WHERE IS
INDIA GOING?
*1 The declaration of the state of emergency and the imposition of a constitutional dictatorship by Indira Gandhi has raised afresh a number of fundamental questions: What is the character of the Indian state? What is the most advantageous form of class rule for the Indian ruling class at this stage? Has Indira Gandhi carried out a major transformation by imposing an internal state of emergency? We will deal with these questions in some detail later on, but it is important to start by explaining the main reasons for the proclamation of the emergency. The Congress has exercised a complete monopoly of power in the central government since Indian indepen-
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CORRUPTION by S. Bhagat dence in 1947. It has proved to be a more stable party for the Indian bourgeoisie than its counterparts elsewhere in the nonindustrialized world and even in parts of West
Europe. This monopoly has never been seriously threatened in the arena of bourgeois parliamentary politics.
It has been smashed in a number of states, but never at the center. The 1971 elections resulted in yet another stunning electoral victory for the Congress party, and its principal leader, Indira Gandhi, emerged from the elections greatly strengthened. During the past five years, however, the social crisis has wreaked its vengeance. Populist outbursts became common, and because of the endemic weaknesses of the left, they were provided leadership and guidance by a bloc consisting of
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INDIA the extreme rightist Jan Sangh and the Bonapartist figure Jaya Prakesh Narayan, with Gandhi's old Congress opponents led by Mararji Desai thrown in for good measure. The mass response evoked by these old-time politicians obviously worried the high command. The channeling of the movement into a parliamentary opposition and its important success in the recent Gujarat elections (where it defeated the Congress despite Gandhi's personal intervention in the campaign) was the major factor in motivating the declaration of the state of emergency. The immediate pretext was provided by Narayan's constant appeals to the Indian army and police to "defend the constitution" coupled with the Jan Sangh's preparation and training of its armed volunteers. We say pretext because we do not believe that there was any real danger from the army (despite all Narayan's appeals) or that the Jan Sangh was preparing an insurrection. If the Congress leaders were seriously worried about the Jan Sangh, they could have dealt with it without a state of emergency. The real threat was that the Congress monopoly was being seriously challenged. If the trend continued, the Congress could have lost the elections scheduled for 1976. The state of emergency also gives Gandhi the opportunity to postpone the elections until she is sure she can win. An added complication has been the High Court decision against her, which threatened her personal position. She has appealed to the Supreme Court, and if the latter upholds the lower court's decision barring her from public office, it will not be easy for her to stay in office, despite the state of emergency. These are the problems - and they are political - that have led to the present situation. In our view economic deterministic explanations of the state of emergency (agrarian capitalists versus industrial capitalists or the pro-U.S. section of the bourgeoisie versus the pro-Soviet section) are both simplistic and wrong. There is nothing to suggest that the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole has decided to abandon the Congress party and hitch its wagon to the rising star of J.P. Narayan. There are, of course, small sections of the ruling class that have been backing the JP movement, but even here the evidence suggests that the intent was to administer a sharp rap on the Congress knuckles rather than to try to decapitate it. •Is the Indian bourgeoisie a comprador bourgeoisie? To understand why India is the only postcolonial state in Asia and Africa that has preserved some of the basic elements of bourgeois democracy, we have to start by understanding the role and position of the Indian capitalist class, In India, unlike China (where the bourgeoisie had a comprador character from the very start), local capitalists developed independently uf British capitalism, though not of the overall interests of British impe12 rialism. Until the mid-1870s there were no laws impeding industrial development. (1) Toward the end of the first world war the total amount of Indian capital invested in Indian industry exceeded that of British capital, a symbol of the gradual overall decline of British imperialism. The cotton industry and later the iron and steel industry were financed and dominated by Indian capital. It was sections of this Indian bourgeoisie that actively encouraged the formation of the Indian Congress in the late 1880s, which makes the Corgress one of the oldest bourgeois parties in the world. During the first few decades after its formation the Congress annually pledged its loyalty to the King-Emperor in a language so flowery that even the odd British viceroy found it a bit too fulsome. It was in the 1930s that the Congress mounted its offensive against the British, but it was supported throughout by the Indian capitalist class, which had an extremely able strategist, Birla. Thus, when Nehru was going through his most radical phase in the late 1930s, openly flirting with communist ideas, Birla sharply admonished a group of Bombay capitalists who had denounced Nehru. Birla realized that Nehru would not lead a fight against and break with Mahatma Gandhi, and since the latter was the most far-sighted bourgeois politician India has ever produced and was completely in league with Indian capital, Birla, the Indian bourgeoisie's most capable spokesman, knew that there was nothing to worry about. (2) It is important to grasp these facts if one is to understand the nature of the colonial state the British introduced in India, which