Radical Socialist statement

Terrorism is not a reference to any category of persons but refers to a particular method, technique or tactic that involves the killing or injuring of innocent civilians or, outside of a battle or war zone, of even soldiers who by virtue of the distinctive nature of the attack are rendered completely defenceless. Precisely because terrorism is an act of this kind it can be and is carried out by the individual, a group, or larger collectivities like the apparatuses of the state. The car bomb attack that has killed 40 CRPF soldiers is just such an act and deserves the strongest condemnation. As in all cases of terrorism our sympathies and condolences are with the loved ones, families, relatives and friends of the victims. The perpetration was a lone Kashmiri youth Adil Ahmad Dar, while responsibility for preparing and training him was publicly claimed by the Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group that has been sponsored and supported by important sections of the Pakistan Establishment. Given that this is the case what should be the course of justice for the immediate as well as the longer term that we should demand?

• The golden rule of justice is to seek punishment for those identified as guilty. Given that JeM has announced its responsibility there is little reason to doubt its culpability. Nevertheless, the Indian government should publicly disclose all evidence pointing to and confirming this if for no other reason than to fully persuade the peoples of Pakistan, India and the rest of the world of who the guilty ones are and thereby not only build pressure from all quarters for their indictment; but by doing so also counter false and motivated conspiracy theories of all sorts. Yes, the Pakistan government must in any case be pressured to take action against the JeM given its past history. As it is, Pakistan has also suffered from terrorist attacks against its people and institutions but there are those in the wider governing Establishment who make a hypocritical and self-serving distinction between those agents who are ‘ours’ and others.

• There is indirect state sponsorship and support for agents who have the autonomy to decide when, where and how terrorist acts are to be carried out; and there is direct state execution of such terrorist across country borders (the greatest and most pernicious of such states being the US which since 1945 has killed more civilians outside its territory than all the rest of the world’s countries put together have done). Sponsorship abets an act of international terrorism even if it is not the embodiment of such an act. But there is still between the two a very important qualitative difference politically and in respect of international law. The latter carried out as it were by the official armed forces of a country is an act of war, declared or undeclared. A non-state actor, even when abetted in preparations by a government, no matter how reprehensible this is, is not an act of war. Which is why, for the Modi government to declare that the attack in Pulwama is just such an act of war is not only wrong but it is politically speaking extremely dangerous since it raises the military-political stakes so much higher. That this government should nevertheless resort to such jingoistic rhetoric raises suspicions that the BJP is planning to use this encounter to generate greater communal tensions for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. The aim is to whip up public anger against the people and government of Pakistan on one hand and against the people of Kashmir on the other hand – yet another example of a thinly disguised politics of anti-Muslimness that has always been central to the fascistic ideology and politics of the Sangh Parivar.

• An attack by the Indian Army across the border against Pakistani soldiers, let alone against civilians, will not be a ‘revenge’ because it will cause injuries and deaths to those who have nothing to do with what has happened in Pulwama. This will only cause widespread anger and bitterness among a Pakistan public about the injustice being done to its soldiers and/or civilians and help rally domestic support for their own government including for those sections which are behind such cross-border assaults, when in fact everything should be done to isolate and undermine these sections within the country. Any hopes of moving towards greater democratization within Pakistan and an end to, or cumulative reduction of, military domination will be seriously undermined by Indian actions that push the Pakistani public to support that military in the name of their own form of belligerent nationalism. All progressives in Pakistan working to democratize that society understand this fully (and much more than progressives in India) realize that progress internally in this regard is directly and intimately connected to greater sobriety, balance and moderation in the ties between the two countries. Religious extremism on both sides, however, feeds on generating greater hatred and hostility between the two countries and peoples.

• Terrorism always has a specific political context. In this case, as in so many other examples of unwarranted violence by non-state and state actors (including by the Indian government), the context is Kashmir! The fundamental diagnosis is clear. While the Pakistan government since the late 1980s has fished in the ‘troubled waters’ of turbulence and alienation in Kashmir those ‘troubled waters’ have been created by successive Indian governments with the current Central government adding a distinctive anti-Muslim attitude and practice to its involvement in Kashmir. Even in the initial decades from independence to the late 1980s when serious levels of domestic violent activism arose, there has been betrayal after betrayal of the commitments made to respect the state’s autonomy even as the province as suffered more frequently from the imposition of President’s Rule than any other Indian state.

There are over 650,000 troops of all kinds primarily in the Valley making the proportion of armed personnel to civilians the worst in the world when according to New Delhi the number of militants or designated ‘terrorists’ in recent years is not more than a few hundred or so. This huge presence of troops is required primarily to monitor and subdue a general population whose alienation and anger against New Delhi has spreader wider and deeper than ever before. Among Kashmiri Muslims this has been further exacerbated by this government which has justified the firing on stone-pelters, excused the occasional firing on bystanders as well as condoning the generally humiliating treatment of the populace, not to forget the use of pellet guns injuring and maiming hundreds of unarmed demonstrators. Given this reality it is extraordinary that the Indian army is now saying that they will shoot on sight anyone carrying a gun who does not immediately surrender. All this has not lessened the willingness of Kashmiri youth to get training from the all too willing providers like the JeM across the border; or to carry out their own ‘martyrdom’ through suicide bombings to make their personal statement against the injustices done to them.

