background to the Indian CrISZS total of 7.1 million families who lack the means to provide for themselves. The approximately 80,000 Families who own more than twenty acres each are the only ones able to produce o real surplus of food. The landless peasant families have become passive consumers of food who in practice no longer produce any food. Many of them are moving to the cities. The others are "saved" from famine by public projects financed by the state; these operate for several months of the year and pay wages of a few rupees a day. Smuggling, corruption, and bourgeois politicians. In a country as poor as India, the threefold combination of a state capitalist sector, a public budget that accounts for more than half of industrial investments, and a powerful bourgeois class secretes and strongly stimulates corruption on a colossal scale. The Indian economist Shenoy, who is an ardent defender of "free enterprise, " estimates that of the 41 thousand million rupees expended in the public sector of the economy, as much as 40 percent may have been diverted to the private sector through bribes and embezzlement. Innumerable ruling politicians have been implicated in corrupt practices. Not a week goes by without some scandal coming to light. Smuggling has taken on gigantic dimensions. The customs administration estimates its magnitude during the fiscal year 1974-75 at 9 thousand million rupees on the western coast alone. Most of the goods illegally brought into the country are synthetic textiles; other smuggled commodities include watches, electronic gadgets, pharmaceufical products, and automobile parts. Most of the products illegally exported are foodstuffs! In fact, rice, whose price is
9
INDIA subsidized by the government, can be bought in India at 6-7 rupees per kilogram and then sold in the countries of the Arab-Persian Gulf at 30 rupees per kilogram because of the dizzying rise of food prices in these countries. Many of the richest smugglers are also the major financial contributors to the bourgeois parties, including the ruling party. Hence the impunity they Divisions within the bourgeoisie. Following the winning of independence, the major Indion capitalist groups advocated a strong public sector of the economy. In fact, heavy industrial companies were slow to start functioning, did not bring in profits for long, were not competitive on the world market, etc. But in the long run, some public companies began to become profitable. There were rivalries between the public and private sectors over the disposition of available investment.resources. Hence the pressure of a section of the bourgeoisie in favor of a total or partial reprivatization of the public sector (through the establishment of "joint enterprises"). The major bourgeois opposition parties - the "Old Congress, " the Jan Sangh, and Swatantia - favor this reprivatization; Indira Gandhi opposes it to some extent. What this represents, however, is a divergence within the bourgeoisie over what policy would better serve the interests of the ruling class ond not at all an opposition between a "capitalist" line and a "noncapitalist" or even "socialist" line. The Birla group, one of the most powerful capitalist groups in the country, continues to support Indira Gandhi. And after the failure of the nofionalization of the grain trade, the prime minister had modified the course of her economic policy, favoring the private sector. Origins of the Jaya Prokesh Narayan agitation. The mass agitation had been initiated by the students, especially the students of the states of Bihar, Gujarat, and Uttar Prodesh, to protest against the injustices of the university system and the corruption prevailing there. The agitation was directed against the most general targets: price increases, food shortages, corrupfion and incompetence in the state governments, etc. It forced the prime minister of the state of Uttor Prodesh to resign and led to the dissolution of the state assembly in Gujarat, Jaya Prakesh Nardyan is an old Social Democratic leader, an advocate of nonviolence whose prestige predates the independence struggle and whose anticommunism has become increasingly pronounced. He refused to orTent the mass agitation of which he had become the symbol and major spokesman toward precise economic and social objectives and instead raised to vague populist objectives like "the reestablishment of an honest administration" and the "struggle against corruption." Consequently, he was able to be easily manipulated by the rightist and far-right forces that command solid organizational structures, while he himself has no apparatus and no party of his own. Objectively, his function has been to divert the growing anger of the youth and the unor-
Narayan 10
