It can be seen in retrospect that independence for the vast majority of the people of India has simply meant the exchange of one set of exploiters for another. Independence has solved few of the peasant or working-class problems and in the case of the Indian urban working class the solution to their problems is the same as ours. It does not lie in the substitution of one kind of capitalism for another, just as it did not lie in the substitution of a native Indian master class in place of the British Raj. Their fellow countrymen have been among their most ruthless oppressors. When India achieved independence very little changed except the personnel of the State machine.
Indian capitalists want to have the profits of the developing Indian capitalism for themselves and the Indian nationalist movement represented the interests of Indian capitalists who sought to possess the profits of the developing Indian capitalism for themselves. They wish to be able to control the taxation and tariffs system and use them to further their own interests. They do not object to the exploitation of the Indian workers, but what they do object to is non-Indian investors getting the lion's share; and they objected to British traders, exporting British-made goods to India and enjoying preferential treatment. Nationalism was naturally supported by the Indian educated castes, who saw the promise of fat jobs in the new Indian Army or civil service, and in the legal profession.
But Indians should recognise that their poverty was the result not of foreign rule — which is only one of the many evil by-products of capitalism —but of the capitalist system itself. Independence for India did not solve many of the working class problems. It merely substituted "India for the Indian capitalists" in place of "India for the British capitalists. The only sound policy for the Indian workers in line with their interests is to organise themselves on the economic field for the defence of their interests against their employers, as well as organise on the political field for the ultimate achievement of socialism, in cooperation with the rest of the world's workers. Before India gained its independence British colonial capitalists and administrators had plundered this land but now the Indian workers and peasants are being exploited under home-born masters. Their craft skill and energy serving the modernisation and industrialisation of India in the fight for markets. Our watchword should never be "Britain for the British" nor "India for the Indians," but "The World for the Workers."
If you want to assess a country's progress you should pick up the poorest from among the people and see how far he has gone up the ladder said Mahatma Gandhi. Indian billionaires like the Mittels and the Ambanis compete well with their counterparts in America and mere millionaires in India are cheaper by the dozen. Yet the common man and woman has made little progress and it is still women who bear the brunt of poverty and the discrimination in this caste-ridden, neo-feudalistic, male-dominated society. Dowry demands, domestic and sexual violence are frequent. Village society in India is loaded against women. It refuses to educate them, marries them off too early and barters them for money. However, Indian society and culture is changing and will continue to change.
"It's a cliché now, isn't it, but it's still true. I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating. I don't need to depend on my parents for money, I don't need to depend on a husband for money. I can choose to get married later if I want to. I may not even need to get married. The opportunities that have opened up for me are mind-boggling." so spoke 25-year-old Devika, who works at a call centre in Mumbai and a member of the ever growing working class.
But with the rose there is the thorn and the bloody price of capitalism is often a steep cost to bear. Millions of farmers have had to watch the value of their products at the mercy of the whims and fancies of global supply and demand. They are caught in the cycle of debt, and year after year life gets worse in the India of the haves, and the India of the have-nots as Dharampul Jarundhe, a farmer in the west of India has learned "No more agriculture for us. It doesn't feed us, it doesn't feed our children. We will move to the cities and work as tea bearers, and live in Mumbai's slums if we have to - it is better than starving."
Gandhi was no socialist, preferring to believe that moral force could achieve a more equitable society where capitalists would become trustees over the labourer and he sought merely a levelling of incomes. But occasionally he did reveal some genuine socialist insights:
"According to me, the economic constitution of India and for that matter of that of the world , should be such that no-one under it should suffer from want of food and clothing. In other words everybody should be able to get sufficient work to enable him to make the two ends meet. And this ideal can be universally realised only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses. These should be freely available to all as God's air and water are or ought to be; they should not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others. Their monopolisation by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust. The neglect of this simple principle is the cause of the destitution that we witness today not only in this unhappy land but in other parts of the world too."
