overarching narrative that these local struggles are part of a larger, inevitable tendency. The horizon of the Left remains in the midst of the present struggles. It will need to be stretched out into the future, to push aside the prevailing view that the future is the domain of the Right. This is what the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui imagined was the case in 1925,   What most clearly and obviously differentiates [the bourgeoisie and the proletariat] in this era is myth. The bourgeoisie no longer has myths. It has become incredulous, skeptical, nihilist. The reborn liberal myth aged too much. The proletariat has a myth: the social revolution. It moves towards that myth with a passionate and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms. The bourgeois intellectuals entertain themselves with a rationalist critique of the method, the theory, revolutionary technique. What misunderstanding! The strength of revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual power. It is the force of myth.[115]

 

Mariátegui then, strikingly, goes to his essay on Gandhi. In that essay he had pointed out that “revolutionary excitement” is a “religious emotion.”[116] A combination of sober analysis of the conjuncture is necessary, but this soberness should not demoralize a population that requires faith in the future. Religious thought is capable of this kind of emotion – and it is this that Mariátegui says should be imported into communism. Precisely what the communists have to invoke is the myth of the revolution, its inevitability and its justice. The revolution is the spell that the sorcerer conjurs up from the nether world, and can no longer control. It affirms life and provides a full alternative to the present. But

short of that myth are the smaller myths of governance – the Communists are incorruptible and decent, able to govern for the needs of the people rather than simply be the brake on a corrupt and indecent system. Broader horizons that were once the coin of the Left need to be minted once more. Elements of that myth remain among the supporters of the Left. Take the case of Santana Mondal, a 35-year old supporter of the Left Front from Hooghly district, West Bengal. Her nephew Pradip had been a polling agent for the CPI-M during the 2014 elections. After voting had taken place, three political activists of the Trinamul Congress visited Mondal’s home. They wanted her nephew but could not find him there. On 6 May, two days later, the men returned. They had come for retribution. They kidnapped Mondal, took her to a deserted place beat her savagely and made three deep cuts in her breasts. Doctors at the Walsh hospital in Sreerampore, the district headquarters, stitched up her wounds and saved her life. Still in pain, Mondal remembered refusing to budge when the men threatened her. “What will you do?” she asked them. “If you will burn down my house, I will sleep in the open. What will you do? You will kill us all, but how many will you kill? There are still many more who will hold the red flag.” Mondal is not a member of the CPI-M or of any other political party. She does, however, come from what is often called a “red flag family”. Her parents were landless field workers who struggled for land reforms and registry of tenancy rights. The scheduled castes  and the scheduled tribes of Hooghly provided support to the Left parties.   Mondal comes from a dalit family, which benefited from the land reforms of the 1980s. “My parents”, she told the CPI-M leader Brinda Karat, “got their land because of the red flag. The red flag gave them hope.” Santana Mondal is fearless and hopeful. From her hospital bed, in immense pain, she says, “Don’t worry about me. I know the days are coming when Trinamul goonda  (gangster) raj will end.” Santana Mondal’s hopefulness captures the myth of Communism. It will prevail; it is decent; it can govern; it will win office, and then stand aside as the working-class and peasantry claim power and property.

TAMIL NADU’S FIGHTS

AGAINST UNTOUCHABILITY

On June 30, 1997 Melavalavu panchayat head, K. Murugesan was on a bus to Dindigul with some of his associates. A gang of about twenty on the

same bus set upon Murugesan and his companions. The bus stopped. The killers chased the passengers off, and then systematically murdered six people – they then beheaded Murugesan and threw his head into a well.[117]

The previous year, the government had declared that the Melavalavu panchayat would be reserved for dalits. The local dominant caste, the Thevars, refused to accept this verdict. They prevented Murugesan from taking his office and conducting his duties. A police picket had tried to create a safe environment for the dalit leadership to run their panchayat. It was not possible. At stake was the power to lease twenty-five fish ponds (worth Rs. 10 lakh), among other economic opportunities. The dominant caste seemed unwilling to surrender this economic power to the dalits, and they, as Dalit Panthers leader Thirumavalavan put it, saw his victory as “an insult to their inherited superiority.”[118] The attack on Murugesan was a culmination of the refusal to allow for dalit equality. Protests broke out across the state, with dalit organisations calling for mass demonstrations and strikes. In Melavalavu, the dominant caste organisations retaliated with a social boycott of the dalits, hampering their limited employment opportunities. Many fled to Sivaganga and Madurai for work.[119] In 1999, AIDWA leader Valentine said in a speech, “Everyone is migrating to towns now, where caste is hidden to an extent and one can use one’s skill to obtain employment. But we cannot all go!”[120] In 2001, after a long struggle, the Courts found the killers guilty and sentenced them to life in prison. Meanwhile, as journalist S. Vishwanathan found, “in Melavalavu, the dalits continue to suffer from an undeclared social and economic boycott imposed by the caste Hindus.”[121]

Starting in 1995, the southern districts of Tamil Nadu became the battleground of a series of attacks by dominant castes (mainly Backward Castes) against dalits. These were battles raged as much against the assertion of dalits through the political system as they were about the shifts in economic power of the landowners. Not long after the judgment in the Melavalavu case, the Tamil Nadu State Committee of the CPI-M commissioned a set of district-level studies conducted by party workers on the caste conflicts and atrocities. What these studies found was that “the incidence of untouchability was the root cause of these caste conflicts.”[122] The CPI-M followed the work of AIDWA, which already had (along with the Kisan Sabha, the Agricultural Workers’ Union and the DYFI) been in the fight against caste atrocities. In the late 1990s, AIDWA conducted its

own surveys and conferences and found that only after sustained discussions would dalit members assert the importance of an antiuntouchability struggle. One of the atrocities is that tea-shops use two glasses to serve their customers – one glass for dalits, and one glass for others. AIDWA conducted a survey of this two-glass system in thirty villages of Dindigul district. In twenty-five villages, AIDWA found this system intact. Women in these villages, organized by AIDWA, campaigned against the two-glass policy. Their pressure ended the custom in many villages. “Caste feelings still run deep and other methods of exclusion have been found like disposable glasses,” noted an AIDWA report. Nevertheless, the “agitation had a good impact in the area and gave confidence to dalit women including our activists.”[123] Confidence in sustained struggle was the main outcome of the campaign, although it was important to put the teashop owners and the social hierarchies on the defensive. AIDWA and CPI-M leader U. Vasuki told Elisabeth Armstrong in 2006 that one of the problems within AIDWA was that dalit leaders did not drive the agenda in the organisation. Dalit women rose to leadership in localities but did not rise beyond that. “Previously our women activists will go to many places and take up issues, conclude them, like civic issues and all that,” said Vasuki. “So Dalit women will thank them and they’ll happily come away.”[124] It was in these campaigns that this paternalist model fell away, and dalit members became leaders of AIDWA. That energy would transfer to the CPI-M and to other mass organisations. A frontal assault on untouchability was necessary. So too was there an obligation to train toward leadership dalit members of the mass fronts and the CPI-M. The CPI-M decided to hold district level conferences on untouchability and caste hierarchy. Twenty of the thirty-four districts held such conferences, with ten districts holding dalit women’s conferences as well. This was the start of the CPI-M’s mass intervention against untouchability and caste violence, although the mass fronts had already been involved in these battles for some years previously. To say that these conferences were the “start” of the CPI-M’s intervention is misleading. In 2005, Ravikumar wrote, “There has been a belated dawning of caste consciousness on the part of Marxists in India,” and that, more specifically, “the left in Tamil Nadu has not taken any notable initiative to contain caste clashes.”[125] The latter statement – that the Left had taken no “notable initiative” against caste violence – is belied by

ample evidence to the contrary.[126] Through the 1990s, as caste violence rose, the CPI-M and the CPI had worked in villages and towns in coordination with dalit groups to defend dalit communities. Much of this work was outside the glare of the media, whether in the 1999 fight around the Cuddalore massacre or the 2000 fight around the Tirunelveli massacre – these were then defensive fights; that would change in time.[127]

The former statement, that Marxists have eschewed caste and the consciousness of caste is astounding. In 1922, at the opening of the communist movement, M. N. Roy wrote of caste as the “heritage of the old society.” Without removing the practices that prolong untouchability, Roy wrote, “no amount of ethical propagandizing will remove this prejudice.” Bourgeois nationalism’s social reform agenda was, to Roy, “sentimental humanitarian cant.”[128] The CPI’s Draft Platform of Action (1930) called for the “complete abolition of slavery, the caste system and inequality in all forms (social, culture, etc.).” If caste roots itself in the political economy of India – with landlords able to exert extra-economic pressure on their workers, for instance – then a cultural or social struggle would not be adequate. What was necessary was a struggle to uproot the economic roots of caste. In 1979, CPI-M leader B. T. Ranadive wrote that there was “no question of replacing caste by class, refusing to recognize the caste distinctions. It is a question of addressing yourself to the concrete reality which combined the growing formation of an exploited class with the existence of caste distinctions – the formation process of the class.”[129] The correctness of this view did not mean that the correct tactics emerged out of it. For decades the communists would not organize directly on the platform of caste, to organize a dalit front, for fear of fracturing the tenuous alliances of workers and peasants. “It has to be admitted,” Ranadive wrote, “that there has been a certain neglect in the ideological struggles against caste.”[130]

In the early 2000s, the CPI-M conducted surveys in almost two thousand villages in twenty of Tamil Nadu’s districts. Evidence of untouchability was everywhere to be seen. Walls had been built to separate the dalit parts of the village from those of dominant castes. Dalits could not worship in the temples, nor – like Murugesan – take their panchayat leadership posts. Atrocious violence against dalits seemed commonplace and the terrible labour forced on the Arunthathiyar community (to carry human excrement) seemed premised on this violence. In rural Tamil Nadu, the principle grievance of the working class and peasantry was rooted in the

social atrocity of untouchability. It had to be tackled head on. It helped that in Tamil Nadu a third of the ninety thousand CPI-M members come from dalit backgrounds: the centrality of the dalit grievances came from within the party and out of collective outrage. The CPI-M cadre across the state got involved in a number of local struggles – to stop the prohibition against dalits walking on certain roads, to ride bicycles, to wear sandals, to wear a certain kind of dhoti, to wear a thin-line (M. G. Ramachandran-style) moustache, to use the same kind of glass in a tea shop, to bathe in public baths, and to light firecrackers. The pettiness of the prohibitions belies the seriousness with which they are maintained. Years of preparation for the party went into these small struggles – cadre had to learn how to engage in anti-untouchability struggle, how to understand that the caste struggle was related to the class struggle. It was clear to the party activists that these relations were organic.[131] In 2006, the CPI-M held an All-India Convention on Problems of Dalits, attended by left and social democratic groups. The Convention’s final resolution – “A Marxist Perspective on Caste Oppression” – suggested that the way forward would be to fight directly against the symptoms of caste domination (untouchability) and to fight against the roots of caste domination (the social relations of Indian capitalism). It was no longer enough to believe that a united fight for land reforms, for instance, would be sufficient solvent against caste oppression. The fight had to be for land reforms as well as against the two-cup system in tea-shops.[132]

In May 2007, after years of preparation, the CPI-M activists launched the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front (TNUEF). All the CPI-M mass fronts and associated trade unions got involved with its work, as did sixty-three dalit organisations across Tamil Nadu.[133] The TNUEF continued with the survey as a means to document atrocities. In March 2008, TNUEF activists in Periyar taluk found a wall in the village of Uthapuram that had been erected in 1989 during the caste clashes. The ten-foot wall prevented dalits from access to large parts of the village. Local protests led by the TNUEF startled the district, with the CPI-M leading a protest in May to the office of the Periyar Revenue Division to demand that the wall be demolished.[134] State-wide protests followed, raising the temperature. Pressure on the state government finally drew a response and on May 6, with a hundred police officers on the scene, the wall was brought down. The next day at the site of the fallen wall, CPI-M General Secretary Prakash

Karat said, “May 6 is a historic day for Uthapuram, Tamil Nadu and India as the wall of shame, which divided people for more than 18 years, and which symbolised caste oppression and discrimination, was razed down. This is the first step towards demolishing the wall completely.” This was TNUEF’s first major victory. It would soon move outward, as dalits identified walls in their village (the “next Uthapuram” was the siren). TNUEF grew in strength as it took up the issue of prevention of free movement of all people. But even in Uthapuram, the struggle was not over. The dominant castes tried to block the roads by throwing household trash and stones to build unofficial barricades.[135]

Apart from bringing down “untouchability walls,” the TNUEF fought for the integrity of the dalit reserved seats in panchayats, as well as fought to break the barriers for temple entry of dalits. It would be jejune to see temple entry as somehow the promotion of Hinduism. The fight is about dignity and rights, and not religion alone. On November 11, 2011 after a long struggle, the dalits of Uthapuram entered the village temple. “We are happy to enter temple after a long time,” said Sankaralingam.[136] TNUEF president P. Sampath said, that Uthapuram was no longer a symbol of untouchability. “It has become the symbol of the eradication of untouchability,” he said.[137] TNUEF took up a host of issues related to dignity – right to cremation, right to a home site, right to install a statue of Dr. Ambedkar, right to a cup of tea. The police typically arrest the Left activists or sit back when vigilante groups attack the TNUEF. These are not simple struggles; they cut to the heart of power, privilege and property.

The most painful struggle has been for justice for the Arunthathiyar community, the truly oppressed of all castes in Tamil Nadu. Various Arunthathiyar organisations (such as the Tamizhaga Arunthathiyar Youth Front and the Democratic Front) have been fighting for their civil rights for the past quarter century. They work in the most difficult occupation – landless field labourers, cobblers, servants and most egregiously cremation ground workers and sewage cleaners (including the carrying of human excrement on the head). The latter occupation defines their social status. Despite being abolished, head carrying of excrement continues. During the first innings of the new nation, from 1947 to 1991, the State commissioned several reports (1949, 1957, 1965, 1968, 1976) that came to the same conclusion: scavenging continues, it is barbaric, and so the State must act to end it. The Barve Commission (1949) ended with a final word to the

scavengers. The practice continues, it argued, “because the scavengers have submissively put up with its dirty nature and never raised their voices against it, as if it were ordained for them by birth.” History is cheapened when India’s first Commission on the problem (chaired by a Brahmin no less) turned the onus of scavenging onto the scavenger. It is your problem, the government suggested, because you do not refuse to do this job. The silence on the millennia of struggle against Brahmanism, and the obliviousness to the political economy of scavenging reduces the seriousness of the Commission’s recommendations dramatically.[138] From on high, the Commission then propounded, “But they should know that, as human beings and as equal citizens of free India, they have a right to insist that the condition of scavenging work shall be such, that it should be capable of being done by any self-respecting person.”[139] This is precisely what the Arunthathiyar organisations did without success, and, crucially, without allies. On June 12, 2007, about twenty thousand people associated with the Arunthathiyar organisation, the TNUEF and the Left joined a rally to demand rights for the community. Activists went into fifteen of Tamil Nadu’s districts to make their demands clear. The state government, in response, appointed the Janardhan Commission, which recommended reservation in jobs and education for the Arunthathiyars. This has given buoyancy to the struggles of the Arunthathiyars, who continue to work with the Left on a variety of direct actions across the state. Contradictions remain to be tackled. In its ground-level work, AIDWA activists found a serious problem of inter-dalit rape, with Arunthathiyar women sexually assaulted and raped by men of other dalit sub-categories. The Arunthathiyar women in AIDWA wanted a specific struggle on their behalf.[140] When TNUEF was formed, a rally was called but it did not directly address this miserable history of inter-dalit sexual assault. The CPI-M organised Arunthathiyar Conventions for Right to Life across the state, with high participation rates – five thousand participants in Dindigul to four thousand participants in Virudhunagar. Twenty thousand people from the Arunthathiyar community marched alongside the CPI-M to the Tamil Nadu State Secretariat to demand an end to the atrocities against the community, including the demeaning and enforced nature of sanitation work and the routine violence against the community.[141]

In 2013, activists found that in Vadugapatti in Madurai district, dalits had to carry their shoes rather than wear them in sight of caste Hindus. The government came in and filed cases against people who had violently reacted to a young dalit boy who wore his slippers. Everyone suggested that this incident was an aberration. But the matter was deeper than this. M. Thangaraj of the TNUEF found that the ban on shoes has to be seen as part of a series of discriminations, including denial of worship and the twotumbler system in tea-shops. Thangaraj found that these discriminatory prohibitions had deep roots in the local political economy. “As many as 120 brick kilns are located in Usilampatti and Chellampatti panchayat unions. They are owned by caste Hindus,” reported Thangaraj. “Almost ninety per cent of the workers involved in brick-making are dalits brought from the western and northern districts of Tamil Nadu. Most of them are treated as bonded labourers.”[142] The TNUEF has taken up the issue of the shoes. But it knows that the fight over shoes will have to go to the root of the problem, the virtual slavery of the workers in the brick kilns. The movement against untouchability will perforce lead from social discrimination to economic power as long as the theory that drives the protests remains clear, as it has. In May 2007, when TNUEF made its first appearance, the CPI-M published a set of leaflets with the titles such as “Marxists in Eradication of Untouchability Struggle!” and “We are coming.” And so they came.