ganized oppressed masses toward paths that do not challenge the survival of the reign of the Indian bourgeoisie. Iwo political coalitions. The Communist party of India (CPI), Faithful to Moscow, has supported the Indira Gandhi government for a long time, even when it broke the strike of the railway workers (see INPRECOR. No. 4, July 18, 1974) and when it proclaimed the wage Freeze. The CPl even supports the present repression, including the arrests of leaders of the PI[Marxist) and the Sociolist porty. Drawing no lessons from the miserable failure of their policy of coalition goverment with the bourgeoisie in the states of West Bengal and Kerala, two workers parties to the left of the CPI, the CPIM) and the Revolutionary Socialist party (RSP), have concluded alliances called for by Jaya Prakesh Narayan for exclusively electoralist aims, alliances that include, in addition to the SP, the Old Congress (established by leoders of the Congress party apparatus who Indira Gandhi disposed of in 1970-71) and rightist and far-right parties like Swatantra and Jan Sangh (Hindu rocist). This bloc hopes to tum Indira Gandhi out of office during the legislative elections that are supposed to take place next year -through the simple addition of the votes of all the opposition parties. This calculation has just achieved success in the elections to the state assembly in Gujarat. Obviously, only the bourgeoisie profits from such unprincipled operations. Immediate buildup to the Gandhi measures. The immediate motivations for Gandhi's proclamation of the state of emergency seem to have been her electoral defeat in Gujarat and a judge's verdict provisionally annulling her election to the central parliament on the grounds of electoral fraud. The deeper motivation is likely twofold: on the one hand, a real fear of losing power during the legislative elections that are supposed to be held next spring; on the other hand, the appearance in her own party of a significant tendency seeking a compromise with Jaya Prakesh Narayan and a recomposition of all the bourgeois political forces of the country. li is not excluded that o section of the army is in sympathy with this project. The immediate perspectives. While intensifying the repression (the censorship has even banned reproduction of the books of her father, Jawaharal Nehru; if they are judged "subversive" in the present situation), Indira Gandhi has also launched a populist counteragitation. She hos relaunched her campaign to "abolish poverty" and has proposed a new ceiling on the size of agrarion property as well as a halt to seizure of cattle and land for nonpayment of debts. These promises, which have been reiterated for two decades now, first by Nehru and then by Gandhi, may leave the village poor rather skeptical if they are not followed up by action. But as a bourgeois politician, Indira Gandhi cannot really attack the rich peasants and the rural bourgeoisie, who form the basis and apparatus of her party. Moreover, the maintenance of repressive measures and the opposifion's gradually moving underground place her at the mercy of the slightest accident (the death of one of the opposition leaders in prison; cops opening fire on demonstrators on a large scale; the sudden outbreak of a peasant revolt), which could provoke a generalized explosion. The failure of the left has allowed the bourgeois opposition to take the initiative. The ruling party has been deeply discredited. The three immediate candidates for power - Indira Gandhi, the "united" opposition, and the army, acting as an orbiter - all represent bourgeois alternatives. The objective conditions for a revolutionary upsurge are favorable. But the depth of the crisis of the subjective factor is such that the pendulum threatens to swing even further to the right before it is able to swing back to the left.
11
Britain will win with Labour. On July 2, just two days after Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave a speech rejecting "panic solutions, Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey announced to Parliament stringent wage-control measures, The measures, to be immediately placed on the statute books if no satisfactory agreement was reached with the TUC (Trades Union Congress) within one week, include a 10% ceiling on all wage increoses, cash limits to check public expenditure, and on end to "excessive" subsidies in the public sector. The very thin sugar coating around this bitter pill is that the wage limits will be enforced through the price code. This means that no trade unionists will go to jail or face fines for opposing the measures. Insteod, individual employers will have to keep their wage bills under the ceiling announced by the govemment. If they allow their workers wages to rise above that ceiling, they will not be allowed to compensate by increasing their prices. This government sanction against defoulting employers is likely to be coupled with others, including refusal to provide them with government contracts. Despite possible plans to set up insurance schemes to bail out employers facing fierce wage strug gles, the logic of the measures is to drive those firms that cannot withstand their workers struggles into bankruptcy, thereby increasing unemployment (which now stands at nearly 900, 000). Harold Wilson, who has said that he would introduce statutory incomes control only in war time, was allowing the trade unions to acquiesce in the measures voluntarily if they wished. "Unions and employers have ef12