Elsewhere, Gandhi says:
"The real implication of equal distribution is that each man shall have the wherewithal to supply all his natural wants and no more. For example, if a man has a weak digestion and requires only a quarter of a pound of flour for his bread and another needs a pound, both should be in a position to satisfy their wants. To bring this ideal into being the entire social order has got to be re-constructed."
And again he said:
"The elephant needs a thousand times more food than the ant, but that is no indication of inequality. So the real meaning of economic equality was: "To each according to his need" .
That was the definition of Marx. It is true that Marx did not draw up recipes for the cookshops of the future, but he did describe the basis of the society he thought was going to replace capitalism; “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common” (Chapter 1 of Capital); “a co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production” (Critique of the Gotha Programme); “abolition of private property”, “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling”, “the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production” (Communist Manifesto); “abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit). In short, a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on the common ownership of the means of production.
The key point to understand is that capitalism is a system based upon the exploitation and
commodification of workers and the relentless rape of our planet. Working people are conditioned and are psychologically programmed to detest that which could potentially set them free. Workers are led to believe that economic servitude and wage slavery is freedom and it is all done for the benefit of capitalists at the expense of society. Workers have entrusted their hope in phony leaders and bogus institutions that keep us servile and docile. Irrational faith requires little thought from us and delusion has become the norm because too many of us are incapable of grappling with reality. * (See appendix)
In his introduction to 'Riot after Riot’ by M.J. Akbar, a book on caste and communal violence in India, Khushwant Singh writes:
"There was reason to hope that we had seen the last communal strife and that India would indeed fulfil Gandhi's dream ...But that was not to be. Our hopes have turned to ashes. Hindu-Muslim confrontations on religious festivals have begun to occur with sickening regularity in riot-prone parts of the country where the two communities co-exist. From being Hindu versus Muslim, they have become Hindu versus Christian, Hindu versus Sikh, upper-caste Hindu versus lower caste-caste Hindu, Christain versus Buddhist, hill tribal versus plains tribal. In the massacre at Nellie in Assam, it was just about everyone against his neighbour. It has become clearer that we are too many with not enough land or jobs available for all of us. The root cause of spreading endemic violence is economic: religious linguistic and ethnic differences provide the excuse and motivation to indulge in it .... "
In a BBC report it was said that
hundreds of families in a remote region of the eastern Indian state of Orissa remain homeless and without support after a wave of violence swept the region . After the initial attacks on church institutions and the shops and homes of Christian families, Christian mobs responded in kind. The minority Christian community in Kandhamal district, many of whom are forest tribal people and low-caste Dalit converts from Hinduism to to Christianity, say they've been targeted by radical Hindu nationalist organisations seeking to put an end to the church and its activities in the region. Hindu activists had accused the local Christian community of stirring up trouble by making "unreasonable" demands - a reference to their attempts to be granted the same preferential access to jobs and education given to low-caste Hindus and tribal communities.
Churches were ransacked, entire villages razed and their inhabitants forced to flee into the forests. The violence, which began on Christmas Eve, has now largely abated, but the plight of the people has not. Many are now living in the shells of their burned out homes, all their possessions lost. The conflict has pitted Hindu against Christian, tribal against non-tribal. Years of relatively peaceful co-existence of these communities, living a fragile rural existence, has been shattered.
"This conflict is fought in the name of religion," says NGO worker Kailash Chandra Dandpath, "but the real motives are economic and political. The business community here, with its links to the Hindu nationalist organisations, were once in complete control here. They'd lend money to the tribals and the Dalits at incredibly high rates of interest, up to 120% per year, and then the debtor would have to sell his farm produce to the lender at a price controlled by the businessmen." Dandpath is describing the system still widely practiced in India, of bonded exploitation, where a family might well be indebted to the lender for generations. "What's happening now", says Mr Dandpath, "is that the farmers, the most marginalised of whom are from tribal and Christian communities, are being linked by the NGOs to local banks, lending at perhaps 10% interest a year - ten times less. This is clearly a threat to the businessmen. And they are trying to break this link, using religion as an excuse... in India, the easiest method of politics is to take religion to divide and rule."