ANDHRA PRADESH’S LONG MARCH

FOR LAND REFORM

In 1996, the government of Andhra Pradesh and the World Bank created the Andhra Pradesh Economic Restructuring Project. Two years later, a World Bank report laid out the logic of the Project. The state’s development programme had been unable to deliver essential infrastructure and social services. Andhra Pradesh had spent an average of eighteen per cent of its gross state domestic product on infrastructure, “not excessive,” noted the report, but the funds have been “insufficiently oriented toward development.” Andhra Pradesh would not be able to build this infrastructure on its own, or fund it. What it required was private assistance and of course “considerable improvements” in public finances.[143] By “improvements” the World Bank meant cut-backs in public sector salaries and in subsidies for social services (such as food and electricity). The

slashing of public sector salaries meant that highly qualified people would be drawn away from public sector employment to the more generously paying private sector. Cuts in social services (and the rice/electricity subsidy) would of course be catastrophic for the public. The World Bank austerity regime followed a host of Andhra Pradesh government commissions, such as the Hiten Bhaya Committee on Privatisation (1995). These Andhra Pradesh commissions provided the government of Chandrababu Naidu with the opportunity to suggest that austerity had been democratically generated and was not a World Bank enforced project. Naidu fashioned himself as the CEO of his state, a friend of Bill Clinton, Thomas Friedman and Globalisation’s smart set. All isms are dead, proclaimed Naidu, except Tourism.[144]

In February 1999, Naidu and the World Bank signed an agreement for Rs. 40 billion (US $880 million) to come in five installments – if the government was willing to follow the agenda, including a fifteen per cent increase in annual power rates. Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh loomed. The power rate hike would destroy him. The media built him up as the Lee Kwan Yew of Andhra Pradesh. Time knew what was at stake. “The outcome of the election won’t just determine the fate of Naidu’s government,” senior journalist Maseeh Rahman wrote in Time, “it is also being seen as a referendum on India’s ability to pursue economic reform.”[145] A few months later, Time anointed Naidu as South Asian of the Year with Aparisim “Bobby” Ghosh, extolling him as “the subcontinent’s most visionary politician. In just five years, he has turned an impoverished, rural backwater into India’s new information-technology hub (Bye-bye Bangalore, Hello Hyderabad!).”[146] The World Bank also knew the stakes of the outcome. It allowed the Andhra Pradesh government to defer the “reforms” till after the elections.[147] Journalists enamoured of the “reforms” failed to do the due diligence expected of them. Few went into the “impoverished, rural backwaters” that persisted and expanded – Andhra Pradesh’s social indicators were abhorrent and the “reforms” seemed only to bring more social misery. Thirty per cent of its seventy-three million residents lived below the poverty line. The literacy rate hovered at forty-four per cent, far below nearby Kerala. The rate of malnutrition among children up to six years old was about thirty per cent, and the infant mortality rate was 73 per thousand live births. For the years since full-bore liberalisation in Andhra Pradesh, P. Sainath reports,

there is “evidence of farmers committing suicide in large numbers.” In 1996-97, in a few districts in the state, four hundred farmers killed themselves “mainly because they were too burdened in debt and unable to feed their families.” In Ananthpur, one of Andhra Pradesh’s districts, “1,826 people, mainly farmers with very smallholdings of two acres or less, committed suicide between 1997 and 2000.”[148] The World Bank was not blind to rural poverty – in 2000 it started the Andhra Pradesh District Poverty Initiatives Project. Although this was more an exercise in the creation of a small-scale World Bank type NGOs rather than large-scale mass democratization, as was attempted in Kerala.[149]

Few journalists, as well, investigated the relationship of the Naidu government and the World Bank. Right from 1996, the CPI-M used every resource possible to dig up the secret documents and the hidden agreements, and exposed all of them. Two documents, in particular, highlighted how the Naidu government was complicit in the World Bank agenda, including coordination of the politics of the release of information and the creation of the austerity regime.[150] “India cannot afford to lose [Naidu],” wrote the World Bank briefer in 2000. There is a need to reinforce “the message that the reforms are not anti-poor, and that the Bank is in fact on the side of the poor.”[151] The Bank and Naidu have a close partnership, the World Bank acknowledged, with Andhra Pradesh “known as the India’s first reforming state.” This was something that pleased the Bank, although the partnership had over three years “become a political liability for Naidu.”[152] Afraid of the stigma of World Bank induced “adjustments,” Naidu asked for some respite. “A key concern of Naidu’s government,” the Bank noted in 2000, “is to balance the ‘pain’ of adjustment with visible attempts to deal with poverty and other social issues.”[153] In 1998, the CPI-M published a book with all the relevant World Bank-Naidu government communications till then, with a version in English and another in Telugu.[154] With a media unwilling to ask the basic questions, it was left to the communists to do their job.

In several electoral districts across India, the communists have considerable votes, but not sufficient support to win seats to the state assemblies. It is this percentage that the CPI and the CPI-M have been able to barter with the lesser evils of this or that political party to gain one or two seats for the communist bloc in the various state assemblies. In 1999, in the

Andhra Pradesh assembly, the CPI-M delegates came in armed with the documents to raise a fuss about the “reforms.” The Left built a bloc, drawing in some opposition parties, to halt the passage of the Andhra Pradesh Electricity Reform Bill. Power sector employees went on strike, the Left campaigned in the streets. Using the methods of deceit, the Naidu government had the Left representatives suspended from the House and passed the bill. The electoral arrangements are controversial in the Left because it means having to ally with parties that have only a hair-breath of difference in policy with that of the party in power. Some believe that these alliances draw the Left deeper and deeper into the morass of bourgeois politics. K. Balagopal, for instance, suggested that “in the matter of electoral alliances [the CPI-M] follows no principles (except that it will not join with the BJP).”[155] Others believe that any and all opportunities should be taken to trouble those who wield power and property. After all, the use of the Assembly in 2000 proved that a few of these tactical alliances can get one close enough to power where a ruckus can expose the machinations of the powerful. On June 2, 2000, as the government felt the hot breath of anger from the public, the Communists formed a unity platform that included nine leftwing organisations. They went forward with an innovative campaign that included hunger strikes, long marches, a people’s ballot held across the state to vote on the tariff hike, a Bijli Bandh by traders to shut off their lights in their shops, and direct action against a World Bank seminar on the “reforms” (on June 23) and against the State Assembly (on August 28). The police response to the August 28 demonstration was harsh. AIDWA’s detachment came under severe attack. Mamata, an AIDWA member, recalled, “The male police pulled my kurta right up and tore it. I was lifted by them and thrown on the [barbed] wire [fence].” Devi reported, “The [police] men surrounded me and started pulling my clothes. I protested. They used filthy language and said we will teach you to come to demonstrations and tore my kurta and pulled by salwar.”[156] At this demonstration, as in others, there was no “empowerment of women” – a favourite World Bank and Naidu phrase. AIDWA’s Brinda Karat and Pramila Pandhe described the situation,   The policemen also called for the women police and shouted at them to start beating up the women, which they did. All the while the most filthy, sexist, abusive language was

used by the police against the women. They were referred to as sluts, prostitutes, bitches; obscene gestures were made. When the protestors still did not leave the site the male police resorted to repeated cane charges in which the women demonstrators were specifically targeted. This was immediately followed by water cannoning and teargas shells being fired. Seeing the police brutality against women, Communist leader Ramakrishna, who was present, strongly protested and tried to save some of the women. The police caught him and beat him mercilessly on his head repeatedly. He is now in the intensive care unit of the Apollo Hospital where he is in a coma fighting death [Ramakrishna survived].[157]

 

During the entire campaign, the police lathi-charged the demonstrators one hundred and fifty-eight times, arresting more than twenty thousand protestors.[158] On August 28, the police killed two people, one a CPI-M cadre and the other a Congress member. The story of the CPI-M cadre, Vishnu Vardha Reddy, age 23, is emblematic of the crisis that had provoked this struggle and of the type of person who would become a communist militant. His mother, Durgamma said of him,   Vishnu was a gentle boy. He was working in a factory called Aquapure earning about Rs. 1500 rupees a month. We come from Tufran village of Medak district where we have a little land. We had to come to Hyderabad to stay with Vishnu as my only other son Anji Reddy who was older than Vishnu was killed in a traffic accident a month and a half ago. I do not know whether it was an accident or whether he committed suicide. He was very disturbed. He had taken a loan of a lakh of rupees from the moneylender in the village to buy a pump. But the ground water level in our village is very low. The richer people including our neighbour have a more powerful pump at 225 feet, which pulls all the water. My elder son had to dig twice to get the water but the pump burned. He said he was ruined. One day he had gone out for some work. Only his dead body came back. He left behind his wife and two little children. We could not stay in the village because the moneylender wanted the money. So we came to Vishnu. He used to work very hard and then he used to do work for the other workers. He used to tell me ‘we should do good work for the people.’ On August 28th he went as usual. I did not know that he was going for a demonstration. But later some people came to us and said ‘Amma come quickly your son is hurt.’ But he was not hurt. He was dead. They killed him, they killed my gentle son.

 

The struggle did not die that day. It would morph. The example of what the CPI-M’s Raghavulu called the “visual forms” of the campaign – the People’s Ballot and the Bijli Bandh – had taught the left to use innovative methods that drew in people.[159] There was one major limitation – when the electricity workers went on strike, the people did not adequately come to their defence, and when the people came onto the streets the unions had an inadequate showing.[160] The next stage of the movement would take this limitation in hand. The assessment of the communists at the aftermath of this major struggle was to go to the people on a sustained basis to fight for the social welfare provisions that had been threatened by the “reforms.” Seventy per cent of the state’s population lived in rural areas, where the hammer of neoliberalism had fallen hardest against dalits, adivasis and women. One study found that ninety per cent of those rural workers in most severe economic distress were dalits and adivasis, with the feminisation of the labour force as a general trend since the 1990s.[161] The CPI-M organised village conferences, identified immediate problems to be tackled, mobilized people around these issues and pursue them on a consistent basis. From May 2002 into 2003, these village mandals drew in all the party mass fronts – Agricultural Workers’ Union, AIDWA, CITU, DYFI, the Rythu Sangham (peasant unions), SFI, and the Struggle Committee Against Caste Discrimination. They took up pressing issues such as the impact of the drought of 2001-04, the fight against free labour for sanitation, the fight for abbatoir users and house sites, for farmers of Anantapur and handloom weavers of Hindupur, acqua farmers of Nellore and farmers of Prakasam. It was a vibrant mass campaign in rural Andhra Pradesh.

Just as the CPI-M moved into the rural hamlets, it also went into the urban slums.[162] Drawing on the long-standing work of the mass organisations, the CPI-M worked amongst the largely unorganised workers of the state. Consumer fights had a priority here, as the working-class in the cities had great difficulty accessing education for their children, power and water for their homes and dignity for their communities. The bare essence of life had to be fought for, struggles long familiar to the mass organisations, who had already created networks in Andhra Pradesh’s slums as a consequence of such campaigns. The nature of the fights went beyond demands for water and power. In the thick of those struggles, the CITU was able to form unions in the unorganised sector. As the Andhra Pradesh CPI-

M’s state report from 2005 put it, “Contributing to the effort on the problem of residential areas should be an important part in the trade union work. It is necessary for strengthening the trade union sector also.”[163] This is an echo of the kind of politics that had begun to emerge on the other side of the planet, in Bolivia’s city of Cochabamba. Social distress in the state rose to high levels. It was not enough to raise the issues. The CPI-M had to provide direct assistance to the people. In Mahbubnagar, the CPI-M launched a food centre, to distribute ganji (gruel). Soon two hundred centres had to be created by the Left (and a few by the Congress), each serving about three hundred people per day. P. Sainath, who covered this story over the years, reported in 2003 that Naidu’s party, the Congress and even the Hindu Right had been put under moral and political pressure to donate money to these Left-run ganjicentres. One local journalist told Sainath, “It’s unique. At least this crisis has brought some people from these warring forces together. Maybe silently and on the sly, but it’s happening. After all, anyone who has eyes can see the hunger.” The Vishwa Hindu Parishad State President G. Pulla Reddy called the CPI-M to donate money. He sent a check for Rs. 50,116.[164]

Long and sustained preparation across the state would be tested in what the CPI-M’s Raghavulu called a kind of “visual campaign,” the long marches (padyatra) across the state to link local struggles to each other and to raise the banner against the “reforms.” Across 2003, CPI-M members walked their districts – in Khammam, a group led by the district secretary Veerabhadram walked 2,600 kilometers over a hundred days, going through 1,125 villages to hold 1,324 meetings. It was a massive undertaking. Each year subsequently, the CPI-M has tried to link the local work with these padyatras, including through cities (as in the long march through Hyderabad in 2012 that was attacked by the Majlis e Ittehad ul Muslimeem cadres, threatened by the challenge to their authority in the old city). What is fascinating is that the CPI-M padyatras were soon taken up by the bourgeois parties, with the Congress’ Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy now moving left and taking up issues raised by the Left through his padyatra. When Naidu lost power, he too tacked left and started a padyatra. For a few years, the Left had been able to shape the debates in the state through this kind of sustained activism. General strikes followed, as did continuous mobilization against the “reforms.”

By 2012, the Andhra Pradesh State Committee of the CPI-M looked back at a decade of hard work. “Our prestige has gone up. Our contacts widened. Despite this, the people mobilised in these struggles could not be consolidated politically.”[165] This was an important assessment – the struggles had provided political dividends, although not so in the electoral realm. More had to be done. In October, a thousand CPI-M cadre conducted a three hundred kilometre-long march (Sagu Neeti Sadhana Maha Rytu Padyatra) to push for completion of a new, massive public irrigation project. These struggles continue, against immense odds – with the entire political establishment arrayed against them except to seize their popularity for electoral gain. These powerful struggles came upon a wall raised by the bourgeois parties in 2010, when the question of the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh to create Telangana State returned to the table. Popular resistance to the “reforms” and for a more people centered development floundered in the face of this renewed agitation for the division of the state, intensifying with the February 2011 noncooperation movement that ran for sixteen days. The CPI-M, which adheres to the policy of the linguistic division of states, took the view that Telangana’s development can take place within the administrative unity of Andhra Pradesh.[166] In a 2005 note to the central government, the CPI-M acknowledged that Telangana had been historically underdeveloped but said that division of the state would not be a necessary solution. An agenda for actual development would need to include: completion of irrigation projects, land reform, dalit and adivasi liberation, and minority rights.[167] The CPI-M’s position, however correct, went against the tide in the districts that would comprise Telangana (places where the Left had grown over the course of the previous decade – Khammam, Mahbubnagar, Medak, and so on). A frenetic urgency for division swept the unity that had been built by the Left against the “reforms.” Three lessons emerged for the CPI-M from the Andhra Pradesh work, which would of course be important in the two new states (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana). The first was a positive lesson, which is that in most of these struggles women comprised eighty percent of the participants. “The women registered militant participation in the struggles,” the CPI-M state committee noted in 2008, “and showed exemplary courage and confidence.” The second lesson was that the communists needed to put additional resources toward the work of building a mass party. This was so

in the urban slums in particular. “Efforts to allocate the required cadre and rallying the poor in the urban areas are yielding positive results.” The third lesson was about patient and consistent work. Because of erratic attention “the struggle committees and movement committees could not be formed in most slums and villages. Even where these committees were constituted,” the state committee noted, “they failed to function effectively during movements. The neglect shown towards building grassroots level organizational networks was a serious lapse in the movements and struggles conducted by us.”[168]

There is something infectious about the militancy in Andhra Pradesh, as well as the intense self-criticism of the militants who seem restless on their long marches and their entry into new slums. There is also a long history of innovation in the communist movement. During the Telangana uprising of the 1940s, Mallu Swarajyam was a young communist militant. She took the old genre of the cradle song (vuyyalu) and transformed it into radical culture. No longer did mothers only sing the traditional songs to their children. They now sang with Swarajyam about landlords who refused to let peasant mothers breastfeed their children, requiring them to go out into the fields. The landlords sets his thugs to grab the mother’s breasts and empty them of milk as her child starves. “Who is this dora [lord]?” the women sing, “Whose land is this? There is the Sangham to the East: go and call its people here. Abandon your ploughs and join me.”[169] From these songs emerged the mahila dalams, the armed women’s fighting units. It is out of this history of cultural and political innovation that the Left in Andhra Pradesh continues to draw.

