Lead Article-April 1998

Right-wing BJP claims power amid deepening crisis in India

by Maya Jhansi

An alarming new development threatens India's long history as a secular and multicultural democracy which 50 years ago threw off the yoke of British imperialism: the coming to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, led by the Hindu nationalist, Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 19, 1998, is a right-wing party known for its neofascistic anti-Muslim ideology of Hindutva or Hindu fundamentalism.

A crucial factor which allowed the BJP to form a government was the failure of the Congress Party and the leftist United Front to come together and provide a secular alternative. For now, it seems that the Congress Party will forego challenging the BJP in order to rebuild itself around Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi. The United Front fared the worst in the elections, with its parliamentary standing dropping from 180 to 98 seats. Now, several parties from the United Front have abandoned it or split to join forces with the BJP. The ease with which these "committed" secularists have moved into the BJP fold shows their absolute bankruptcy.

The BJP's rise to prominence is phenomenal-in 1984, they won only two seats out of 543. Today, they and their allies hold over 250 seats. Surely, the devastating economic and social crises in India and the growing discontent of the Indian masses with the corruption and betrayal of the politicians has contributed to the BJP's unprecedented success.

TARGETED MINORITIES

Today, over 350 million Indians, some of the poorest of whom are Muslims who comprise the largest minority, live under the official poverty line. The literacy rate is an appalling 48% overall and 39% for women. Where the Indian constitution projected universal education for Indian children by 1960, today one in three children have never been to school, and anywhere from 17 to 100 million children are enslaved in brutal forms of child labor. For many women, outmoded marital practices, dowry deaths, sati, rape and violence still define the parameters of their existence.

In the face of the intractable crises in India, the BJP resorts to neofascistic scapegoating of India's minorities, and to militaristic denunciations of Pakistan and other foreign powers that supposedly threaten the "unity" of Hindu India. To the Hindu right wing, Dalits and other lower castes are as much of a threat to Hindutva as are the Muslims.

This election is not the first time that Indian political parties have enflamed communal tensions for their own electoral gain. The precursor to the BJP, the Jan Sangh, was part of the reactionary Janata Party government that ousted Indira Gandhi in 1977. The Congress Party itself instigated anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi's assassination by a Sikh bodyguard that led to the deaths of over 3,000 Sikhs and the flight of 50,000 out of New Delhi.

Never before, however, has a party defined by narrow nationalism and religious fundamentalism come to power in India. In 1992, the BJP in collusion with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghatna (RSS), the militant Hindu nationalist organization responsible for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, led mobs in the destruction of a 400-year-old mosque in Ayodhya which they claimed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god, Rama. Over 3,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the riots that swept India in the aftermath. Though apologists claim that communal tensions will be eased under a BJP government, there are already reports of violence against Christians by Hindu fanatics in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra.

In their election manifesto, the BJP declared the Ayodhya incident the "greatest mass movement in post-independence India" which "strengthened the foundation of cultural nationalism." Vajpayee, the so-called "moderate" face of the BJP agreed, saying that "Hindu society had been regenerated."

The concept of Hindu "cultural nationalism"goes back to Golwalker, the leader of the RSS during the time of Gandhi's assassination. In 1939 he wrote that in Hitler's approach to the purity of nationhood lies "a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." Such open advocacy of Nazism has been spewed forth in recent times by Bal Thackeray, the lifetime leader of the Shiv Sena, a group of Hindu fundamentalist thugs who formed an alliance government with the BJP in the state of Maharashtra.

Not all aspects of these elections were to the right, however. In Maharashtra, where people directly experienced BJP-Shiv Sena rule, the Congress Party won an overwhelming majority-38 out of 46 seats. One of the issues involved was outrage over the massacre of Dalits by Mumbai (Bombay) police. One BJP official told a reporter: "A strong undercurrent was running through the minds of Muslims and Dalits against our government. We underestimated their anger and strength, and realized it only after the results were out." This undercurrent of discontent will surely make the BJP's seat of power shaky.

Still, no one should be fooled by the BJP's recent rhetoric about democracy and "consensual politics." No doubt, Vajpayee and the even more rabid Home Minister, L.K. Advani, will wait until they have gained some stability at the center before unleashing their now muted agenda of building a Hindu temple at the site of the demolished mosque in Ayodhya, the abrogation of article 370 of the Indian constitution which grants regional autonomy to the majority Muslim area of Kashmir, and the institution of a uniform civil code. The first task of the BJP is to gain legitimacy by proving to other political parties, to the nation and to the international community as a whole that it can be a stabilizing influence on the shaky political situation. This is, after all, India's fifth government in only two years.

The BJP's quest for stability will mean a greater militarization of Indian society. The one platform they are unwilling to bend on is the drive to openly build nuclear arms. Neither Pakistan nor India are willing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, making the issue of nuclear armament a global threat.

GLOBALIZATION AND GRASSROOTS RESISTANCE

A stable government, even under the stewardship of the BJP, is in the interests of India's ruling class, which is one reason the BJP had the support of India's largest industrial houses. Japan's ambassador to India recently told the Confederation of Indian Industry, that "the political situation has made our people really apprehensive about investing."