There are always economic and social divisions within society to be exploited by those more rich and powerful, particularly when the existing order is threatened. This more or less confirms the socialist argument that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual nd religious community to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.
Many higher castes Hindus in parts of India's Tamil Nadu state still not share with the Dalits, They insist on separate glasses for drinking tea and they do not allow the untouchables to go to the same barber shops. They ban them from temples, cremation grounds and river bathing points, among other examples. Studies have found at least 45 different forms of "untouchability" being practised by upper caste Hindus against the Dalits in Tamil Nadu.
A wall segregating local higher caste Hindus residents from their Dalit counterparts in Uthapuram village in Madurai district barely 350 miles from the state capital Chennai (Madras) didn't exactly come as a surprise. The wall kept Dalit people out of the main parts of the village. The authorities demolished part of the wall following an order from the state government to allow Dalits to go where they wanted in the village. About 800 higher caste Hindus decided to leave the village and seek refuge on a nearby hillock in protest against the decision.
The Scheduled Castes constitute roughly 19% of the Tamil Nadu's 62.4 million people. More than 60% of Christians in Tamil Nadu are Dalits - most converted hoping to find more freedom. But they still have very little voice and are largely shunned in the church. They again find themselves humiliated, with separate pews, services, churches, corteges, enclosures in cemeteries and so on. A tentative effort was made in a village called Erayur to integrate the Dalits in all the services. But a group of Christians protested and threatened to go back to Hinduism if the Catholic church went ahead with its initiatives. The diocese had to back down.
Until class politics grow to prevail and caste allegiences are rejected, the capitalist class will continue to control through divide and rule. Capitalist driven urbanisation and industrialisation have helped to break down caste barriers to some extent as people moved out of traditional occupations. In the meantime, for the pro-capitalist political parties, caste is about calculated bargaining for greater electoral spoils.
The best advice to Indian workers in the economic field is:
1) Try to push wages and conditions as high as they are allowed to go by employers.
2) Organise democratically to achieve your aims, without reliance on leaders.
3) Recognise that any union struggle is necessarily a defensive one as there can be no real and lasting victory within the profit system.
Workers must purge their unions of all self-seeking individualism and bureaucratic autocracy. In their own unions must first be worked out that principle of full and free democracy which will make these institutions subject to the rank and file. Not until this is done is the ground cleared for progress of any kind or in any direction. “Workers of the world unite,” is a futile, empty slogan until this task is accomplished.Trade union and political activists should take particular note of this observation made by the World Socialist Party (India) in regards to conducting the economic struggle:
"In countries like India workers have the legal right to form trade unions. But there, too, unlike Europe and America, most of the big trade unions have been organised from above as fund-raising, vote-catching political subsidiaries of self-seeking "leaders" than as spontaneous, grass-root, independent and autonomous organisations of the working class to defend their economic interests. Moreover in the absence of factory-wide free election of trade union functionaries, there are as many unions as there are political parties, most of them operating with their hired gangsters and peculiar flags having very little regard to class-unity. Actually these trade unions are not genuine trade unions. Still workers' organised resistance against exploitation is a must; and for that matter, their resistance struggles must have to be freed from the infamy of remaining divided and subservient to various capitalist political parties. This they can achieve by organising themselves in fully integrated and independent trade unions of their own, by throwing away all kinds of blind faith and submissiveness regarding the wretched hierarchy of subscription-squeezer and flag-hoister "leaders". The working class movement is a movement of equals-organised by the workers and in the interest of the workers. No "leader", supposedly having some unknown "god"-given or "intrinsic" trick-finding qualities given is necessary to lead the working-class movement. For a "trick" cannot throw profit overboard. Simply because private property lives to levy its tribute on labour. All workers are able, rather abler than the "leaders", to understand their own class-interests only if they are fully informed of their circumstances from