HARYANA’S BATTLES AGAINST PATRIARCHY

In 2000, the khap panchayat of village Jondhi assembled to judge the threeyear old marriage of Ashish and Darshana. The khap is a local authority saturated with traditional might, male dominance and ruling class power. Nothing in the khap is democratic. That day the “clan elders” decided that the families of Ashish and Darshana had broken a convention that prevented marriage between their respective gotras (lineage groups). The khap panchayat declared them to be brother and sister, forced his family to accept her as a daughter and then arrange her marriage to someone else. That Ashish and Darshana had a son together was of no consequence to the

khap panchayat. Her family was forbidden to have contact with their caste fellows, and his family was expelled from the village. It was a harsh judgment.[170]

A delegation from AIDWA went to the village, and met with the head of the khap panchayat. What he told them, AIDWA leader Jagmati Sangwan recounted, startled them,   His response was an eye opener for the deep thought and understanding it gave us of the mentality that foments such heinous crimes. We were taken aback at his categorical statement that this was a result of the seed that Nehru had sown by giving property rights to women/daughters. We realized that this was not a stray incident, but the result of organized thinking and opposition to democratic rights for women.[171]

 

The linkage between property rights, land relations, women’s honour, community honour and custom and sexual rights tumbled out into the open. AIDWA had, as Elisabeth Armstrong shows in her study of the organisation, prepared itself theoretically for the convulsions in India around gender, caste and class oppression – the “triple burden,” as AIDWA put it. The agricultural crisis put intense pressure on cultivators, with the deepest problems among landless agricultural workers – most of whom are dalits, with a majority being dalit women. Dominant castes own about eighty-six per cent of the arable land in Haryana, while dalits hold less than two per cent of the arable land (despite being a fifth of the population of the state). Not content with their hold over the arable land, the dominant caste cultivators have taken to seizure of the common (shamilat) land. As economic pressures fall on these cultivators, they have in turn pushed against their workers. Attacks on workers have come not through the whip of unemployment, but through the revival of older forms of social domination – violence against dalits and women as well as social boycotts (nakabandi) to control labour that is both unwilling to work in the deteriorated conditions and has aspired to new horizons. Complex hierarchies within and across castes and classes made any simple and formulaic analysis of the problem in Haryana impossible. What AIDWA required was a close study of the concrete conditions, and the production of a strategy to tackle local power dynamics.

The intensity of violence against dalits and women since the 1990s in the northern belt that runs from Haryana through Uttar Pradesh into Bihar is

as spectacular as that of the southern belt in Tamil Nadu. AIDWA and other groups documented one atrocity after another. These documents detailed the virulent violence against oppressed castes, the killing of young women in the name of community or family honour, the terrible violence against the married couples as well as against the families who tolerate inter-caste marriage, the increased evidence of female foeticide, and the re-appearance of bonded labour (siri). Social toxicity runs at a high level along this belt, which goes from a murder of a young woman here to a communal riot there. For example, Muzaffarnagar district in adjoining Uttar Pradesh was the scene of a terrible riot in 2013, largely engineered by the forces of Hindutva and given impunity by the BJP. This district is home to an extraordinarily high number of “honour killings” and “revenge rapes.”[172] The “revenge rape” takes place when dominant caste men accuse oppressed caste men of having sex with dominant caste women – and then, in “revenge,” the dominant caste men rape oppressed caste women.[173] The large social collapses (the Muzaffarnagar riot of 2013) emerge out of the chrysalis of the everyday violence that has become almost normal in this long belt. Political activism that does not register the centrality of this violence against dalits and women would blind itself to the suffering of the peasantry and the working-class. At the same time, a politics that remains focused only on the caste and gender violence would fail to see the articulation of these social hierarchies with the material facts of social domination – such as the decline in agrarian fortunes and the intense pressure from dominant caste landowners on their field labour. One cannot be fought without tackling the other. During the course of its innovative political work in the 1990s, AIDWA produced a theory to deal with the complexity of their social and political reality. AIDWA called this “inter-sectional organizing.” What it meant, for instance, is that the onus of fighting against caste violence cannot only be on dalits, or that the burden of fighting against gender violence cannot only be on women. Some dominant caste women benefitted from the violence against dalit women, while dalit men participated in violence against dalit women. It was incumbent upon AIDWA to move an agenda that did not stray from the reality of caste violence, but that brought different “sections” into a coalition where they fought to end the oppression faced specially by one section. This was not the kind of organizing that suggested that all social identities had to be

subsumed under a unifying class agenda. On the other hand, this was not a politics that allowed the social identities to remain unchallenged. One came to the fight as a dalit woman or an upper caste woman, but would leave as a socialist. In 2001, Bachan Singh left farm owner Sukhdev Singh’s farm without permission. When he returned, Sukhdev Singh bound Bachan Singh and whipped him. Bachan Singh’s wife, Rani Kaur escaped from the farm and contacted the All-India Agricultural Workers’ Union (the CPI-M mass organisation for agricultural workers). She told them that they were bonded (siri) labour on Sukhdev Singh’s land for a debt that had been incurred by Bachan Singh’s father. AIAWU, AIDWA and the Democratic Youth Federation formed a campaign for the release of Bachan Singh and for the police to charge Sukhdev Singh under the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act. For AIAWU, AIDWA and DYFI, the fight to get the police to book Sukhdev Singh revealed the complicity of local state authority to the landlord class. But the unity of these mass organizations alongside the information produced by a study that AIDWA worked on that identified the prevalence of siri labour helped them push for the arrest. Jatinder Kaur of AIDWA told Elisabeth Armstrong, “We can shout slogans, we can hold rallies, if we have these facts. We must snatch these things, facts help us snatch them.”[174] Based on their research on siri, AIDWA was able to develop a slate of campaigns – but each drawing from the precise work AIDWA, AIAWU, DYFI and the CPI-M had done on the cases that came before them. These suffocating individual cases had to be tackled in themselves, but then they had to be broadened outward into a social and political movement to unearth the root cause of these atrocities. AIDWA’s powerful way to be empathetically angry about each case and then precisely forensic about the broader problem allowed it to seed the emergence of a mass movement in Haryana. This movement, as it arises, is not only premised on the reform of the culture that allows these atrocities, but the structure that produces them.

Sitting with an AIDWA activist is exhilarating. Ask about an issue and the activist will list a number of cases that she is working on – they are details of this person or that person, and this struggle or that struggle. In an AIDWA office there are often people discussing their problems. They come as supplicants – shy and scared, afraid to talk about their own situation. AIDWA members will take up these cases, throw a thousand people onto

the streets into a campaign. Typically that shy petitioner will become a militant activist. Many women who had experienced the worst of the khap panchayats and the writ of violence are inspired by AIDWA’s dogged activism, and then become its staunchest members.[175] Here are a list of campaigns and initiatives that AIDWA has initiated, not all of them with easy endings:   In Khammam, Andhra Pradesh: AIDWA activists formed vigilance committees against the blackmarket in foodgrains. In Tamil Nadu: AIDWA activists organized a bullock cart rally to show that higher diesel prices would make it impossible to travel by bus. In Delhi: AIDWA activists chased off an RSS shakha from a largely Muslim neighbourhood after the RSS members chanted provocative slogans. In Bihar, AIDWA activists took the lead in a major demonstration in Sitamarhi district on August 11, 1998 to demand relief for flood victims. Police opened fire and killed AIDWA activist Ram Pari, shot AIDWA activist Manju in the leg (which had to be amputated) and imprisoned AIDWA Secretary Jagtaran for six months.

 

These are a small sample of the more spectacular work of AIDWA. Its more mundane work takes place in its offices or in the homes of those who turn to AIDWA for help. By 2010, AIDWA recognized that its Haryana organisation had “played an impressive role in bringing the issue of honour crimes and killings onto the national agenda.”[176] AIDWA’s Haryana organisation grew steadily as a consequence of its consistent activism on the questions of violence against women as well as the dignity and well-being of women workers. In 1998, the unit had 14,872 members, which grew dramatically to 34,600 in 2007 and then to 43,000 by 2009. No society is able to transform itself easily. Women who sometimes join AIDWA are not keen to have their daughters-in-law in the movement. Sexist ideas linger. They have to be challenged consistently. The terrain is dangerous. It is not easy to tackle head-on the reactionary forces, who are fighting a deadly battle to defend their property and their prejudices. “Activists at risk of their own lives have intervened and tried to save the couples,” AIDWA noted in 2001 with regard to its work in the arena of inter-caste marriages. “In two cases we have succeeded in doing so. The units have also held several meetings in

affected villages on this issue trying to build public opinion. Most people are afraid to speak although often they indicate their disapproval of what is happening. Young people protest but their voices are unheard. We are trying to make a difference through our interventions but the process is difficult.”[177]

A decade later, the issues would reach the general public, but only as violence against women – not in the more complex way that AIDWA had raised it. During the Delhi Rape Case protests in 2012, national attention focused on rape and young women’s independence in general, but could not focus proper attention on the question of violence against working class women or on the complex social forces that gather into violence against women (class, caste, sexuality and gender). AIDWA took to the streets in force against the rape, against the government’s handling of such rape cases and against the general sense of insecurity experienced by young women across the country. Alongside AIDWA was the CPI-ML (Liberation)’s All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA). On December 16, 2012, AIPWA’s leader Kavita Krishnan gave a stirring speech to differentiate between the conservative critique of rape and the socialist one. When the Delhi Chief Minister said that a slain journalist Soumya Vishwanathan was being too “adventurous,” Krishnan retaliated at a protest,   We will be adventurous. We will be reckless. We will be rash. We will do nothing for our safety. Don’t you dare tell us how to dress, when to go out at night, in the day, or how to walk or how many escorts we need!… Even if women walk out on the streets alone, even if it is late at night, why should justifications need to be provided for this, like ‘she has to work late hours’ or ‘she was coming home from a BPO job or a media job’? If she simply wants to go out at night, if she wants to go out and buy a cigarette or go for a walk on the road – is this a crime for women? … Freedom without fear is what we need to protect, to guard and respect.

 

When AIDWA attempted to draw a line to the violence in Haryana paid some dividends but it could not shape the conversation. In mid-January 2013, AIDWA held a three-day Jan Sunwai, a public hearing, at Jantar Mantar, where brave men and women from Haryana came and told their painful stories. Mutilated children and broken young women found little recourse from an administration that typically favoured the powerful.

People listened to the stories in silence, despite the hubbub of Delhi’s traffic. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had quite stupidly said that rapes mainly occur in “India” (the cities) and not in “Bharat” (the countryside): “You go to villages and forest of the country, and there will be no such incidents of gang-rape or sex-crimes.”[178] Here are a list of the rape cases talked about at the Jan Sunwai, all from small towns and rural areas – the Bharat of Bhagwat’s imagination,   A 16 year old in Gohana goes to buy groceries. The grocer tells her to collect them from a warehouse behind his shop. She goes there and is attacked by the grocer and three boys. A 19 year old in Sonepat is held for four days and raped by a group of men. A 13 year old in Rohtak (home of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda) is raped. A 16 year old in Dabra is gang-raped, filmed by her rapists, the film sent to her father, who set himself on fire and dies. A 16 year old in Jind is gang-raped and then sets herself on fire and dies.

 

In October 2012, AIDWA held a protest in Rohtak (Haryana) to support nineteen women who had been gang-raped and who had received no justice – whose stories were told at the Jan Sunwai. Based on this case, the CPI-M in October 13, 2012 – three months before the Delhi gang-rape – said that rape was the fastest growing crime in India. Sexual assaults of children under the age of 14 rose to 10 percent of the 24,000 sex crimes cases registered each year. “The dismal record of convictions,” the CPI-M noted in October, “shows that 75 percent of the rape accused walk free, encouraging criminals to commit this heinous crime. The recent incidents in Haryana and West Bengal, where those in power have sought to brush aside the increasing sexual assault cases as a ‘conspiracy against the government,’ add insult to injury, demean rape victims and are condemnable.”[179]

AIDWA had worked on each of the cases raised at the Jan Sunwai. Its cadre had gone from courtroom to panchayat, making noises against injustice and congealed power. Every single case had to be taken as seriously as every other case. Each had its integrity. At the same time, AIDWA drew from its modest, but considerable mass following to block the roads in Rothak in October 2012.[180] Twenty-five organisations joined

with AIDWA members as they barricaded the road to the district collector’s office, and faced off against six hundred policemen. The women marched forward to clash with the police, and then sat down on the road. They wanted to meet the Sub-District Magistrate. He would not come. After four hours, the Chief Minister called CPI-M leader Brinda Karat and said that he would meet with a delegation of women. The women sang as they marched to their next protest. They had been powerful on that day, as they would be on other days. The misery of this or that case lifted off their shoulders as they become not this or that victim, but a political movement for a better day.

DELHI’S STREET CULTURE

Far from the center of Delhi, in an industrial area, on the first of January each year, the theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam) anchors a remembrance celebration. In 1989, Janam performed at that very place for the election campaign of Ramanand Jha, a CPI-M candidate for the post of councilor in the Ghaziabad City Board. As they began their play, the Congress Party backed candidate Mukesh Sharma arrived on the scene and asked that the play be suspended. Safdar Hashmi, a Janam performer and CPI-M member, asked the Congress procession to take another route. Iron rods and firearms answered Hashmi, so the actors fled. Sharma’s men followed, killing Hashmi and Ram Bahadur, a worker in a nearby factory. The troupe returned to the spot where they had been interrupted the day after Hashmi’s death and finished their play, Halla Bol (Raise Hell!). For a quarter of a century, Janam has been back to Ambedkar Park to continue this remarkable tradition. Delhi’s cold and fog do not stop them. The working-class community almost demands that the tradition continue. It has become essential for everyone.

To leave the park where the celebration occurs, one walks down a narrow road surrounded by lively shops that retail simple goods and services. The road opens onto the storied Grand Trunk Road, the long artery of trade and migration that knits Calcutta to Kabul. Here industrial firms stand at attention on both sides of the GT Road, a line of smokestacks and barbed wire fences, with groups of workers either on break or between shifts huddled in the cold at tea and snack shops. The Central Electronics firm takes up a city block. A group of men take shelter near a fire outside

the Times of India printing press. They are talking about the gang rape of 2012 that had shocked India, and had drawn large protests across Delhi. The 23 year-old victim, Jyoti Singh Pandey (at the time known only by the alias Nirbhaya, the fearless one), had just died in a Singapore hospital. One man, who must have been in his 50s, repeatedly wondered who these men were who had raped the woman. He oscillated between a progressive stance (“what kind of men are they!”) and a reactionary one (“they must have come from outside Delhi!”). The populist position regarding the type of men that must rape a woman had begun to demand the death penalty or castration for rapists. This man, who worked at the press, did not believe this would be correct. He mused about the decline in the social fabric and the growth of the assumption that men could do what they want with a woman. The gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey had been particularly horrendous, which is perhaps why it struck as deep a chord as it did amongst the city’s population. Pandey did not come from the preserves of the rich nor from those of the powerful. Her family came from Ballia, an impoverished area in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Her parents (who come from the OBC Kurmi community) had mortgaged their assets to send her to school to fulfill her dreams of being in the medical profession. “My brother’s entire salary was spent on educating his children so that their aspirations were fulfilled,” said her uncle, Lalji Singh, a primary school teacher.[181] Pandey went to see Life of Pi with a friend. They were abducted by a group of men on a tear. The men’s neighbours in Ravi Das Colony – a slum in R. K. Puram – later said that the men were up to no good – one neighbour, guilty for not doing anything to stop the men before they went off drunk, said, “we are good people.”[182] Ram Singh (33), a drunk bus driver led the pack, including his brother Mukesh Singh (26), Akshay Thakur (26), Vinay Sharma (20), Pawan Gupta (19) and an unnamed minor. Police incompetence allowed them to flee from a burglary and allowed an unlicensed bus with illegal curtains and tinted windows to drive around while the men beat the Pandey’s friend unconscious, assaulted her with their bodies and iron rods and battered her to a pulp. The Singh brothers came to Delhi in the 1990s from Rajasthan with their parents as part of the migration into the construction trade. They became informal workers in an informal economy that has little to offer them. The violence against Pandey was brutal.