ensured a smooth transition from imperialism to the native bourgeoisie. Or to put it more provocatively: the British, in a very distorted and partial way, initiated the bourgeois-democratic revolution in India. They created an apparatus which provided the mechanism whereby the rising nationalist movement could be integrated and which was to create an objective barrier to the permanent revolutionary process in India. The 1935 Act of India (which resulted in Congress becoming the government in a majority of Indian provinces fully twelve years before independence) was the culmination of years of preparation by the British ruling class and its Indian counterparts. One of the central pillars of this bourgeois-democratic process in India was the press. The vernacular press in particular was a decisive element in ensuring the link between the Congress and its base, and challenges to the freedom of this press were a constant source of friction between the nationalists and imperialism. There are numerous stories in nationalist folklore of how a Bengali editor here or a South Indian journalist there defied the British. That is why the present censorship imposed by the Congress government is particularly ironic. The base of Indian bourgeois democracy lay in the economic strengh of the Indian bourgeoisie. The post-independence Congress governments pursued a policy of state intervention to strengthen bourgeois power in India and
not to weaken it. It was this relative autonomy the Indian bourgeoisie enjoyed with respect to the imperialist ruling classes that permitted Nehru to maintain his neutrality during the cold war period and made him a respected figure at Third World conferences like Bandung. An ironic twist was provided when Muslim Pakistan backed the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 and secular India not only opposed it but offered various forms of solidarity to Nasser. To avert misunderstandings, it is important to stress that when we talk of the strength of the Indian bourgeoisie we are in no way implying that India is an industrial country similar to the metropolitan capitalist states; on the other hand, however, India cannot with justification be characterized as a "semicolonial country, " let alone one where semifeudal relations predominate. Although some substantial pockets of "semifeudalism" do exist, the dominant mode of production is capitalist. And, of course, the British, while giving certain Indian industrialists a free hand for a certain period, did not encourage the full-scale industrialization of India. Apart from the fact that this would have conflicted sharply with the needs of British imperialism, it would also have meant mobilizing the peasantry and smashing landlordism, a task that neither the British capitalists nor their Indian heirs have succeeded in carrying out. While there has been some land reform, its purpose has been to create a class of kulaks in the countryside as a bulwark of reaction, and even here there appears to be an increasing level of interpenetration between capital in the cities and capital in the countryside. It has been precisely this inability to transform the countryside that has produced the contradiction of capitalist development in India and has necessitated state intervention. It also means that there is no way out of underindustrialization for India except through a break with the capitalist mode of production on a global scale, i.e. a socialist revolution. Rosa Luxemburg's famous slogan "Our minimum demand is socialism" has a startling relevance today for the toiling masses in India's towns and the countryside. The continuing social crisis, a reflection both of the inability of Indian capitalism to find even short-term solutions and of the crisis of the capitalist system internationally, has meant that famines have increased in intensity, the standard of living of the masses has continuously deteriorated, whatever industrial development has taken place has been extremely uneven (40 percent of the income tax paid in the whole country comes from one city, Bombay), and. the number of landless unemployed is on the rise. In this situation the medium-term political trend is toward the erosion of an already fragile bourgeois democracy and the institutionalization of a right-wing dictatorship. It is useless to speculate about the form such a dictatorship would take. In one sense the present "state of emergency" is part of this trend, but it is also separate from it in that it is a part of the immediate tactical aims of the Congress party rather than of the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole. A stable right-wing dictatorship would have to have the support of all the bourgeois parties and formations as well as the backing of the army (even if the generals were not openly associated with the government). The present state of emergency does not have that support. Furthermore, its continued imposition is related to the personal fortunes of Indira Gandhi. A Supreme Court verdict against her could open up divisions within the Congress, where Jagjivan Ram, Gandhi's senior minister, is waiting patiently and quietly in the wings. Military dictatorship: an immediate possibility? Any bourgeois party that rules after suspending the constitution and curbing democratic rights must ask itself how far it can go without the support of the army. A subsidiary and equally important question is whether the army will back it if it intensifies the repression. The imposition of a military dictatorship in India would sound the death knell of the Indian federation as it is presently constituted. The army is still dominated by the so-called martial races, so designated by British imperialism. Despite the efforts made by the government, it is still not possible to designate the Indian army as a "national army. " The use of this army to curb recalcitrant statessin South India or Bengal and Assam would trigger a massive reaction. The example of Bangladesh attests to the possible result of attempting to rule a state with an army composed mainly of Punjabis.
