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WSWS : News & Analysis : Asia

India at fifty: a damning indictment of bourgeois rule

By Keith Jones
11 October 1997

India's political elite indulged in much hand wringing during the commemorations that marked the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. In his golden jubilee speech, President Narayanan called for "new social movements" to combat poverty, illiteracy and oppression, while Prime Minister I.K. Gujral warned that corruption had brought the country's political system to the brink of collapse.

"At 50," declared The Times of India, "the Republic seems to be as mortally wounded in spirit as it is in the body of its ravaged and polluted environment."

The poverty that engulfs India today is deeper even than that which prevailed under the British Raj. Some 320 million Indians live in absolute poverty -- i.e., they lack the daily calorie intake needed to support a full day's labour. Some 186 million people do not have access to clean water and close to 650 million lack sanitary facilities. Of India's 625,000 villages, 125,000 are without electricity, as are more than two-thirds of all rural households.

Two out of every three children under the age of five, or a total of 70 million pre-school children, are malnourished. Of the 26 million children born annually, 2.3 million will die before they are a year old, and another 1.2 million will perish before they reach five. Over 90% of these deaths could be prevented through the provision of clean water, adequate food and minimal health care facilities.

Some 130 million Indians have no access to health care. Complications in child birth -- only one in three births in India is attended by a doctor or nurse -- result in the death of 1.2 million women per year.

Barely half of the adult population (64% of men and 39% of women) is literate. The extent of child labour is indicated by the fact that a third of the 105 million Indians who are between the ages of 6 and 10 do not attend school. In rural India, home to two-thirds of the country's population, 45% of children never receive any schooling.

This toll of human misery is, in the first instance, an indictment of British colonialism. India, long a centre of trade and handicraft production, was subjected during 150 years of British rule to a brutal process of economic subordination. Its traditional handicraft industries disintegrated far faster than the bases were laid for a modern industrial economy.

In the first half of this century, India's population rose by some 40% to over 350 million. Yet the number of persons engaged in manufacturing and processing fell from 10.3 million to 8.8 million, and of these, just 2.3 million were employed in modern industries. Agriculture, meanwhile, stagnated under the burden of landlordism, usury, and the heavy land tax that sustained the colonial administration and funded the British Indian Army. Between 1901 and 1941, agricultural production per head fell by 14%, and food grain production by 24%.

But the country's present-day poverty is no less an indictment of the Indian bourgeoisie. Under its rule, "development" has disproportionately benefited the bourgeoisie and sections of the rural and urban middle classes, while exacerbating social inequality and pauperising broad sections of the masses.

If India was, as Trotsky said, "the classic colonial country," it became, after 1947, the archetype for "decolonisation," that is, the transfer of political power from European imperial overlords to the native bourgeoisie. The purported anti-imperialist path of development that the Indian national bourgeoisie pursued following 1947 became the model for bourgeois national regimes throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America.

What the Indian bourgeoisie hailed in 1947 as "freedom" -- the end of British political control and the division of the Indian subcontinent along communal lines into the states of India and Pakistan -- was, in fact, an essential element of the post-Second World War imperialist order. The British Labour government decided to dismantle the Raj because it feared further attempts to hold India by force would exacerbate class relations at home. Moreover, it realised that the Indian National Congress (INC), the principal bourgeois nationalist party, was less and less able to contain worker, peasant and student discontent.

The 1942 "Quit India" movement had rapidly passed out of the control of the Congress leadership and, in much of the country, had assumed a semi-insurrectionary character.

Post-war India was wracked by strikes, peasant unrest and demonstrations against the imprisonment of officers of the Indian National Army, which had joined the Japanese attack on British possessions in Southeast Asia. Then in February 1946 sailors on a score of Royal Indian Navy ships off Bombay mutinied, an action which soon precipitated a general strike in India's largest industrial centre.

Founded in 1885 as a moderate lobby group loyal to the Empire, the INC had always rejected any revolutionary challenge to the British colonial regime, let alone to India's socio-economic structure. Beginning with the Non-Co-operation movement of 1920-22, led by Mahatma Gandhi, the Congress party intermittently mobilised sections of the peasantry and, to a lesser extent, the working class to pressure the British to grant home rule. But the struggles it initiated were always tempered by its fear of a challenge to capitalist and landlord property.