Hundreds of rapes are registered in Delhi each year, with hundreds or more absent from the registers. As Subhashini Ali, president of AIDWA put it, “Most of the rapes that occur in Delhi are of minors, of poor women daily wage-earners, and women working as domestic help. None of these facts, however, seem to have made the slightest impact on those charged with guaranteeing the security and safety of women and children and bringing the guilty to justice. They, however, continue to hold on strongly to the prejudiced view that women themselves are responsible for the violence that they are subjected to. This can only increase both the insecurity and the incidence of violence.”[183] The massive protests in Delhi against the gang rape focused the eyes of the media on the epidemic of violence. On 1 January, 2013, as Janam got ready to hold their day of remembrance, the Hindu’s inside pages carried the stories with headlines that read,   “Woman stabbed to death allegedly by ex-friend.” “Brother of molestation victim arrested on rape charge.” “Teenaged boy arrested for insulting woman commits suicide.” “Probe ordered into protester’s allegations.”

 

Activist Kamla Bhasin said of these routine stories that India needs a “cultural tsunami. Indian laws are amongst the best in the world, but they’re not implemented. We have to change thinking. Take little boys. They’re not born rapists. But within 12 years, the neighbourhood, family, Bollywood are telling him, ‘You have a penis, you can do it, baby!’ We are producing rapists like a factory. We need to stop that factory.”[184]

At the January 1 remembrance in Jhandapur, a poster hung beside the stage with lines from Janam’s celebrated 1978 play Aurat (Woman), written by Safdar Hashmi and Rakesh Saxena. The play opens with the six male actors and the one female actor reciting a poem by an Iranian revolutionary, Marzieh Ahmadi Oskouei (1945-74), killed by the Iranian secret police, SAVAK.   I too am a worker. I too am a farmer. My body is a picture of pain. The fire of hatred burns me And you shamefully declare

That my hunger is imaginary That my nakedness is a dream A woman of no importance Cannot be described by any word In your obscene language.

 

The woman in the play then steps away from the circle made by the men. She makes her own road. At the end, she picks up the red flag, announcing her intention to walk towards a better world. At Jhandapur, and along the GT Road, contradictory cultural imaginations jostle for that future. There is violence, rooted in histories of capital and caste hierarchy, in misogyny and religious supremacy – vicious, spectacular violence. There are other traditions, not all of them selfconscious enough or courageous enough to pick up the red flag and openly challenge the system. There are the printers from the Times of India, whose words only enter the pages of the bourgeois media if they spit on the paper as it rolls off the presses. There are also the ordinary women and men who are disgusted by what they see around them, the riot of aspirations conjoured up by neo-liberalism, whose inability to match these new desires leads to extreme forms of social dislocation and to violence along conventional social hierarchies. AIDWA’s clinics and demonstrations, the quiet work and the noisy work of protest, do one kind of work. They set a bar. They push for legal reforms. They defend this or that person. Behind all this is culture, a word that denotes so much. In a lecture delivered at the University of Delhi in 1998, Aijaz Ahmad introduced the phrase “culture of cruelty” into the discussion of the great moving right show:   So, when I use the phrase “cultures of cruelty” I mean something more than professional politicians, more than agencies of the state on the ground, more even than organised communalism; I mean a much wider web of social sanctions in which one kind of violence can be tolerated all the more because many other kinds of violence are tolerated anyway. Dowry deaths do facilitate the burning of women out of communal motivations, and, together, these two kinds of violences do contribute to the making of a more generalised culture of cruelty as well as a more generalized ethical numbness toward cruelty as such.”[185]

 

What are the sources of these cultures of cruelty? Old traditions built up over centuries of social accretion certainly contribute to the hierarchies of caste and gender. Colonial interventions with their arrogance of enlightenment sent these traditions into the shadows, to reappear in a warped guise as right-wing patriotism and traditionalism. Hiding behind state power grew an amalgam of enlightenment thought and hierarchical social practice. More recently, the onrush of neo-liberal desire has produced its own toxicity, drawing in aspirations that come alongside hardened ideas of cultural tradition. There is little room here for the slow-pace of accommodation and understanding. The “ethical numbness” that sets in has a soundtrack in the loud music that alternatively comes from the mall and the jagaran, equal parts of Honey Singh and Jag Diya Jota Wali Mata. Political struggle alone cannot unearth the deep roots of the cultures of cruelty. Social imaginations have to be expanded to allow the belief in different possibilities. For that, art is essential. Art, in communism, has always played the role of the mirror of social reality and the canvas to explore alternative promises. Neither can art do its work alone, nor political movements. They require each other. Art alludes to reality; it can draw our attention to certain problems, even to provide understanding to them. But art “cannot define the means which will make it possible to remedy those effects,” cautioned the communist philosopher Louis Althusser.[186] The means will be defined by the political organisations that are driven by a different kind of knowledge – a science of society that has a theory of the mechanisms that produce social effects that are depicted by art. Art imagines a new world that becomes legible through the fights to make that world possible. No surprise then that the first self-conscious left-wing cultural organisation in India – the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) – was formed in 1936, the same year of the formation of the All-India Kisan Sabha and the leftward tilt in the Congress (pushed by the two-year struggle within waged by the Congress Socialist Party).[187] Indeed, the Congress, the Kisan Sabha and the PWA all met in Lucknow that year. To preside over the PWA, the writers chose the venerable Hindustani writer, Premchand. The meeting was in April 1936, and Premchand would die in October at the age of 56. He had already established himself as the premier storyteller of rural India – although his two most influential works, the novel Godaan and the short-story Kafan, were both published in 1936. This master of Hindustani

fiction took the stage at the PWA founding conference to argue against a literature that would not “arouse in us a critical spirit, or satisfy our spiritual needs, which is not ‘force-giving’ and dynamic, which does not awaken our sense of beauty, which does not make us face the grim realities of life in a spirit of determination, has no use for us today. It cannot even be termed as literature.”[188] The PWA’s manifesto drew from this spirit. It called upon the new literature to “deal with the basic problems of our existence today – the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjection.” Art that creates “passivity, inaction and unreason,” the PWA argued, must be rejected. “All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organise ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive.”[189] Art arouses the critical spirit, but it does not pretend to solve the problems by itself. It has its role. Outside the novel sits the Kisan Sabha. It is prepared to take the reader forward.

In 1942, artists who had been inspired by the freedom movement, by the anti-fascist struggle and by the sweep of communism formed the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). It was cousin to the PWA. In its early bulletin, IPTA members wrote of their links to folk culture and the freedom movement,   It is not a movement which is imposed from above but one which has its roots deep down in the cultural awakening of the masses of India; nor is it a movement which discards our rich cultural heritage, but one which seeks to revive the lost in that heritage by re-interpreting, adopting and intergrating it with the most significant facts of our peoples’ lives and aspirations in the present epoch. It is a movement which seeks to make of our arts the expression and the organizer of our people’s struggles for freedom, economic justice and a democratic culture.[190]

 

Among IPTA’s serried ranks were Prithviraj Kapoor, Ravi Shankar, Utpal Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak and many familiar as well as unfamiliar names. Socially relevant art drew them. The Bengal famine of 1943 provided them with the issue. The CPI leaders P. C. Joshi and Kalpana Dutt took along the photographer Sunil Janah and the artist Chittoprosad Bhattacharya to Bengal to document the horrendous famine that would claim between one and four million lives. Joshi and Dutt’s dispatches, Janah’s photographs and Chittoprasad’s art were published in People’s War, which was the first

periodical to expose the famine and British imperial complicity in it.[191] Artists in the orbit of IPTA put their considerable energy to render the famine into art. The dancer Shanti Bardhan composed Bhookha Hai Bengal, a dance drama that raised large sums of money toward famine relief. IPTA’s Bijon Bhattacharya wrote Nabanna, a play, also to raise money. This work would culminate in Dharti ke Lal, the 1946 debut film from K. A. Abbas (written by Bhattacharya and Abbas) that starred Zohra Sehgal and Balraj Sahni, and told the story of the Bengal famine from the standpoint of one peasant family. It is the direct precursor to the socialist-realist classic Do Bigha Zamin, 1953. There is a line that links the IPTA plays Dakkan ki Ek Raat and Jadoo ki Kursi, both performed at the CPI Allahabad meeting of 1948, and the plays of Janam from the 1970s onwards.[192] Although of the course that line is not straight because it was broken in the 1950s. IPTA dissolved in that decade leaving its creative writers and actors, singers and dancers to create their own groups across the country. By 1973, IPTA’s Delhi unit had become moribund with the office used by its member for their own private work. It took a dozen college students associated with the Students’ Federation of India to galvanise IPTA into a new formation, Janam. Janam produced full-length proscenium productions, the first a translation of an Utpal Dutt play and then original work done by the company members and their friends. In 1978, Janam members heard of a workers’ struggle at a Harig-India factory (Harig is a US-based tool-and-die maker, which created an Indian operation in 1961 to become a leader in the manufacture of hydraulic machinery). The workers’ demands were elementary: they wanted a parking space for their bicycles and a canteen for tea. Harig refused. The workers struck. Janam prepared a play – Machine – for the striking workers. The most spectacular performance of Machine was on November 19, 1978 at an all-India trade union conference. As soon as the seven thousand delegates ended their session and began to file out of the cavernous Talkatora Stadium in Delhi, a group of actors dressed in black entered the arena. They formed a machine that huffed and puffed along till they got the attention of the delegates. The machine stopped. The narrator asked, “What has happened? The machine has stopped. This is a first rate crisis! Why has it stopped? Can someone tell me?” An actor steps forward and says that the workers are on strike. When he finishes his complaint, out of the machine

emerges the owner and the guard, both of whom try to persuade the workers to return to work. The workers refuse, shout slogans, the guard fires and kills them. The narrator returns, “No matter how many bullets you pump into us, the workers are not going to be defeated. They will rise again.” The workers rise. They gherao (surround) the owner. The play lasted for a quarter of an hour. As Safdar Hashmi recalled, “After we sang the final song, the trade union delegates jumped over the rails. The leaders were like kids. They lifted us on their shoulders. We became heroes. People took our autograph on cigarette packets.”[193]

From that day onwards, Janam performed more than eighty plays for thousands of shows across Delhi, but also elsewhere. These plays and shows had been developed alongside the left organisations – often for their conferences and struggles. Aurat, from March 1979, had been developed for the first North Indian Working Womens’ Conference in Shakti Nagar (with a density of textile factories). It opens with Oskouei’s poem, “I’m a Woman,” recited by one woman and several men. The woman depicts scenes of home, work, market, marriage, college, in public, and then in the factory. Each scene allows for a sensation of the social forces that both tie her down and lift her up. Her loneliness mirrors the fragmentation of society into individuals, with distress being borne individually. Social oppression strikes her at each turn, but she refuses to submit to the pressures. She will not yield, but she cannot overcome her situation by herself. The feeling of immense helplessness sets in. The woman is fired from her job. At this point, she runs into a march of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, the CPI-M’s youth front. Her co-workers urge her to fight the boss, and eventually they join the march as well. As in Garam Hawa, the woman picks up the red flag and settles into the crowd. This has been Janam’s most successful play, being reproduced more than any other. [194]

Aurat provides a sketch of the various forms of oppression and exploitation the runs through the life of a woman. It does not analyse in detail any one of the social processes. Neither does it provide a detailed sense of the cultural roots of the oppression. It lays it out there. It evokes equal parts of frustration and anger. It is a relief when the woman joins the DYFI demonstration. It is a relief when she is organised. CPI-M leader Brinda Karat told Arjun Ghosh about the first performance of Aurat, which had a “tremendous impact on women and mobilizing women. Janam’s

driving and partisan commitment not to the Party [CPI-M] but to raising issues of injustice, that is what really helped in taking our message among women.”[195] The point of art is not only to take issues to the people, but also to help people reconsider the present and imagine a future. This work has been essential not only from Janam, but from a world of left theatre (Andhra Pradesh’s Praja Natya Mandali and Karnataka’s Samudaya, for example) and from a world of left cultural practice. Immense waves of cultural production from television channels, cinema, the Internet and the images of advertisements flood the worlds of Indians of all classes. There is no immunity from the spectacles of desire and hatred that are the coin of mainstream culture. Aggressive forms of consumption both of goods and other people rewrite older cultural arrangements. As Aijaz Ahmad put it, “Every session of TV watching, to which the whole of the Indian middle class is addicted, turns out to be a study circle for acquisition of certain sorts of ideology and cultural taste; and re-making oneself in the image of the American teenager becomes a widespread form of imagined class mobility among those whose positions at the bottom of the class ladder may remain stationary in material terms.”[196] The work of this or that small left arts ensemble is no barrier against this onslaught.

Cultures of cruelty cannot be tackled by cultural activism alone. They require more than that. After the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Arjun Ghosh notes, “street theatre groups around the country found it difficult to respond with an appropriate response to these tragic and yet emotive events.”[197] Janam did not pause for too long. On June 2002, the group debuted Yeh Dil Mange More, Guruji, derived from the general ideological orientation of the Left toward communalism and built around the first cultural artifacts to emerge from the artist community, poetry. It opens with the cast reading some of the most heartfelt and earnest poems written shortly after the enormity of the anti-Muslim pogrom. Then, they walk out from the center of their circle bearing placards upon which are mounted photographs of the carnage. This is all heavy stuff. But it is the bookend for a remarkably farcical show about the twin forces of neo-liberal capital and theocracy made manifest by stock characters and a humorous scenario. Guru Golgangol and his two chelas (disciples) Buddhibali and Baahubali are on a quest to create the Hindu Rashtra, and we follow their ridiculous adventures, which is a summary of India’s recent history. The

farce and the tragedy coexist, and heighten each other, so that it becomes harder to see the ridiculous in the spoof and the overwhelming solemnity of the poetry and images are broken when we realize that the perpetrators of these crimes are ridiculous and dangerous.[198]

To compare Janam’s approach to communal fascism with that of the films of Anand Patwardhan is instructive. Patwardhan’s three films that track communal ideology and violence (Ram Ke Naam, 1992; Father, Son and Holy War, 1995; War and Peace, 2002) are richly documented and lushly filmed. But a viewer who takes in Patwardhan’s films is left with a sense of gloomy futility. The documentaries pound on and on with image and fact about the desolation that is Hindutva. This is a consequence of two problems: first, that an independent leftist, such as Patwardhan, makes films as politics, and therefore mixes the very different forms of art and of “science,” of the representing of problems and the resolution of them. When the art form is to carry the enormous burden of political theory and of praxis, it is diminished. There is room here to question the lack of gap between art and politics, not to champion art for art’s sake, but to maintain the distance between what art can do and what political work can do. The second problem is in the gloomy response of the audience who now sees what they are up against, but has not the means to take these allusions to reality and find the mechanisms to thwart Hindutva. Without political organizations of heft by one’s side, the aesthetics of the independent leftist is consequentially morose. Janam is saved from the latter problem, because it is linked to trade unions and the communist movement (so are Patwardhan’s movies on the fisher workers, on slum dwellers battles and on the Canadian Indian farm workers fight to create a union).[199] The first problem is often circumvented, because the plays are only one part of the ensemble of ideas presented by Janam and its movement to the people. Janam can afford to be satirical, even humorous when it depicts the Hindutva Right; it can even make us laugh in the wake of Gujarat. This humor, the spoof, draws us in, and even if it does not explain every element of Hindutva, the laughter empowers the audience to feel that he or she can vanquish theocracy and neo-liberal globalization. And when they feel this, the political organizations are nearby.

