[Marxism] Impasse in India

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Impasse in India
By Pankaj Mishra

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future
by Martha C. Nussbaum
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 403 pp., $29.95

Last summer Foreign Affairs, Time, Newsweek, and T
In the elections of 2004, Indian Communist parties performed better than 
ever before. The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, had built its election 
campaign around the travails of the ordinary Indian in the age of 
globalization. Much to its own surprise, the party found itself in 
power, with Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, as prime minister.

Singh and his Harvard-educated finance minister P. Chidambaram were 
among the technocrats who initiated India's economic reforms in 1991. 
Their second stint in power has disappointed international business 
periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times as well as 
much of the English-language press in India, which complains 
periodically that economic reform in India has more or less stalled 
since 2004. But given the mandate it received from the electorate, 
Singh's government has little choice but to appear cautious. The rise in 
inflation that accompanies high economic growth proved fatal for many 
governments in India in the previous decade, most recently in the state 
of Punjab where the ruling Congress lost to a coalition, prompting Sonia 
Gandhi to publicly ask the central government to show greater 
sensitivity to the plight of poor Indians.

The government's hands are already tied by rules of free trade inspired 
by such international institutions as the World Trade Organization 
(WTO). Thousands of cotton farmers in central India have killed 
themselves, escaping a plight that Oxfam in a report last year claimed 
had been worsened by their "indiscriminate and forced integration" into 
an "unfair global system" in which the agricultural products of heavily 
subsidized farmers in the US and Europe depress prices globally. Unable 
to persuade the United States to cut its subsidies to American farmers, 
the Indian commerce minister spent much of his time at the WTO's Doha 
Round of talks in July 2006 watching the soccer World Cup.

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20339

Unlike China, India can only go so far in creating a "business-friendly 
climate"—the very limited ambition of many politicians today. In China, 
lack of democratic accountability has helped the nominally Communist 
regime to give generous subsidies and tax breaks to exporters and 
foreign investors. The swift and largely unpublicized suppression of 
protesting peasants has also made it easier for real estate speculators 
acting in tandem with corrupt Party bosses to seize agricultural land.[8]

In India, however, the government's efforts to court businessmen are 
provoking a highly visible backlash from poorer Indians who feel 
themselves excluded from the benefits of globalization. Plans to relax 
India's labor laws —in other words, to import the hire-and-fire 
practices of American companies—have provoked strong protests from trade 
unions. In recent weeks, the government has been forced to reconsider 
its plan to set up Chinese-style Special Economic Zones for foreign 
companies after the project ran into violent opposition from farmers 
facing eviction from their lands.[9]

Such intense mass agitations in India have helped magnify the growing 
contradictions of economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth 
in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by 
distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the 
disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to 
populist politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of 
globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu 
nationalism.

The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless 
peasants, is what has led to militant Communist movements of 
unprecedented vigor and scale—Prime Minister Singh recently described 
them as the greatest internal security threat faced by India since 
independence in 1947.[10] These Mao-inspired Communists, who have their 
own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of 
central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra 
Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa.

Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. 
Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself 
seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves 
where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of 
the country they live in. Affluent Indians are helped in this 
relocation—as much psychological as geographical—by the English-language 
press and television, which, as a report in the International Herald 
Tribune put it, "has concocted a world —all statistical evidence to the 
contrary—in which you are a minority if not fabulously rich."[11]

Nussbaum is right to say that the "level of debate and reporting in the 
major newspapers and at least some of the television networks is 
impressively high." In fact, India is one of the few countries where 
print newspapers and magazines, especially in regional languages, 
continue to flourish. But the most influential part of the Indian press 
not only makes little use of its freedom; it helps diminish the space 
for public discussion, which partly accounts for what the philosopher 
Pratap Mehta calls the "extraordinary non-deliberative nature of Indian 
politics."

On any given day, the front pages of such mainstream Indian newspapers 
as The Hindustan Times and the Times of India veer between 
celebrity-mongering—Britney Spears's new hair-style—and what appears to 
be "consumer nationalism"—reports on Indian tycoons, beauty queens, 
fashion designers, filmmakers, and other achievers in the West. Excited 
accounts of Tata, India's biggest private-sector company, buying the 
Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus make it seem that something like what The 
Economic Times, India's leading business paper, calls "The Global Indian 
Take-over" is underway. Largely reduced to an echo chamber, where an 
elite minority seems increasingly to hear mainly its own voice, the 
urban press is partly responsible for a new privileged generation of 
Indians lacking, as Nussbaum points out, any "identification with the poor."

The stultification of large parts of the Indian mass media is 
accompanied by the growing presence of a new kind of special interest in 
Indian politics: that of large corporations. Close links between 
businessmen and politicians have existed for a long time. But unlike in 
the United States, the electoral process in India was not primarily 
shaped by the candidates' ability to raise corporate money. Compared to 
the US Congress, the Indian parliament was relatively free of lobbyists 
for large companies. This began to change during the rule of the Hindu 
nationalists, who proved themselves as adept in working with big 
businessmen as in holding on to its older constituency of small 
merchants and traders. A recent opinion poll in the newsmagazine Outlook 
reveals that growing public distaste for politics feeds on the intimacy 
between politicians and businessmen.

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20339

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