In accepting the partition of India along communal lines, the INC betrayed its own commitment to democratically fuse the subcontinent's manifold linguistic and religious groups into a single polity, in which all would enjoy equal rights of citizenship. The Congress party was unable to counter the communal appeals of the Muslim League, because its class composition and outlook made it recoil from the only means of establishing the unity of the oppressed Hindu and Muslim peasants and workers -- their united mobilisation against their common landlord, moneylender and capitalist oppressors.

The partition of India into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India was, as a Ceylonese Trotskyist explained at the time, "the product of the bourgeois abortion of the mass movement." Its immediate outcome was one of the bloodiest eruptions of civil strife of the 20th century. A million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims perished in the partition riots and mass expulsions of 1947-48, and some 14 million people were uprooted from their homes.

The legacy of the partition settlement is a system of state frontiers that has undermined the rational use of the subcontinent's resources and institutionalised communalist antagonisms, leading to three wars between India and Pakistan.

The Congress, which became India's governing party, pursued economic polices aimed at bolstering native industry and lessening India's dependence on imports from the imperialist countries. The governments of Nehru, and later Indira Gandhi, imposed high tariffs, brought much of the industrial and banking sectors under state control, and struck a lucrative trading relationship with the USSR and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe.

To rally popular support and encourage domestic demand, the Congress instituted some rudimentary social programmes and established subsidies for key grains, fertilisers and other essential commodities.

This programme -- under which the lion's share of India's productive resources remained directly in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the remainder was administered on its behalf by a state bureaucracy -- was proclaimed "socialist" by the Congress leadership and, just as significantly, supported as "progressive" by the Stalinists.

While the Congress's economic policies did significantly augment India's industrial capacity, they were far less successful in achieving their stated goal of eliminating poverty and inequality. Land reform, in fact, only served to increase socio-economic differentiation in the countryside, as only the largest estates were broken up and no serious efforts were made to distribute land to the landless.

Twenty-five years after independence and the partition of India, the various states of the subcontinent were once again convulsed by social struggles. Fearing that a mass uprising in Bangladesh (East Pakistan) against Pakistani rule would undermine the bourgeois state system established in 1947, Indira Gandhi ordered an invasion of Pakistan in 1971. From 1975 to 1977 she placed India under Emergency Rule, using mass detentions, censorship and state violence to quell social unrest.

But it was the economic and political changes of the 1980s that spelled the end of Congress's "socialism" and the Indian bourgeoisie's national project. The technological revolution associated with the development of globalised production rapidly undermined India's industry, while the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and eastern Europe deprived the Indian bourgeoisie of its chief economic and political counterweight to imperialism.

Since 1991, when a Congress government adopted the so-called New Economic Policy, the Indian bourgeoisie has pursued with a vengeance its new goal of integration into the world capitalist economy. To placate international investors and creditors, subsidies for food, fuel and fertiliser have been slashed and hundreds of public sector enterprises have been declared "sick," the first step in their closure or privatisation.

The plans of foreign investors and the government itself revolve almost exclusively around India's use as an assembly platform for low-wage exports to the West, on the one hand, and the potential of the country's 100 million-strong middle-class consumer market, on the other. The rest of the country's nearly 1 billion people are to be relegated to even deeper poverty.

Fifty years after independence India is on the verge of great social convulsions. Having no progressive solution to the social crisis, the bourgeoisie and its political representatives turn, as did the British colonial rulers and their princely and landlord allies, to the promotion of communalism, casteism and ethno-linguistic separatism.

A half-century of bourgeois rule has demonstrated the historical bankruptcy of the Indian bourgeoisie. The only social force that can lead the oppressed masses of India to liberation is the Indian working class, fighting as a battalion of the world proletariat, it alone can resolve the uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution -- the eradication of landlordism and casteism and the democratic unification of the subcontinent -- and lay the bases for a new society through the establishment of social ownership of the means of production. This is the programme fought for by the Socialist Labour League of India, which is in political solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International.