With Modi firmly in the saddle, Hindutva’s student group, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) began a campaign against “live-in relationships.” The social suffocation of Hindutva was second nature to their students. In the name of a campaign against atrocities on women, ABVP’s head Rohit Chahal said, “Such relationships hardly succeed. We will form groups of students in all colleges in Delhi University to create awareness against such relationships.”[200] Aparna Mahiyaria, who is part of Janam and is an active communist in the student movement, wrote an open letter to Chahal. It bears the very best of the communist ethic toward happiness and joy.   Mr. Chahal, I have a boyfriend. We live together. He is adept with household work and shares it equally with me. Not only that, we are each other’s emotional support in any situation of crisis and trouble. It is a beautiful feeling to come back home (at whatever time) to him. I come from a family of RSS activists and my parents wanted to get me married after BA to a person of their choice (based on religion/caste etc of course). Even as I insisted that I wanted to study further and bought more time, they kept bringing up the ‘need’ for marriage, time and again, making it difficult even to study peacefully. Just saw a news report where your activists are demanding respect for women. Respecting women is not about choosing for them what is right for them. Respecting women is about respecting their choice – even the choice to say NO. Women are able, rational beings – by the virtue of being humans, and anyone who thinks they respect women must first acknowledge their ability to make decisions for themselves. Even if my relationship does not succeed, I don’t think it is the end of my life (it might be so in your patriarchal world). It is not a big deal because my identity is not defined by the ‘man’ I take as a partner. Ending the relationship could be my choice too. Also, the success or failure of my relationship is for me to deal with, it is none of your business. Live-in relationships are beautiful, loving is beautiful. And guess what, my boyfriend is Muslim. Both of us, however, are atheists and our relationship is independent of our religious and caste identities. You don’t understand such a concept, do you? P. S. We also make each other drinks once in a while, sit in the balcony and talk endlessly. Meanwhile, the fight with you and your likes (which includes my parents too) goes on. In love, hopelessly, with Sahil Casper. Aparna Mahiyaria

 

Here is a reasonable and eloquent statement against the culture of cruelty. It is the kind of intellectual and cultural artifact that stands alongside the ceaseless work of the communists to take each grievance and make it into a movement.     [1]

    Mother Teresa, No Greater Love, Novato: New World Library, 1989, pp. 97-98.

[2]

    Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, London: Verso, 1995.

[3]

    Barbara Crossette, ‘Pomp Pushes the Poorest from Mother Teresa’s Last Rites,’ New York Times, 14 September 1997, p. 14.

[4]

    Mother Teresa, Loving Jesus, ed. José Luis Gonzalez-Balado, Ann Arbor: Servant, 1991, p. 46.

[5]

    Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” The First International And After. Political Writings, vol. 3, London: Verso, 2010, p. 213.

[6]

    Interview with Anil Biswas, Calcutta, June 24, 1995.

[7]

    Buddhadev Bhattacharya, “On Industrialisation in West Bengal,” The Marxist, vol. XXIII, no. 1, January-March 2007, p. 4.

[8]

    Jyoti Basu, Some Aspects of Seventh Plan. West Bengal’s Views, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1988, pp. 3-4.

[9]

    A Study of the Industrial Scene in West Bengal, p. 10.

[10]

    Reserve Bank of India, Report of the committee to examine the legal and other difficulties faced by banks and financial institutions in rehabilitating sick units, Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1984 (Tiwari Committee Report) and R. C. Dutt, “Rehabilitation of Sick Units,” Mainstream, May 16, 1987.

[11]

    Government of India, Report of the Committee of Industrial Sickness and Corporate restructuring, New Delhi: GOI, 1993 (Goswami Committee Report); Omkar Goswami, “Sickness and growth of India’s textile industry: Analysis and Policy Options,” EPW, vol. XXV, no. 45, November 7, 1990; T. C. A. Anant and Omkar Goswami, “Getting Everything Wrong: India’s Policies Regarding Sick Firms,” Indian Industry: Policies and Performance, ed. Dilip Mookherjee, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

[12]

    B. T. Ranadive, “Presidential Address. Working Committee Meeting of CITU, Kalyani, September 4-6, 1989,” On Trade Union Movement, volume 3, pp. 354-361.

[13]

    CPI-M, Political Organisational Report. 15th Congress CPI-M, April 3-8, 1995, Chandigarh, p. 39 and interview with Anil Biswas and interview with Benoy Konar, Calcutta, June 30, 1995.

[14]

    Policy Statement on Industrial Development, pp. 7-9.

[15]

    CPI-M, Political Organisational Report. 15th Congress, pp. 40-41.

[16]

    Interview with Anil Biswas.

[17]

    Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Kaushik Basu, Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak, Ashok Sanjay Guha, Mukul Majumdar, Dilip Mookherjee, Debraj Ray, “Strategy for Economic Reform in West Bengal,” EPW, vol. XXXVII, no. 41, October 12, 2002.

[18]

    D. Bandyopadhyay, “Land Reforms and Agriculture: the West Bengal Experience,” EPW, vol. XXXVIII, no. 09, May 1, 2003, p. 883.

[19]

    Mishra and Rawal, “Agrarian Relations,” pp. 44-49.

[20]

    Bhattacharya, “On Industrialisation,” p. 5.

[21]

    Bhattacharya, “On Industrialisation,” p. 6.

[22]

    Bhattacharya, “On Industrialisation,” p. 1. The book Bhattacharya mentions is Dispatches from Latin America: Experiments Against Neo-liberalism, eds. Teo Ballvé and Vijay Prashad, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2006. For critiques of the “Chinese road” from an Indian perspective see Prabhat Patnaik, “The Difference Between the Chinese and Indian Situations,” The Marxist, vol. XV, no. 4, October-December 1999 and C. P. Chandrasekhar, “Industrial Development,” Crossing a Bridge of Dreams. 50 Years of India-China, ed. G. P. Deshpande and Alka Acharya, New Delhi: Tulika, 2001.

[23]

    Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, “Of Control and Factions: The Changing ‘Party-Society’ in Rural West Bengal,” EPW, vol. XLIV, no. 09, February 28, 2009.

[24]

    The “there is no alternative” position was clearly articulated by Ratan Khasnabis, “The Economy of West Bengal,” EPW, vol. XLIII, no. 52, December 27, 2008.

[25]

    Ajitabha Raychaudhuri and Gautam Basu, “The Decline and Recent Resurgence of the Manufacturing Sector of West Bengal: Implication for Pro-Poor Growth from an Institutional Point of View, IPPG Discussion Paper, no. 10, 2007.

[26]

    Abhijit Guha, Land, Law and the Left. The Saga of Disempowerment of the Peasantry in the Era of Globalization, New Delhi: Concept, 2007, p. 93.

[27]

    West Bengal CPI-M State Committee, “Left Front Government, Panchayats, Municipalities and Our Tasks,” The Marxist, vol. XXIV, no. 1, January-March 2008, pp. 55-56.

[28]

    Bhattacharya, “On Industrialisation,” p. 6.

[29]

    Patnaik, “In the Aftermath of Nandigram.”

[30]

    Prasenjit Bose, “The Special Economic Zones Act, 2005: Urgent Need for Amendment,” The Marxist, vol. XXII, no. 4, October-December 2006; Partha Sarathi Banerjee, “Politics of Special Economic Zones in West Bengal,” Contemporary Politics in West Bengal.

[31]

    “Buddha Bombshell – CM Vows to Speak Up, CITU, Trinamul Heap Scorn,” The Telegraph, August 27, 2008.

[32]

    “Buddhadev in trouble with party over anti-bandh remark,” India Today, August 27, 2008.

[33]

    Brinda Karat, “Singur: just the facts, please,” The Hindu, December 13, 2006.

[34]

    Romita Datta, “Polls Over, Partymen train their guns on West Bengal Chief Minister,” Mint, May 19, 2009.

[35]

    Patnaik, “In the Aftermath of Nandigram.”

[36]

    “Salim to invest in Haldia SEZ,” Economic Times, June 16, 2006.

[37]

    Richard Robinson, Indonesia: the Rise of Capital, Jakarta: Equinox, 2009, chapter 9.

[38]

    B. Prasant, “Chavez in Kolkata,” People’s Democracy, March 13, 2005.

[39]

    Sukanta Goswami, “Nandigram gets Singur Jitters,” The Statesman, November 15, 2006.

[40]

    Prakash Karat, “Let the truth be known,” People’s Democracy, March 25, 2007.

[41]

    “Nandigram firing ordered by executive,” The Hindu, January 30, 2014.

[42]

    Nandigram: What Really Happened? Based on the Report of the People’s Tribunal on Nandigram, 26-28 May 2007, Delhi: Daanish Books, 2007; Report of Investigation into Nandigram Mass Killings by Association for Protection of Democratic Rights and Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samiti, Calcutta: APDR/PBKMS, 2007; Territorial Warfare to Reign of Terror. Nandigram: Peasants’ Demands for Democratic Rights and Political Choice. An Independent Citizens’ Report, Kolkata, 2008; November in Nandigram. A Citizens’ Report, November 2007.

[43]

    “Dissident Trinamool MP Kabir says Maoists helped Mamata win Assembly polls,” Indian Express, January 5, 2013.

[44]

    “False Alarm Sparks Clash,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2007.

[45]

    Naresh Jana, “Mobilisation and Mayhem; Hitback men and motive,” The Telegraph, January 8, 2007.

[46]

    Naresh Jana, “Peace push and pitfalls,” The Telegraph, January 9, 2007.

[47]

    “Flare up could be avoided, says Biman,” The Telegraph, January 14, 2007.

[48]

    “Intelligence officer’s body found near Nandigram,” The Hindu, February 11, 2007.

[49]

    The modus operandi of knifing a police officer and then stuffing the body in a sack repeated itself a number of times over the next few years. CRPF jawan Maruti Wagare was killed in the same manner in January 2010. “‘Missing’ CRPF jawan’s body found in sack,” Indian Express, February 1, 2010.

[50]

    Ekdin, March 10, 2007 and Pratidin, March 14, 2007.

[51]

    Debranjan, “Nandigram: Rumours and Truths,” People’s Democracy, March 25, 2007 and interviews with CPI-M supporters at the relief camp in Khejuri, January 2008.

[52]

    Praveen Swami, “Lalgarh: fear, power and obedience,” The Hindu, July 3, 2009.

[53]

    Pronab Mondal, “Maoist Warns of Sleepless Nights,” The Telegraph, July 15, 2005.

[54]

    “What Muslims were to BJP, Maoists are to Congress: Arundhati Roy,” Times of India, October 25, 2009.

[55]

    World Bank, India: Achievements and Challenge in Reducing Poverty, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997, p. ii.

[56]

    Documents of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Madras. January 39 1993, p. 71.

[57]

    T. J. Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, London: Pinter, 1988, p. 108.

[58]

    Kerala State Planning Board, Task Force on Coir Industry, Trivandrum: SPB, 1990. Cf. Kerala State Planning Board, Report on the Study Group on Mechanization in Coir Industry in Kerala, Trivandrum: SPB, 1973.

[59]

    K. T. Rammohan, “Technological Change in Kerala Industry: Lessons from Coir Yarn Spinning,” Kerala Research Programme on Local Level Development, Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, Discussion paper no. 4, October 1999, p. 39.

[60]

    T. M. Thomas Isaac and Pyarelal Raghavan, “A Policy Framework for Revitalisation of Coir Industry

in

Kerala,”

Working

Paper

no.

240,

Centre

for

Development

Studies,

Thiruvananthapuram, November 1990. [61]

    T. M. Thomas Isaac and Richard W. Franke, Local Democracy and Development. People’s Planning for Decentralised Planning in Kerala, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000, p. 14.

[62]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “A Kerala Experiment,” The Frontline Years. Selected Articles, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2010, p. 188.

[63]

    Namboodiripad, “A Kerala Experiement,” p. 188.

[64]

    B. A. Prakash and M. P. Abraham, “Employment and Unemployment in Kerala,” Kerala’s Economic Development, ed. B. A. Prakash, New Delhi: Sage, 2004.

[65]

    M. P. Parameswaran, “What Does the Kerala Model Signify? Towards a Possible ‘Fourth World,’” Kerala. The Development Experience, ed. Govindan Parayil, London: Zed Books, 2000, pp. 241-243 and T. M. Thomas Isaac, Richard W. Franke and M. P. Parameswaran, “From AntiFeudalism to Sustainable Development: The Kerala People’s Science Movement,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 29, no. 3, 1998.

[66]

    P. K. Michael Tharakan, The Ernakulam Total Literacy Programme: Report of the Evaluation, Thiruvananthapuram, Centre for Developing Studies, 1990.

[67]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, pp. 47-48.

[68]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, pp. 43-44 and pp. 48-49.

[69]

    T. M. Thomas Isaac, Richard W. Franke and Pyaralal Raghavan, Democracy at Work in an Indian Industrial Cooperative. The Story of Kerala Dinesh Beedi, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, pp. 66-68.

[70]

    T. P. Alexander, “Computers to Aid Jobless Kerala Beedi Makers,” Financial Express, December 6, 1998 and K. P. Sethunath, “Beedi Co-op Rolls Out Software Tech Park,” Financial Express, October 24, 2001.

[71]

    Namboodiripad, “A Kerala Experiment,” p. 188.

[72]

    Namboodiripad, “A Kerala Experiment,” p. 188 and p. 186.

[73]

    Documents of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Madras. January 39 1993, p. 72.

[74]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 77.

[75]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 77 and chapter 5.

[76]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 79.

[77]

    On the nature of class struggles in this exercise, see Prabhat Patnaik, “A Theoretical Note on Kerala-Style Decentralised Planning,” The Marxist, vol. 20, no. 1, January-March 2004.

[78]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 111.

[79]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 162.

[80]

    Parvathi Menon, “Empowering Women,” Frontline, vol. 17, issue 13, June 24-July 7, 2000. Also see, Aarti Dhar, “Political Will Changes Women’s Status in Rural Kerala,” The Hindu, June 6, 2000.

[81]

    Thomas Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy, p. 212.

[82]

    Patrick Heller and T. M. Thomas Isaac, “The Politics and Institutional Design of Participatory Democracy. Lessons from Kerala, India,” Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, London: Verso, 2005.

[83] 

  K. P. Kannan, “Kerala’s Turnaround in Growth: Role of Social Development, Remittances and Reform,” EPW, vol. XL, no. 06, February 5-11, 2005.

[84]

    K. P. Kannan, “People’s Planning, Kerala’s Dilemma,” Seminar, no. 485, January 2000.

[85]

    Shubham Chaudhuri and Patrick Heller, “The Plasticity of Participation: Evidence from a participatory government experiment,” Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University, Working Papers, January 2003.

[86]

    R. Krishnakumar, “Derailing decentralization,” Frontline, vol. 20, issue 16, August 2-15, 2003.

[87]

    For a full and sympathetic critique of the PCDP, see Report of the Committee for Evaluation of Decentralised Planning and Development, Government of Kerala, March 2009 (Oommen Report).

[88]

    Andhra Pradesh State Conference, CPI-M, Extracts from the Political-Organisational Report published in The Marxist, vol. XXIV, no. 1, January-March 2008, p. 15.

[89]

    P. Sainath, “In 16 years, farm suicides cross a quarter million,” October 29, 2011.

[90]

    Jaideep Hardikar, A Village Awaits Doomsday, Delhi: Penguin, 2013, p. 154 and also, P. Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, Delhi: Penguin, 1996.

[91]

    Hardikar, A Village Awaits Doomsday, p. 53.

[92]

    Aman Sethi, A Free Man, Delhi: Random House, 2011, p. 113.

[93]

    Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, New York: Random House, 2012, p. 237.