The economic platform of the BJP is swadeshi or economic nationalism, a response to the problems that neoliberal restructuring has caused to Indian industry and to the masses in general. India introduced liberalization policies as far back as the early 1980s, which under Rajiv Gandhi's New Economic Policy, in the late 1980s gained some momentum. The fall of so-called Communism in 1989 paved the way for Indian economists and policy makers to advocate more full-scale "free market" restructuring. In 1991 Congress Party Prime Minister Narasimha Rao worked out a new set of economic "reforms" designed to bring India into the globalized economy.

The BJP coalition government has pledged to continue these "reforms." They want a rapid dismantling of internal financial, investment and currency controls, and they support foreign investment in infrastructure. However, they favor a slower opening up of the domestic market to foreign competition to give domestic industry the opportunity to become globally competitive. This has no doubt gained the support of a section of India's capitalists because of the Asian economic crisis, in the wake of which even "experts" who touted unfettered liberalization are now attacking the IMF and World Bank.

India lags far behind other Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and China in economic growth. Though the 1991 Economic "Reforms" were introduced to bring India alongside the so-called Asian "miracles," the process of throwing India open to foreign investment has, at best, been only partial. Compared to China, which reported $40 billion dollars in outside investment in 1996, India reported less than $3 billion the same year. This is in part due to the fact that India lacks the strong, centralized state apparatus that multinational interests prefer.

Grassroots movements against the inhuman logic of capitalist development have also blossomed throughout India, from the struggles of fish workers against factory trawlers to the struggles against Enron Corp. One of the largest and most successful movements in India today is the struggle against the massive Narmada Valley Project in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, a movement led by women. The project is to build 30 large dams, 135 medium dams and 3,000 small ones in the Narmada River Valley. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA or Save the Narmada Valley Movement) estimates that one million people will lose land or be otherwise affected by the building of these dams. The Indian and state governments have either drawn up inadequate resettlement plans or have abandoned the displaced completely.

International and local protests forced the World Bank out of the project five years ago, and continuous revolt and resistance by villagers has put the project on hold for the past three years. In the words of the NBA's outspoken feminist leader, Medha Patkar: "This struggle has been led by women and financed by farmers of the valley. This will send a strong message to Indian and foreign corporations that privatization will not be accepted on their terms. The people will decide how development proceeds in the Narmada Valley."

The twin realities of rising religious fundamentalism and the neoliberal restructuring initiated in 1991 have spurred various grassroots movements around India to unite together as the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM). After much debate and back and forth between the 200 and more movements involved in the NAPM, an alternative manifesto of the people's movements called "The People's Resolve" was issued in 1996. This document hits out against the "profit-oriented New Economic Policy," as well as against caste oppression, sexism, environmental degradation, and child labor, calling for an alternative where "creativity and selfless humanity and not material abundance are valued."

India has a rich legacy of women's liberation, peasant, tribal and labor struggles that is ongoing. The organized Indian left has remained staunchly deaf to these creative mobilizations. Much of the Indian left has historically followed the Soviet or Chinese line, ignoring the needs and aspirations of the Indian masses for a different kind of socialism. Today, the Left's support of neoliberal restructuring is a further betrayal of the masses. West Bengal, for example, "celebrating" 20 years of Left Front rule, was recently declared by Germany to be the state with the best foreign investment climate. This is surely behind the current lack of support for the United Front.

What remains a foremost challenge is working out an alternative vision of Indian society not hemmed in by the false opposites of globalized capitalism on the one hand and economic nationalism on the other. Not only are the slogans of economic nationalism by the BJP disingenuous, they are ultimately bids of the Indian ruling class to maintain control over the capitalist extraction and exploitation of Indian labor. As the Center of Indian Trade Unions' secretary, Vivek Monteiro recently told the TIMES OF INDIA: "Though labor has been badly hit by liberalization, there is not much difference in the economic policies of most national parties."

In general, attempts at liberalization in India face the country's long history of struggle against Western imperialism. The roots of the contradictions that plague India today are found in this rich legacy and in the unfinished nature of India's independence movement. As the first nation to gain its independence from British rule, India opened a whole new Third World, from Asia to the Middle East and from Africa to Latin America.

As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in the early 1960s, "India's world role shone so brightly that it dimmed that other truth, that no fundamental change in human relations occurred after independence. The dominant Congress Party, which had succeeded in uniting all classes in the struggle against foreign domination, first began showing its true class nature by leaving production relations, in the city or the country, basically unchanged." Because the question of what happens after national independence was never confronted, narrow nationalists today are able to pervert the revolutionary history of India's struggle for national self-determination.

As India crosses the 50 year mark of independence, it is still plagued by the deep internal dualities that freedom from British rule by itself never resolved. The BJP clearly sees itself fit to fill the void left by the bankruptcy of the Congress Party and the Indian Left. The vocal discontent of the Indian masses and the persistent humanism of a multicultural and linguistically diverse India will make the BJP's task of staying in power difficult. Yet as everywhere fundamentalism thrives in the wastelands created by the revolutionary left's failure to meet the aspirations of the masses for a better way of life with a viable alternative to capitalism. In light of this, a return to Marx's concept of revolution-in-permanence is imperative if India is ever to develop a truly humanist Indian socialism.


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