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INDIA Of course, this does not mean that the possibility of a military dictatorship can be excluded permanently. If there was an upheaval led by revolutionary parties challenging the existence of the system, there is no doubt that the army would move in - and very fast. But no such threat exists today. Indian "communism" is weaker than ever, racked by divisions (the Maoists alone have twenty different groupings) and incapable of developing a revolutionary strategy. Revolutionary Marxism does not exist as an organized force in the country as a whole. Thus, despite the social crisis and the mass popular explosions past and present, it cannot be said that Indian capitalism is seriously threatened yet. Accordingly, the Indian bourgeoisie is unlikely to opt for a military dictatorship, despite the gravity of the social and economic crisis. This fact might hit the Congress rather hard if it decides to overturn hostile state governments in Gujarat and Tamil Nad. Both these governments represent the interests of regional bourgeoisies against the countrywide monopolies; neither the big bourgeoisie nor the army desires an open clash with them. (3) In fact, the state structure of the Indian federation could well be the rock on which this particular "state of emergency" crumbles, even if Indira Gandhi postpones the national elections beyond 1976. It is not possible in the space of this article to deal with the bankruptcy of the Stalinist movement in India in anything but the most cursory fashion. It is nonetheless symbolic that the two major parties, the CPI (Communist party of India) and the CPM (Communist party-Marxist) 14
"There is nothing to suggest that the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole has decided to abandon the Congress party and hitch its wagon to the rising star of J.P. Narayan." have found themselves in bitter opposition to each other during the events of recent weeks not because of doctrinal differences but because they are backing different sections of the bourgeoisie. The CPI is supporting the so-called "progressive" bourgeoisie: the Congress party led by Indira Gandhi, while the CPM is backing the JP movement, hoping to derive electoral benefits from this association. In fact, a common denominator in the political line of both these parties is the most bankrupt variant of parliamentary cretinism. Naturally, revolutionaries are not opposed to participating in bourgeois elections. In a country like India, given the specific nature of the colonial state, there has always been mass participation in elections. The link between elections and mass struggles was strikingly shown in the electoral victory for the then united CPI in Kerala in 1957 and the CPM electoral victory in West Bengal exactly a decade later. Both these victories were reflections in the parliamentary arena of the level of the mass struggles. On both occasions the masses hoped that by electing a communist government they would see radical social changes and on both occasions they were proven wrong. Both these governments carried out repression, which sowed demoralization and resulted in a return to right-wing Congress governments. (4) The policies of the CPM in West Bengal provoked a further split in Indian communism and led to the emergence of a Maoist current of mass proportions: the Communist party of India (Marxist-Leninist), CP|(M-L). Encouraged by Peking Radio broadcasts and facile analyses in Peking Review, these extremely courageous militants embarked on a suicidal political course that led to the deaths of
hundreds in pitched battles with the police and army and to the imprisonment and torture of tens of thousands of others. There are now between 30,000 and 40,000 Maoists in Indian prisons. They do not excite the sympathy of bourgeois journalists in Europe, because they operated, for all their weaknesses, outside the limits of bourgeois democracy. Nonetheless, they have not learned from their mistakes. They have failed to break with their incorrect strategic formulations, although they have corrected some of their more blatant tactical absurdities. They are theoretically committed to an alliance with the national bourgeoisie as part of a fourclass bloc to lead the revolution (proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie). Since they want the revolution and know that it would be impossible by making a bloc with the Tatas and Birlas, they refuse to categorize the latter as a national bourgeoisie. On the contrary, they see the Indian bourgeoisie as a comprador bourgeoisie and the Indira Gandhi government as a puppet government. There is confusion within their ranks as to whether the "comprador Indian bourgeoisie" is tied completely to U.S. imperialism or to "Soviet social-imperialism. " The more slavish followers of Peking see the latter as the main enemy and the conflict with the former as a "secondary contradiction. "Given this complete political and theoretical bankruptcy, it is hardly surprising that even the furthest left wing of Indian Stalinism is in an impasse. If the CPI and CPM-have been obsessed with parliamentary illusions that have led them into a reformist blind alley, their Maoist opponents have completely failed to grasp the nature of the Indian state and have operated, not unlike the Stalinists of the early 1930s, as ultraleft "antiparliamentary cretinists."
This weakness of Indian communism has enabled the ruling class to rule unchallenged for the last thirty years. Unless this weakness is remedied it is quite possible that the same ruling class will increasingly resort to barbaric acts (such as the use of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, the oppression of minorities in the tribal belts, the torture and murder of political prisoners, etc.) and will seek to institutionalize these practices. The coming months will be crucial, as they will indicate the likely direction of the Indian ruling class for the next period. July 19,1975 Footnotes: 1. For an extremely well-researched study see "Industralization of India" by G.K. Shirokov, Moscow, 1973. For a revolutionary Marxist survey of the background of Indian capitalism see "The Economic Development of India, " by Brian Davey, London, 1975. 2. See Bipan Chandra, "Jawaharlal Nehru and the Capitalist Class, 1936, " a paper presented to the Indian History Congress in 1974, which contains the most original Marxist account of the subject. 3. See "Explosion in a Sub-continent, " R. Blackburn (ed.), article by Megnad Desai. 4. See the interview with K. Damodoran, veteran former CPI leader, to be published in a forthcoming issue of New Left Review (London).
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