[94]

    Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned. A Portrait of the New India, New York: Faber and Faber, 2011, p. 170.

[95]

    Prakash Karat, “On the Political-Tactical Line of the 20th Congress,” The Marxist, vol. XXVIII, no. 1, January-March 2012, p. 8.

[96]

    Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profit, speech of June 27, 1865. This text was well-known to Indian Marxists via Alexandr Lozovsky, Marx and the Trade Unions published in 1935 but then reprinted in Calcutta in 1944 by the Radical Book Club.

[97]

    For a generous history of trade unionism in India, see Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1977.

[98]

    “Maruti ready to accept new union but no external affiliation,” Financial Express, June 13, 2011.

[99]

    Peter Wonacott, “Deadly Labour Wars Hinder India’s Rise,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2009.

[100]

    Cf: “The Party has to pay special attention to work in the urban areas, particularly in the slums and among the poorer sections. The growing urbanization and the lack of housing and basic facilities for the large mass of the working people needs urgent attention.” Karat, “On the Political-Tactical Line,” p. 8.

[101]

    George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez. A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

[102]

    Oscar Olivera, Cochabamba! Boston: South End Press, 2004.

[103]

    Sven Harten, The Rise of Evo Morales and the MAS, London: Zed, 2011.

[104]

    Forward to Struggles. Proceedings, Speeches, Resolutions, Messages, etc. to 26th Conference at Khammen (Andhra Pradesh), New Delhi: All India Kisan Sabha, 1989, p. 11.

[105]

    All India Agricultural Workers Union, Documents, IVth All India Conference. November 2-4, Khammam (AP), New Delhi: AIAWU, 1996, p. 45.

[106]

    All India Agricultural Workers Union, Documents, p. 22.

[107]

    Jyoti Gupta, “Land, Dowry, Labour: Women in the Changing Economy of Midnapur,” Social Scientist, vol. 21, nos. 9-11, September-November 1993, p. 87.

[108]

    “No separate programme and distribution of land to women as a section was initiated, but in cases where the woman was the head of the family, the patta [paper for landownership] was initiated in her favour.” Chhaya Bera, Women and the Left Front Government of West Bengal, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1990, p. 4.

[109]

    All India Agricultural Workers Union, Documents, p. 47.

[110]

    It is important to register that in the Marxist movement, the question of women’s struggle has been central from its inception. Of course there is Engels’ essential Origin of the Family, Private

Property and the State (1884), but the year before that appeared August Bebel’s Women and Socialism. Bebel was the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, the main Marxist party in Germany. In Central and Eastern Europe at this time, women had leadership roles in the most important Marxist parties – Angelica Balabanoff, Kata Dalström, Gertrud Hanna, Alexandra Kollontai, Anna Kuliscioff, Rosa Luxemberg, Henriette Roland-Holst, Vera Zasulich, and Clara Zetkin. It is a straight-line from Bebel’s 1883 book to E. M. S. Namboodiripad’s “Perspective of the Women’s Movement,” Social Scientist, vol. 4, nos. 4-5, November-December 1975. [111]

    CPI-M, Review of the Work on Kisan and Agricultural Workers Fronts and Future Tasks, Adopted by the Central Committee meeting held on June 7-9, 2003 at Kolkata, p. 1.

[112]

    Review of the Work on Kisan and Agricultural Workers’ Fronts, p. 20.

[113]

    Review of the Work on Kisan and Agricultural Workers’ Fronts, pp. 8-9, and p. 15.

[114]

    CPI-M, Review of the Work of the Trade Union Front and Immediate Tasks, Adopted by the Central Committee at its meeting held on November 22-24, 2002, pp. 25-26.

[115]

    José Carlos Mariátegui, “Man and Myth,” José Carlos Mariátegui. An Anthology, eds. Harry E .Vanden and Marc Becker, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011, p. 387.

[116]

    José Carlos Mariátegui, “Gandhi,” La Escena contemporánea, Buenos Aires: Technikbook Ediciones, 2011.

[117]

    Brinda Karat, “Remembering the Melavalavu Six,” Survival and Emancipation. Notes from Indian Women’s Struggles, New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2005, pp. 229-230; S. Vishwanathan, “The Melavalavu Murders,” Dalits in Dravidian Land, pp. 83-86.

[118]

    Thirumavalavan, Uproot Hindutva, Calcutta: Samya, 2004, p. 14.

[119]

    Vishwanathan, “Hampering Empowerment,” Dalits in Dravidian Land, p. 179.

[120]

    Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens. Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu, New Delhi: Sage, 2005, p. 160.

[121]

    Vishwanathan, “Justice at Last,” Dalits in Dravidian Land, p. 193.

[122]

    P. Sampath, “CPI-M’s Intervention Against Caste Oppression in Tamil Nadu,” The Marxist, vol. XVIII, January-March 2002, p. 38.

[123]

    AIDWA. Perspectives, Interventions and Struggles (1998-2001), New Delhi: AIDWA, 2002, pp. 128-129.

[124]

    Armstrong, Gender and Neoliberalism, p. 163.

[125]

    Ravikumar, “Introduction,” Vishwanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land, p. xxxvi.

[126]

    On this point, Ravikumar’s view is reinforced by an unsubstantiated comment by M. S. S. Pandian, “Dalit Assertion in Tamil Nadu: An Exploratory Note,” Journal of Indian School of Political Economy, vol. 12, nos. 3-4, July-December 2000, p. 510.

[127]

    The evidence is in Vishwanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land.

[128]

    M. N. Roy, “Civil Disobedience,” Selected Works of M. N. Roy. Volume 1, ed. Subnarayan Ray, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 553-5.

[129]

    B. T. Ranadive, Caste, Class and Property Relation, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1982, p. 10.

[130]

    Ranadive, Caste, Class and Property Relation, p. 24.

[131]

    Sampath, “CPI-M’s Intervention Against Caste Oppression,” p. 44 and D. Karthikeyan, Stalin Rajangam and Hugo Gorringe, “Dalit Political Imagination and Replication in Contemporary Tamil Nadu,” EPW, vol XLVII, no. 36, September 6, 2012, p. 31.

[132]

    “A Marxist Perspective on Caste Oppression,” In the Casue of Dalits. Struggle for Social Justice, Delhi: CPI-M, 2012, pp. 7-21.

[133]

    The Fire Against Untouchability, ed. P. Sampath, Chennai: Indian Universities Press, 2012 has an impressive collection of articles that document the work of the TNUEF.

[134]

    S. Vishwanathan, “The Fall of a Wall,” Frontline, May 24- June 6, 2008.

[135]

    P. Sampath, “Experiences of Struggles Against Untouchability in Tamilnadu,” The Marxist, vol. XXVI, no. 1, January-March 2010, p. 44.

[136]

    Ganesh, “Struggle for Social Justice Achieves Decisive Victory in Uthapuram,” In the Cause of Dalits, Hyderabad: Prajashakti, 2012, p. 100.

[137]

    S. Sundar, “Uthapuram Dalits enter temple after more than two decades,” The Hindu, November 11, 2011.

[138]

    For the long history of struggle, see Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[139]

    Mari Marcel Thekaekara, Endless Filth. The Saga of the Bhangis, Bangalore: Books for Change, 2005, p. 118.

[140]

    Armstrong, Gender and Neoliberalism, pp. 163-165.

[141]

    Tamil Nadu State Conference, “Extracts from the Political-Organisational Report,” The Marxist, vol. XXIV, no. 1, January-March 2008, p. 29.

[142]

    S. Dorairaj, “Stripped of Dignity,” Frontline, July 12, 2013.

[143]

    India: Andhra Pradesh: Agenda for Economic Reforms, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997, pp. i-iii.

[144]

    K. C. Suri, “Andhra Pradesh: Fall of the CEO in Arena of Democracy,” EPW, vol. XXXIV, no. 51, December 18, 2004, p. 5494.

[145]

    Maseeh Rahman, “Andhra’s Vote is a Test for Reform,” Time, September 13, 1999.

[146]

    Aparisim Ghosh, “South Asian of the Year: Chandrababu Naidu,” Time, December 31, 1999.

[147]

    T. Lakshmipathi, “A Rude Shock in Andhra Pradesh,” Frontline, vol. 17, issue 12, June 10-23, 2000.

[148]

    P. Sainath, “None So Blind as Those Who Will Not See,” UNESCO Courier, June 2001.

[149]

    World Bank, India-Andhra Pradesh District Poverty Project, Washington, D. C.: World Bank, 2000.

[150]

    The two documents are: (1) Summary of the meetings between Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and WB Resident Representative Edward Lim on June 4, 1997 at Hyderabad and (2) Briefing Book no. 3, James D. Wolfenson, Visit to India, November 6-13, 2000, WB office in India. These documents are extensively discussed in B. V. Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms in Andhra Pradesh and the Resistance Movement,” The Marxist, vol. XVII, no. 1, January-March 2001.

[151]

    Briefing Book no. 3, pp. 3-5, Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” pp. 18-19.

[152]

    Briefing Book no. 3, p. 1, Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” p. 21.

[153]

    Briefing Book no. 3, p. 5, Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” p. 23.

[154]

    CPI-M, World Bank Loan – Boon or Bane? Hyderabad: AP State Committee of the CPI-M, 1998.

[155]

    K. Balagopal, “Land Unrest in Andhra Pradesh: Ceiling Surpluses and Public Lands,” EPW, vol. XLII, no. 38, September 22, 2007, p. 3833.

[156]

    V. Sridhar, “Brutal Crackdown”; Brinda Karat and Pramila Pandhe, “Targeting Women,” Frontline, vol. 17, Issue 19, September 16-29, 2000.

[157]

    Karat and Pandhe, “Targeting Women.”

[158]

    Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” p. 39.

[159]

    Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” p. 39.

[160]

    Raghavulu, “Power Sector Reforms,” p. 40.

[161]

    C. Sambi Reddy, K. Jojaiah, N. Venugopala Rao, I. Narasaiah, “Land and Income Inequalities in Rural Andhra Pradesh,” The Marxist, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, April-June 2012, p. 61. For an earlier study with the same results, see V. K. Ramachandran, Vikas Rawal and Madhura Swaminathan, “Land, Assets, Incomes and Employment in Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh,” The Marxist, vol. XXVI, no. 2, April-June 2010, p. 68.

[162]

    Andhra Pradesh State Conference, “Extracts from the Political-Organisational Report,” The Marxist, vol. XXIV, no. 1, January-March 2008, p. 12.

[163]

    Andhra Pradesh State Committee, “Andhra Pradesh State Conference. Excerpts from the PolOrg Report,” The Marxist, vol. XX, no. 4-vol. XXI, no. 1, October 2004-March 2005, p. 48.

[164]

    P. Sainath, “The Politics of Free Lunches,” The Hindu, June 15, 2003.

[165]

    CPI-M, Political-Organisational Report, 2012, p. 72.

[166]

    G. Haragopal, “Dimensions of Regionalism: Nationality Question of Andhra,” Nationality Question in India, Pune: Training for Development Scholarship Society, 1987.

[167]

    “CPI-M Stand on Telangana Issue,” People’s Democracy, May 15, 2005.

[168]

    Andhra Pradesh State Conference, “Extracts,” pp. 11-14.

[169]

    Parvathi Menon, Breaking Barriers. Stories of Twelve Women, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2004, pp. 58-59.

[170]

    The case is summarized in Prem Chowdhry, Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples. Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 100-108.

[171]

    Armstrong, Gender and Globalisation, p. 116.

[172]

    Presentation by Zareena Khursheed, AIDWA secretary of the UP unit, AIDWA National Convention against “Honour Killings,” January 11, 2004 and “Report of AIDWA visit to Muzaffarnagar,” Ganashakti, October 8, 2013.

[173]

 

 

For one example of such “revenge rapes,” see “Revenge Rape: Girl gangraped in

Muzaffarnagar,” Financial Express, September 4, 2014. [174]

    Armstrong, Gender and Globalisation, p. 130.

[175]

    Elisabeth Armstrong, “When the Door Becomes a Window: Domesticity and Activism,” 42nd Conference on South Asia. October 17-20, 2013, Madison, WI, USA.

[176]

    AIDWA, Draft Report-II. Work Report & Organisation Report, 9th All India Conference, November 9-12, 2010, Kanpur, p. 77.

[177]

    AIDWA, Issues, Interventions and Struggles. AIDWA Work Review and Organisation, 19982001, 6th Conference Report, November 24-27, 2001, Vizhakhapatanam, p. 36.

[178]

    “Rapes Occur in India, Not Bharat: RSS Supremo Bhagwat,” Times of India, January 4, 2013.

[179]

    CPI-M, Central Committee Communiqué, October 14, 2012.

[180]

    T. K. Rajalakshmi, “Hisar’s Shame,” Frontline, vol. 29, issue 22, November 3-16, 2012 and “Women Hold a Large Rally Protesting a Spate of Rapes in Haryana,” People’s Democracy, vol. XXXVI, no. 42, October 21, 2012.

[181]

    Omar Rashid, “Far from media storm, UP village grieves for its daughter,” The Hindu, December 20, 2012.

[182]

    Jason Burke, “In the Delhi slum home of gang-rape accused: ‘We are good people.’” The Guardian, December 31, 2012.

[183]

    Subhashini Ali, “From Outrage to Empowerment,” The Hindu, December 23, 2012.

[184]

    Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, “Rape in Delhi: Thousands Protest for Women’s Safety in India,” Vice, December 30, 2012.

[185]

    Aijaz Ahmad, On Communalism and Globalization. Offensives of the Far Right, New Delhi: Three Essays, 2002, pp. 80-81.

[186]

    Louis Althusser, “A letter on art in reply to André Daspre,” Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 224.

[187]

    E. M. S Namboodiripad, “Half a Century of Marxist Cultural Movement in India,” The Marxist, vol. 4, no. 2, April-June 1986.

[188]

    Documents of the Marxist Cultural Movement in India, ed. Sudhi Pradhan, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979, vol. 1, p. 53.

[189]

    Documents of the Marxist Cultural Movement in India, vol. 1, pp. 20-21.

[190]

    IPTA, “People’s Theatre Stars the People,” IPTA Bulletin, no. 1, July 1943.

[191]

    Sunil Janah, Photographing India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 9-10.

[192]

    Habib Tanvir, Memoirs, Delhi: Penguin, 2013, pp. 266-272.

[193]

    “‘The people gave us so much energy,’ Safdar Hashmi interviewed by Eugène van Erven,” Theatre of the Streets. The Jana Natya Manch Experience, ed. Sudhanva Deshpande, Delhi: Janam, 2007, p. 40.

[194]

    Arjun Ghosh, A History of Jana Natya Manch. Plays for the People, New Delhi: Sage, 2012, p. 50.

[195]

    Ghosh, A History, p. 262.

[196]

    Ahmad, “Globalization and Culture,” On Communalism and Globalization, pp. 113-114.

[197]

    Ghosh, A History, p. 136.

[198]

    Sudhanva Deshpande, “Why this issue?” Seagull Theatre Quarterly, Issues 32-33, 2002, p .40.

[199]

    Mariam Sharma, “Anand Patwardhan: Social activist and dedicated filmmaker,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, June 2002.

[200]

    “ABVP starts campaign against live-in relationships in DU,” India Today, October 8, 2014.

 

7. Indo-Communism?

The days after the 2014 election results came out, despondency and recrimination struck the liberals. Many slumped into depression, terrified of what might come from a Modi government. Several important liberal intellectuals had already made their accommodations with Modi, suggesting that he had changed since 2002, and that he should be “given a chance.”[1] Liberals hoped that Modi 2.0, the Vikas Purush (Development Man) would be unlike Modi 1.0, the Vinash Purush (Destruction Man).