local to global. And to be informed of what is happening around, and what has happened earlier, what they require is to meet in regular general assemblies, discuss and debate all that matters keeping ears and minds open and decide to take such steps as deemed useful. In case a strike is to be declared, they would need a strike committee to be formed of recallable delegates elected and mandated in the general assembly-thus retaining the ultimate control in their own hands.Where there are many rival trade union shops in a single factory or workplace operated by many capitalist political parties, a socialist worker can neither keep on supporting the one he is in, nor go on seeking membership of one after another or all at the same time, nor can he open his own "socialist" trade union instead. What he can, and should, do as an immediate perspective, is to try to form a "political group" with like-minded fellow workers and campaign for a class-wide democratic unity as stated above. Whenever an opportunity arrives the group must use the assemblies as a forum for political propaganda to expose the uselessness of "leaders" and show that the trade union movement is unable to solve the problems of crises, insecurity, poverty, unemployment, hunger and wars" - Manifesto of the World Socialist Party (India), March 1995
Trade unions are essentially fighting over the crumbs (necessary though that fight is). But socialists long ago raised sights beyond the crumbs, beyond even for control of the bakery, and e now demand the flour-mills and wheat-fields, too. That way we will not be perpetually doomed to repeat the battles of the past. We can and must do better or we are doomed.
Now is the time for those in India who really desire socialism to strike a blow for it by building a genuine world socialist party for India. In the words of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay:
“Why must I cling to the customs and practices of a particular country forever, just because I happened to be born there? What does it matter if its distinctiveness is lost? Need we be so attached to it? What's the harm if everyone on earth shares the same thoughts and feelings, if they stand under a single banner of laws and regulations? What if we can't be recognized as Indians any more? Where's the harm in that? No one can object if we declare ourselves to be citizens of the world. Is that any less glorious?”
* Appendix
Akbar in ‘The Spiders of Orissa’ writes movingly about today’s reality:-
"...To create a good slave you must first kill his pride, his self - respect, his notion of himself as an ordinary equal human being. The slave's body is needed - the man's for labour, the woman's for labour and abuse; but to control the body the inner spark which ignites anger must be crushed. There are many weapons in the spiders arsenal, both psychological and physical , but the chief one is dramatically simple: hunger. When a generation or two dies of the ultimate denial, delirious for a handful of rice, while a chorus of spiders fattens indifferently in the background, physical and mental slavery becomes an easy option to the dying. The young woman at your feet is not prostrate through love or devotion; she is there because over many lifetimes she has learnt that the degradation of the spirit is the only guarantee she has against the degradation of the body, that food and safety are not her right but a gift which a superior might grant if she behaves. The man, his taut, dark body glistening with youth which will fast wither , is allowed the hint of a sullen look, but no more. Oppress by destitution. Keep a people on the permanent knife-edge of hunger: normalcy should never mean more than one meal of rice and dal a day...
...The real trick is to destroy the confidence of a people: make them believe the caricatures you have created about them . Less than 500 years ago, these tribals of Orissa and Bastar and Andhra ruled over a brillant empire; today they have been turned into parodies of a cruel fiction. The tribal man is a mahua-swigging drunk. The woman is an easy lay. The strength of the hoax lies , of course, in the fact that it is constructed on a malicious distortion of reality to give it a facade of believability. The tribal does like a drink and has none of the hypocritical duplicity of the middle class towards liquor. That does not maker him a drunkard . The woman is beautiful; she does not wear a blouse and no-one in her village looks twice at her exposed breasts; leering is the prerogative of the starved visitor. To equate this with prostitution is the task of the pervert. What has made one tribal an emaciated drunkard and another a prostitute in Raipur or Calcutta is hunger; gnawing, tearing, shattering hunger. And the last stage of hunger: despair. There is no hope left of escaping from the web, so lie somnolescent at the centre, praying that destiny grants you a few extra days before the spider inevitably consumes you ..."
A shortened version of the above can be read at Countercurrents website.
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