None on the Left saw the possibility of a Modi 2.0. It had a structural analysis of the rise of the Right, and this was unchanged. On the Left the debate broke out over the terrible result in West Bengal. The first statements from the CPI-M indicated that the Left Front had done badly in West Bengal because of the violence, intimidation and rigging. This was certainly part of the story, but it does not explain the gradual decline since 2008. Not long after the election the Central Committee of the CPI-M met to discuss the results. At this meeting, the party’s General Secretary Prakash Karat laid out the shortcomings of the campaign. The starkest point regarded “organizational atrophy,” which led to a “failure to initiate struggles and develop movements. Stereotyped methods of functioning and the inability to maintain live links with the people are problems.”[2] The requirement of increasing the mass base of the Left leads the list. The numbers who are in the CPI-M and its mass fronts, for example, are not negligible. Currently, over one million people are card-carrying members of the CPI-M, while sixty one million people are in the party’s mass fronts – All India Kisan Sabha (22 million), Democratic Youth Federation of India (14 million), All India Democratic Women’s Association (11 million), All-India Agricultural Workers’ Union (5 million), Centre for Indian Trade Unions (5 million) and the Student Federation of India (4 million). The numbers of people in the CPI, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Forward Bloc, the CPI-ML, and

the SUCI only add to these figures. In a country of 1.3 billion, this number is small, and yet it is substantial.

What the Left considers essential is a mass base. A politics of transformation is not to be won simply by better arguments. A hundred policy documents with more rational ways to organize the state or to craft a more just budget will not make an impact unless there is the force of political power behind them. Correct ideas are never sufficient; they are not believed or enacted simply because they are right. They become the ideas of our time only when they are wielded by those who come to believe in their own power, who use it to struggle through the institutions and to consolidate that power. This is a view that the liberals either do not share or do not wish to acknowledge – if they shared or acknowledged this view, the liberals would build their own political force. Liberal politics in India has a tattered history. It originated in the 1910s, when the extremists took hold of the Congress. Liberal leader Tej Bahadur Sapru disdained the call for Swaraj, taking a few of his closest allies into the National Liberal Federation of India in 1919. Rather than try to build a mass party, Sapru made an alliance with the Indian princes to argue for increasing rights to Indians in a federal set-up – allowing princes to have fuller sovereignty in their kingdoms, and therefore less rights to Indians as it turned out. Sapru’s party opposed all of the Congress’ mass agitations – from the first satyagrahas to the final push for independence in 1946. In 1930, Sapru had confided to a friend, “I do not think that we have yet got the mentality for democratic form of Government.”[3] Distance from the masses meant that although it contested the 1937 elections, it made no impact. It was a victim of its own refinement. No real liberal party appeared in independent India. Many liberals took refuge in the Congress – a situation that prevails to this day. The presence in the right-wing Swatantra Party of Minoo Masani, who ran the Indian Liberal Group, did not influence that party. The banker Meera Sanyal now runs Masani’s Indian Liberal Group. She ran for the Lok Sabha in 2014 on the Aam Aadmi Party ticket for Mumbai South, trailing in fourth place. That the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (in India) is on the AAP’s National Committee on Economic Policy says something about AAP’s accommodation not to liberalism but to neo-liberalism – to the agenda of the banks. Other liberal parties are vehicles for the ambition of this or that politician. The most striking is the Swatantra Bharat Paksh,

headed by Sharad Joshi, whose liberalism has come to mean opposition to the bill for 33 per cent reservation for women in political institutions. His ambition is to delete the word socialism from the Indian constitution. The failure to establish a mass liberal party and the collapse of the social democratic pole in the Congress as well as in the socialist parties certainly leaves Indian liberals at a serious loss. For several decades, important liberal voices have called for the communist parties in India – certainly the CPI-M – to resign themselves to the present, shrug off their communist heritage and don the mantle of social democracy. The most recent plea for this came from the major liberal historian and commentator Ramachandra Guha in an essay in Caravan (2011). The communist presence in parliament had fallen between 2004 and 2009, and the Left Front lost power in both Kerala and West Bengal. The Left appeared weak. It was in this context that Guha argued, “a modern, democratic and even properly Indian Marxism needs a strong dose of robust revisionism.”[4] At moments of crisis for the left in India, the liberal intelligentsia has asked for its liquidation – to become something akin to the Congress Socialist Party and provide a mass vehicle for their aspirations. What does Guha mean by “revisionism”? The term after all is saturated with considerable abuse in the Marxist tradition, referring as it does to Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 The Prerequisites for Socialism. Bernstein, unlike Marx, believed that capitalism would evolve graciously from the obscenity of private property relations to socialist relations. There was little need to have a revolutionary party to prepare for la lutte finale, the final struggle – when the old granite bloc of capital would use all the force at its disposal to protect its privileges and property. Rosa Luxemburg in her Reform or Revolution? (1900) argued that Bernstein’s approach would “turn social reform from a means of the class struggle into its final aim.” No more should communism strive to change property relations and lay the foundation for an equal, socialist society. It should simply be content with small reforms to ameliorate the suffering of the present. This, in sum, seemed to be Guha’s advice to the communists. Guha, who is no stranger to the Marxist tradition, decided to go back to the most recent debate in the world communist movement about revisionism – under the name of Eurocommunism.[5] He turned to the leader of the Spanish Communist Party (CPE) Santiago Carrillo for inspiration. Carrillo offered a sophisticated reconstruction of Bernstein’s revisionism.

Like Bernstein, Carrillo argued that capitalism had already produced the institutional framework for a gradual transition to socialism. The CPI-M’s B. T. Ranadive, in 1977, had written a review of Carrillo’s book Eurocommunism and the State. Ranadive’s review was swift and unyielding.[6] Carrillo had called, essentially, for a break with the idea of communism – to build a socialist and democratic Spain out of the already democratic institutions of the State, and to utilize the multinational corporations (which would remain in private hands) in the national interest. [7] Ranadive accused Carrillo of threatening to destroy Europe’s communist movement. Social reform was certainly to be pursued, argued Ranadive, but not at the cost of the long-term battle for socialism – the final aim. Carrillo’s Eurocommunism needs to be put in its context. It did not come from nowhere and did not go anywhere. In 1972, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) elected Enrico Berlinguer, an aristocratic Sardinian, as its leader. Europe seemed torn between two extremes – the emergence of the far right and the far left, both in reaction to an unsustainable economic crisis and intensified worker militancy. The PCI was not able to harness the wave of strikes to build a wide enough socialist alliance. It floundered. The 1973 coup against socialist leader Salvador Allende’s government in Chile frightened Berlinguer.[8] He began to push for moderation on the world stage – for détente, for a third way between European socialism and Soviet communism. At the 1976, pan-European Communist meeting in East Berlin, the French Communists (PCF) and the Spanish Communists joined the PCI to carve out their own kind of political movement. Their document went after Moscow more than Washington – “once Moscow was our Rome,” said Carrillo at this meeting, “but no more. Now we acknowledge no guiding centre, no international discipline.”[9] Carrillo’s pessimism was haunted by what he saw in neighbouring Portugal. There, the Portuguese Communist Party’s influence grew exponentially during the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Something mysterious occurred, as far as Carrillo knew, that set the reactionary cat amongst the revolutionary pigeons. A ruthless crackdown by the military in late November 1974 scattered the communist fortunes.[10] Carrillo had no stomach for the reality of the counter-revolution. He believed that moderation from the communists would forestall the attack. Berlinguer and Carrillo claimed that their break with the past was actually in line with the history of Western European communism. They

suggested that when the Soviet Red Army marched into Hungary in 1956, their parties had already drawn a red line between themselves and Moscow. Indeed, Berlinguer’s mentor, Palmiro Togliatti had in 1956 coined the term polycentrism – each national communist party had to forge its own road to socialism.[11] The debate around polycentrism, in which Berlinguer cut his political teeth, is no stranger to the Indian context. After all, it was in the 1950s that the CPI’s inner struggle proceeded over its analysis of the role of Moscow and of the Congress. The 1964 split produced the CPI-M, Ranadive’s party, which was clearly on the side of polycentric communism – although both Togliatti and Ranadive would have agreed that this did not imply at all a hostile position toward Moscow. 1970s Eurocommunism was, on the other hand, anti-Moscow – a decisive difference from even Western European communism of the earlier decades. The CPI-M leadership took the Eurocommunism debate seriously because they had also been in a long-term serious discussion about the utility of using parliamentary means. After the coup against Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) coalition in 1973, E. M. S. Namboodiripad gave a talk in Calcutta on “Chile and the Parliamentary Road to Socialism.” Allende’s UP won the presidency, but it did not control the parliament, nor did it have any mechanism to constrain the immensely powerful oligarchs, the military or the United States embassy (an old joke: why is there no coup in the United States? Because it does not have a US embassy). How did the Chilean left prepare for the counter-revolution? The Chilean left’s weakness “could have been overcome,” said Namboodiripad, “if the government of the Popular Unity bloc had used its power to arm the people, or a split had taken place within the armed forces.”[12] The parliamentary road was not to be scoffed at, Namboodiripad argued, and yet, the Left should not take power unless it is powerful enough – the putsch had to be cast aside, and so too the invitation from the bourgeois parties to do its dirty work. Once having taken power, the reactionaries will come in the dark of the night, armed and ready to do mayhem. It is for this inevitability that the left must prepare – winning mass support is one mechanism, but so too is building up an organizational capacity fierce enough to withstand the counterrevolution. It was not the use of parliamentary democracy that bothered the CPI or the CPI-M. What bothered them was the danger of the annihilation of a working-class bloc to fight against the very powerful bloc of Property and Privilege.

The debate around Euro-communism in India took place over two years. It was not merely in the essay of Ranadive. Both the CPI and the CPI-M leadership worried that if they divorced themselves from their traditions, they would liquidate their parties. The CPI’s Mohit Sen argued, “Euro-Communism needs only to be rejected but criticized and relentlessly combatted. All efforts have to be made to see that it does not become the Maoism of advanced capitalist countries and repeat the damage and disaster of that pernicious ideology.”[13] Others in his party, including intellectuals who would abandon it three decades later for the Aam Aadmi Party, would call for the adoption of Euro-Communism.[14]

Namboodiripad’s hesitation over Euro-Communism followed that of both Mohit Sen and Ranadive. The context of contemporary politics is the reality of both the class struggle and of imperialism’s “ferocious attacks,” as Namboodiripad put it.[15] The CPI-M, he argued, had to hold to the “doctrines of proletarian dictatorship, proletarian internationalism, the hegemony of the working-class in the democratic struggle.” What does this mean? To defend the Marxist-Leninist approach indicates the party’s assessment that the social relations of the present – founded on private property – would not surrender willingly. If this is the case, then the party needs to overthrow the old social relations by democratic and disciplined struggle – it will have to inaugurate a “proletarian dictatorship,” where the workers, as the majority, will rule in their interest. It will face ideological and physical attacks from the power bloc, and if it is not steeled by its theory and its organization then its membership will wilt. Finally, if the party is not clear about the illusions of nationalism that draw workers away from their own interests and set them into a web of false interests with the bourgeoisie – against foreigners or the enemy – then they will not only stand against workers of other countries, but also against their own class interests. These class interests are protected by “proletarian internationalism” rather than bourgeois nationalism. Namboodiripad’s concerns are genuine, driven by the reality of social domination – and not by nostalgia or the blindness of orthodoxy. In a subsequent issue of Caravan in 2011, CPI-M General Secretary Prakash Karat offered a considered response to Ramachandra Guha.[16] Firstly, Karat pointed out that Carrillo’s theory ended with the selfdestruction of the PCE. The Party dissolved into the Izquierda Unida (United Left, 1986), various green formations and then into the Catalonia-

based Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (United and Alternative Left, 1998).[17] In the 2014 European elections, a broad front – Podemos (We Can) – made significant gains but largely as a protest party. It does not carry the mantle of working-class power or of socialism. Secondly, the CPI-M, Karat argued, is not as hidebound as Guha describes it – the party revised its programme in 2000, at each Congress it reconsiders its strategy and tactics based on the changes in the world, and over the course of the past several decades it has entered into coalitional governments in various states. Rightly Guha bemoans the political culture in India. Graft is a commonplace feature, with distinctions not made between corrupt politicians and non-corrupt politicians, but on more corrupt versus less corrupt. The communists, Guha notes, are not only largely moral and personally incorruptible but they are also fair and rational in their outlook. Guha, and other liberals, had written about the lengthening roots of corruption into the main political parties. If the communists entered an alliance with the Congress, for instance, he hoped, “they would have provided a much needed stiffening to the Central government. The communist ministers would have been among the most articulate and intelligent members of the Union cabinet, and certainly the most honest. They would have shown a commitment to maintaining communal harmony.” The test case of these opportunities came in 1996, when the Janata Dal and its allies turned to CPI-M leader Jyoti Basu and asked him to be the Prime Minister. The CPI-M Central Committee met to go over this invitation and rejected it. Basu later called this “a political blunder. It is a historic blunder.”[18] Basu had been in a United Front government for West Bengal in 1967 and 1969-70 (in alliance with the Bangla Congress). He knew intimately that even when the communists had the largest bloc in the State Assembly, the governors (Dharam Vira and Shanti Dhawan) used all means to prevent a communist government. It was only when the Left Front won an overwhelming majority in 1977 were they permitted to take power. In Kerala, the Left had been removed by Nehru’s decree in 1959, despite a majority in the State Assembly. This is the context of the Left’s hesitancy to enter office – unless it has a majority, it will not be able to rule, and unless it has a majority, it will not be able to set policy. Karat answer for Guha drew from this assessment,  

The test has been whether it has the requisite strength to set the policy direction of the government. The real issue for the CPI-M is that joining a government is not for the purpose of sharing the spoils of power or the trappings of authority, but of having the adequate strength both inside and outside Parliament to get alternative policies implemented. This is not possible when governments are dominated by parties that represent the interests of the ruling classes.

 

In 1996, despite refusing the offer of leading the government, the Left did join the United Front and took a seat on its steering committee. In 2004, the communist bloc did support the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government but without getting into government. The UPA and the Left bloc drafted a Common Minimum Programme (CMP), an agreement about what is possible and what might be possible. To monitor the CMP, the two sides created a Coordination Committee. The 61 Left Members of Parliament voted to support the UPA, from the outside. The CPI-M and the Left Front wanted to be “the watchdogs of the new government, not their lapdogs,” as CPI-M Politburo member Sitaram Yechury colourfully put it. The Common Minimum Program was not a revolutionary, postcapitalist document. Instead, it laid out a broadly social democratic agenda. On the economic front, the CMP called for an increase in government expenditures to provide relief to the population, notably the rural poor. Women’s empowerment was to be fully supported in every domain. The CMP pledged to ensure an economic growth rate of 7-8 percent “in a manner that generates employment so that each family is assured of a safe and viable livelihood.” For the pro-capitalists in the Congress Party, this emphasis on growth was crucial, as was the aim “to unleash the creative energies of our entrepreneurs, businessmen, scientists, engineers and all other professionals and productive forces of society.” Labour was to be given welfare, while professionals were to be given energy. This was hardly a progressive foundation, but it was all that the Left could gain. It shows how little is possible in a united front from above with parties such as the Congress. But the Left went ahead with the CMP, largely because of the national feeling that religious fundamentalism (manifested by the BJP) must be rejected. It would be wrong to characterize entry in the UPA government as revolutionary, or to say that the Congress had a “left-wing mandate” (as David Harvey puts it in his Brief History of Neoliberalism).[19] Kicking and screaming, the Congress accepted many of the suggestions of the Left in

order to make the fractured popular mandate into a stable government. Knowing that it did not have the power to determine the course of the Indian political agenda, the Left also compromised with the UPA and accepted a social democratic agenda. This was not a forced compromise, but a voluntary compromise.[20]

The UPA-Left compromise broke down on July 9, 2008, when the Congress Party decided to push ahead with a nuclear deal with the United States. The deal was not merely about nuclear fuel for India, but also for India to be drawn into the US narrative for world events. India’s agreement to vote against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was one part of this, as was the pressure for India to accept the US position on various international trade issues. The Congress Party called for a “trust vote” in the Parliament. Since the Left was going to vote against the UPA government, it was sure to lose the vote. This is where Guha’s worries about corruption found their validation. The BJP parliamentarians rushed into the well during the “trust vote” and threw bundles of cash to the floor. They claimed that the Congress and its allies had tried to bribe them to vote for the government or abstain. Bribery aside, others had agreed to vote with the government in exchange for prized ministries (such as the Coal Ministry, which is a giant ATM machine; the minister gets to funnel contracts here and there, and reap the long-term “rewards” from this market). Rather than halt the process, the Speaker went ahead with the vote, and the government sailed through. Prabhat Patnaik precisely called the parliamentary vote a coup d’etat: “The fact that parliament was subdued not with tanks but with cash-for-votes does not make it any less a coup d’etat; nor does the fact that it was carried out not by a bunch of generals but by a bunch of bureaucrats or ex-bureaucrats (which includes the prime minister), and by persons whose life in politics, such as it is, has never included any contact with ordinary people.”[21] Patnaik points his finger at the section of the Congress, weighed down by the liberals, who were hell-bent on a close alignment with the United States and with the full implementation of the liberalisation agenda. Their mandate came from their own sense that they were correct, with lubrication of funds to their new allies permissible to get the ends they desired. In the wreckage of parliament, the UPA liberal leadership began to crow that without the Left, the government – as finance minister P. Chidambaram put it, “will take economic reforms forward.”[22] Meanwhile, as soon as the vote came through, the White House hastened to

congratulate Singh, and to pledge to do all it can in the IAEA and at the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The continuation of outside support by the Left for a government whose commitment to the US narrative was stronger than its own domestic liberal agenda would have been impossible. With the bulk of the Indian political landscape on the side of neoliberal policies, the Left has to find allies based on issues and on struggles. It cannot afford to enter government where it is handed a brief that it cannot carry forward. It is instructive that Guha says that the CPI-M in 2004 would have protected the Congress from its “corrupt allies.” It is the Congress, however, that is not only corrupt but has been the main architect of neoliberal reform. Those reforms, Karat argues, have destroyed the political foundation not only of classical liberalism (which had barely any roots in India), but also old-fashioned Indian nationalism (Nehruvianism). “With the advent of neoliberalism,” Karat writes, “liberal democracy and social democracy became denuded in the face of the savage offensive of finance capital. Guha’s admired model is an empty shell in most of Europe. In the United States it hardly exists at all.” This is an important point. The context has changed not only for Indian liberals but also for Indian Marxists. Our landscape is denuded and requires close attention to the social conditions of politics. The reaction to the electoral defeat of the Left is not political suicide, but study and work. One of Guha’s points, which is a cliché elsewhere, is that the Left believes in an outmoded theory and cloaks itself in anachronistic symbols – drop the pictures of Marx and the hammer and sickle, they suggest. The question of theory is an important one, and should not be treated cavalierly. It is important to recognize that the Indian Left had a major debate on its assessment of the Indian Republic, its theory and its practice, from 1947 to 1964, when the CPI-M split from the CPI. There is no question of a mimetic attitude either to Marx or to Moscow. E. M. S. Namboodiripad, like Jose Carlos Mariategui and Mahdi Amel, was a scrupulous thinker of his own social reality drawn from Marxist concepts that he worked on and through. On the question of symbols, every political tradition roots itself in its past so as not to lose its way toward the future. The BJP keeps ancient symbols close to its work, and the Congress adorns itself in its history from 1885. Neither has decided to jettison its past. What they are able to do is to claim the future. This is the challenge for the Left: not to abandon its

legacy, but to demonstrate to the public that it has a roadmap to produce an equitable and just future. Karat says that the advent of neoliberalism has eviscerated liberal democracy and social democracy. Indeed, neoliberalism is nothing else than the restoration of the class power of the bourgeoisie. The owners of Capital, who previously had their power hemmed in by the rise of the socialist bloc, the trade union and social movements and the rise of national liberation states, are now free. This restoration of class power comes through in the following vectors:   A direct attack on the state and at state intervention. Neo-liberal thinkers argue that state intervention is inefficient in economic terms. They blame all the failures of previous attempts to use state power to create equality as the reason for inequality – their guru, Fredrich Hayek’s 1944 book is tellingly titled The Road to Serfdom, with the suggestion that communism can only lead to the gulag. It is an audacious argument. With the mass of the corporate media and a prone intelligentsia behind it, this argument has made great inroads into the public consciousness. It means that large parts of a Left agenda for the use of the state to develop equitable policies is challenged by those who would benefit from such an alternative. An argument for the privatization of state functions and state concerns as well as to introduce what had been in the commons – such as water and education – into public hands. This includes social wealth such as pension funds and social resources such as health care systems (which include pharmaceutical industries that do not adhere to intellectual property regimes). A narrowing of political participation into a cliché of democracy, namely periodic ritual elections, including elections of military chieftains. Social movements and organizations, the objective basis of political participation, are discouraged as a danger to order. This results in an increased fragmentation of society; at worst into the cellular world of individual consumers. On a global stage, this has meant the use of new technologies (satellite communications and container ships) and new legal frameworks (the intellectual property regimes enshrined in the World Trade Organisation) to develop the theory of the global commodity chain, with production facilities broken up across national borders and firms with a tentacular – subcontracted – relationship to production now able to become vast oligopologic entities. Such a landscape weakens the ability of formally democratic institutions (such as the state) to have control over production, with the policy of nationalization invalidated by the global commodity chain – how can a country survive if its production facilities for the soles of shoes, not the shoe itself, is embargoed for being under national control?

On a global stage again, states are vulnerable to the movement of finance, which uses the inevitability of short-term and long-term debt to blackmail countries into following capital’s dictates even if this means going against one’s people. The ratings agencies (Moody’s, Standards and Poor) will downgrade a country and make it more expensive to borrow money if the country does anything to challenge finance capital. The IMF will refuse to underwrite loans if there is any hesitancy about the full adoption of the IMF-driven agenda for “liberal” reforms. Finally, despite the demise of the primacy of the United States, the immense power of its military and its ability to suborn international institutions to its will provide a firm indication of 21st century imperialism. The power of the United States constrains the political choices before countries of the Global South, such as India. To assume that US military and institutional authority does not play an adverse role in trade negotiations, for instance, is to be naïve toward the operation of power in our world today.

 

Such is the context of the present. To cry for liberal application of neoliberal policy is a voice in the wilderness. The problem is not that the neoliberal policy-makers do not know that there is inequality; it lies in their refusal to allow any policies that would ameliorate the social consequence of inequality, let alone sharply change the policy regime to allow for alternatives. Power blocks liberal ideas, just as it blocks revolutionary transformation. If the problem is power and not an insufficient recognition of the problem, then the answer is to find the means to build more powerful movements, a more powerful set of parties. The class struggle that is endemic to capitalism cannot be seen merely in the electoral domain. It cannot be reduced to the relations between political parties and their role in the parliament. Socialism cannot be constrained by the timid imagination of liberalism. It dreams more, it imagines greater times ahead. It is driven by the self-emancipation of the working-class. That class has no need to ask permission for its destiny. But it has to struggle hard to build the pathway for its future.     [1]

    Shiv Vishwanathan, “How Modi Defeated Liberals Like Me,” The Hindu, May 22, 2014. For a smart liberal riposte to the self-flagellation, see Mihir Sharma, “Liberals under Mr. Modi,” Business Standard, June 8, 2014.

[2]

    Prakash Karat, “Renewing the Party & the Left: Steps to be Taken,” People’s Democracy, July 6, 2014.

[3]

    Rima Hooja’s Crusader for Self-Rule: Tej Bahadur Sapru & The Indian National Movement, Delhi: Rawat, 1999, p. 167.

[4]

    Ramachandra Guha, “After the Fall,” Caravan, June 2011.

[5]

    Ramachandra Guha, “An Anthropologist Among the Marxists,” An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.

[6]

    Santiago Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977 and B. T. Ranadive, “Carrillo’s Eurocommunism and the State,” Social Scientist, vol. 7, no. 3, October 1978.

[7]

    A critique, much more fierce than BTR, was the veteran PCE leader Eladio Garcia Castro, who left the party over the Eurocommunism thesis for Maoist-inspired Spanish Workers’ Party (PTE). España, hacia un socialism sin adjetivos, Madrid: Manifesto Editorial, 1978, p. 65.

[8]

    Andrea Mulas, Allende e Berlinguer. Il Cile dell-Unidad Popular e il compromesso storico italiano, San Cesario di Lecce: Piero Manni, 2005, p. 200.

[9]

    Fernando Claudin, Eurocommunism and Socialism, London: New Left Books, 1978, p. 54.

[10]

    Paul Preston, The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo, New York: HarperCollins, 2014.

[11]

    VIII Congresso del PCI, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1956, p. 45.

[12]

    EMS Namboodripad, “Chile and the Parliamentary Road to Socialism,” Selected Writings, Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1982, p. 116.

[13]

    Mohit Sen, “Communism and Euro-Communism,” Mainstream, August 5, 1978.

[14]

    Kamal Mitra Chenoy and Anuradha Mitra Chenoy, “Eurocommunism: Its Validity and Relevance for India,” Mainstream, August 11, 1979.

[15]

    E. M. S. Namboodiripad, “Euro-Communism and India, Part 2,” Mainstream, June 24, 1978. See also, Mrinal Datta-Chaudhuri, “Democracy and Mr. Namboodiripad,” Seminar, no. 233, January 1979. One of Namboodiripad’s interlocutors was Pradeep Bose, The Indian Communist Movement and Euro-Communism, Calcutta: A New Left Forum Publication, 1978. Bose, like Ramachandra Guha, was a well-respected commentator. Namboodiripad answered him in EuroCommunism and India, Delhi: Janavadi Vichar Manch, 1978 in much the same manner as Prakash Karat would answer Guha in 2011, Prakash Karat, “Theory and Practice,” Caravan, November 2011.

[16]

    Karat, “Theory and Practice.” A full analysis of the 1996 decision is in Aijaz Ahmad, “In the Eye of the Storm: the Left Chooses,” EPW, vol. XXXI, no. 22, June 1, 1996.

[17]

    Gregorio Moran, Miseria y grandeza del Partido Comunista de Espana, 1939-1985, Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1986.

[18]

    M. J. Akbar, “Interview with Jyoti Basu,” Asian Age, January 2, 1997.

[19]

    David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 186.

[20]

    For the distinction between a forced and a voluntary compromise, see V. I. Lenin, “On Compromises,” Collected Works, vol. 25, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, pp. 309-314.

[21]

    Prabhat Patnaik, “The Coup d’Etat,” Pragoti, August 11, 2008.

[22]

    “Reforms will be taken forward, says Chidambaram,” Hindustan Times, July 23, 2008.

 

Epilogue

Antonio Gramsci opens his essay on The Modern Prince with the acknowledgment that it is not a “systematic treatment but a ‘live’ work.”[1] This book certainly does not presume to offer either a systematic account of India’s history or a systematic treatment of the wave of communism that continues its ebbs and flows in India’s society. No Free Left is a “live work,” an invitation to debate and discussion. It plots the emergence of Indian communism and threads a needle through the fabric of its growth, fragmentation and consolidation.

One of the great sneers toward communism these days is for its presumed anachronism. What communism? In the 21st century? Even China is a capitalist country! Cuba has allowed barbers to operate in the private sector! Meanwhile, in factories and fields, in call centers and office buildings across India workers produce the goods and services without seeming to improve their own conditions of life. Capitalism dances between a major contradiction: between social production and private property. Capital – namely Money that thirsts to make more Money endlessly – superbly organizes all the hitherto slumbering forces of production into one effectively organized social process. The time of the pre-capitalist era is thrust aside as capital condenses labour power into each second. Waste is forbidden, and rest is sin. Even relaxation must be made into a commodity – a walk is not enough, a personal trainer is essential! The remarkable productivity of social production ties workers in one part of the world to another, brings commodities from here to there and undertakes to enrich everyday life. That is, after all, the great promise of globalization – it links people together and allows humans to enjoy the fruits of each other’s labour. The problem, however, is that the immense productivity of capitalism is generated by private property. Capital is privately held money that is restless and must always seek a profit. It is through the competition

of private capitals that capital is able to draw out surplus value from the productive process. Private capital engenders social production. It is the motor of this gargantuan project. The shackles of private property prevent capital from enlivening the creative powers of human labour – the pressure of profit, the fruit of private property, seeks to draw more and more from the workers whose own resourcefulness if stifled by the social relations of the production process. Poverty is not an unfortunate manifestation of this system, but its necessary product. To eradicate poverty is to organize the producing classes to overthrow the system of private property and found a system based on socialist property relations. Charity might remove the immediacy of suffering – but there is no substitute to the struggle to found a new order, one that was not regimented around suffering. This insistence of organizing the producing classes leads Marxism directly to an intervention in the world – hence Marx’s important formulation, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however is to change it.” The 1917 breakthrough in Russia, and then again in China (1949) and Cuba (1959) as well as in other places as varied as Afghanistan, South Yemen and Vietnam, sent a charge through international communism. In July 1921, the Communist International formulated rules and advice for communists around the world. Most of these rules are straightforward. But one particular statement stands out – “For a communist party there is no time in which the party organisation cannot be politically active.”[2] This advice was useful seventy years later when the USSR collapsed, and the world communist movement suffered greatly from its defeat. History, it was then said, is over: capitalism has proved that it is now eternal and cannot be superseded. Marxism remains an essential framework to analyze a system that continues to operate by the same basic rhythms as it did for the past several hundred years. Capitalism has no-doubt changed its form, developed a greater role for finance, but it remains governed by the system of social production and private gain, by capital’s immense power over the system of production and accumulation. Harsh conditions of work and life, the fight over labour time and intensity illuminate the centrality of the class struggle in our social order. It calls upon the Left to be “politically active,” to throw itself into this struggle and that, to extend, to deepen and to unify the myriad struggles for concrete demands. As each struggle develops it bring a

response from the bourgeoisie, and each such response clarifies the political fight that must be waged by the workers not for this or that reform but for a transformation of a system that requires poverty. A system that produces diabolical levels of poverty is not capable of making poverty history. For that the structures have to be transformed, the final aim of a communist movement. To abandon that final aim is to leave society with the illusion in small reforms. Seven hundred million Indians living in destitution cannot afford those illusions. Nor can the rest.   [1]

    Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 125.

[2]

    “Extracts from the Theses on the Structure of Communist Parties and on the Methods and Content of their Work, Adopted by the Third Comintern Congress,” July 12, 1921, The Communist International, 1919-1943. Documents. Ed. Jane Degras, London: Oxford University Press, 1956, vol. 1, p 256. This is the thesis that Lenin found to be “too Russian, it reflects the Russian experience.”

   

Acknowledgements

Working with LeftWord Books since its inception in 1999 has opened up the world for me. Not only did it allow me to work closely with my comrade and collaborator Sudhanva Deshpande, but it also allowed me to develop several intellectual projects – of which this is one.

I am grateful to a set of communists and fellow travellers who continue to teach me how to be a better Marxist – Aijaz Ahmad, Subhashini Ali, Venkatesh Atreya, Ritabrata Banerjee, Biman Basu, Nilotpal Basu, Githa Hariharan, Thomas Isaac, Prabhat Patnaik, Prabir Purkayastha, V. K. Ramachandran, Ramakumar Ram, Vikas Rawal, P. Sainath, Jagmati Sangwan, Sudha Sundaraman, U. Vasuki, Sitaram Yechury, as well as the late Anil Biswas. Brinda and Prakash Karat know how much they mean to me. This book benefitted from a reading by Elisabeth Armstrong, Debashish Chakraborty, Suchetana Chattopadhyay, Sudhanva Deshpande, Subin Dennis and Archana Prasad. This book is for Rosa and Zalia, my red-diaper children, for my family at large, and for a world of comrades from the communists of Houla in Lebanon to the communists of Marinaleda in Spain.   Laal jhanda lekar comrade aage badhte jayenge …   Delhi-Beirut-Northampton 2012-2014

   

LeftWord Books is a New Delhi-based publishing house that seeks to reflect the views of the left in India and South Asia. We publish critical and analytical works on a range of subjects, and pay special attention to works on Marxist theory. We project the interests of the working people and movements for social transformation.   Set up in 1999, LeftWord runs and manages May Day Bookstore and Café, which is next door to a theare space, Studio Safdar.   LeftWord Books is the publishing division of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt Ltd.   www.leftword.com

Table of Contents Prefatory Remarks 1  The Necessity of  Communism 2.  The Great Moving Right Show 3.  The Collapse of Indian Socialism 4.  The Era of Populist Politics 5. The Left 6.  Communism in Neo-liberal Times 7. Indo-Communism? Epilogue Acknowledgements