 The path to reducing and finally eliminating attacks such as in Pulwama does not lie in belligerent posturing or ‘surgical strikes’ across the border let alone in escalating military tensions and actions between the two nuclearly-armed neighbours. It lies above all in addressing the political context of Kashmir and in ensuring justice to all in the province especially in the Valley, be they resident Muslims or Hindu Pandits wanting to live there with peace and amity once again restored. It is not the Indian government’s actions against Pakistan but its behavior in Kashmir that will be decisive for shaping the future. Will alienation there further deepen making it a continuing breeding ground for the cycle of on one side non-state terrorism (aided or otherwise from across the border) and on the other side the state terrorism of the Indian armed forces? Or will we work to end that pernicious cycle altogether?

February 20. 2019.

Thursday 7 March 2019

Wednesday 6 March 2019, by Laia Facet

Soma Marik

DOES KARL MARX have any relevance for today’s struggles for women’s liberation? Do his theories of society and revolutionary transformation present us with tools that in any way continue to be useful?

These and related questions come up repeatedly — as I will argue — for two very different reasons. I will exclude here the arguments, if they can be called that, of the extreme right, which are opposed to human liberation in any form, from class exploitation, from racial, gender and sexual oppression and discrimination. Rather, my focus is on forces and ideas within what we can call the center and the left.

With the worldwide collapse of older, organized, often large Marxist (or socialist) working class parties, a left-liberal segment became more influential even within the old left. We think of the left’s orientation to the Democratic Party in the USA (where no mass workers’ party has existed for some 80 years now) — or the example of India where the left, in order to halt the fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) [extreme Hindu nationalist — ed.], sees no option but to rely on the rightwing liberal Indian National Congress.

One consequence has been the acceptance of intellectual currents that reject Marxism’s contributions to the principles of emancipation. Another consequence of the collapse of class politics is the rise of an ideology that conceives of the struggle for liberation as separate for each gender, race or other “identity”-based segments of the population. These separate oppressions at best forge moral alliances, rather than an objectively rooted unity.

A secondary but not unimportant reason lies in the creation of an opposite ideological claim that Marxism indeed promotes women’s liberation, Dalit [lower caste — ed.] and other oppressed people’s emancipation, but must be hostile to feminism, Dalit (or Ambedkarite) politics, etc. as all being variants of “bourgeois/petty-bourgeois politics.”

In India in particular, in the name of putting the working class first, this second current is widely present within both the old mainstream left and considerable parts of the far left. We can call this a sort of Marxist Antifeminism. It has both indigenous and international influences.

Marxist Antifeminism in India

Kanak Mukherjee, one of the first woman members of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in Bengal and a leader of the Communist-led mass women’s movement from the end of the 1930s. She later became a key figure in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) and its women’s front, the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), needs to be cited in this connection.

Mukherjee, belonging to an older generation of activists, dismissed feminist ideas and movements for autonomy in many of her writings. Her focus was on fighting the Congress as well as the CPI (after the party split in 1964 and she went to join the CPIM), defending the Left Front government in West Bengal from 1977. However, a few remarks scattered through her political essays show Marxist Antifeminism at work. She saw feminism as a homogeneous category, and a movement that set women against men rather than class against class. In Women’s Emancipation Movement in India (1989), she wrote:

“Now the imperialists are also throwing a challenge to the healthy democratic women’s movement. They are propagating the misleading Western ‘feminist’ ideology to misdirect and confuse women of the villages and cities…. As against Marxist ideology and its analysis of the women’s emancipation movement as an integral part of the people’s revolutionary movement and the class struggles of the proletariat, these agencies advocate “party-less” or ‘above party’ ‘feminist’ theories to confuse and disrupt the democratic women’s movement. (103)

In the next paragraph, she sets forth the theoretical positions of the feminist movement as she sees it.

“These feminists, though of various views, pose the woman’s question as opposed to men’s and hold the patriarchal system of society responsible for the exploitation of women. Thus, they try to divert the class struggle into a struggle between men and women. This breeds hatred in the family, conjugal life and social life, and leads to the isolation of the women’s movement from the mainstream of the people’s movements…. Some of the leaders of these action groups pose as leftists and criticise the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin on women’s questions.” (Ibid).

Younger activists, who had to build their organizations while in regular dialogue with the left wing of the feminists, such as Brinda Karat, for many years General Secretary of the AIDWA and now a member of the CPI(M) Politbureau, took a somewhat more nuanced position, but explained the persistence of patriarchal families as a hangover from the ruling class, with no material roots within the toiling people. (Karat, Survival and Emancipation, 36-39)

One of the major influences from abroad has been “classist” (class reductionist) forces in the West, especially their material available in English. Here, I do not propose to look at all dimensions, but to mention the example of Tony Cliff’s book Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation. Cliff took the most conservative trends in feminism as representing the norm, then debunked all feminists as some kind of homogeneous force, and went back to Marx, Zetkin, Lenin and others as evidence that he stood with the Marxist tradition.

Cliff’s argument against the feminists, taken up in the mid-to late 1980s by some activists in India having connection with the British Socialist Workers Party, included the stance that feminists are wrong in differentiating between men and women even when looking at women’s oppression:

“This is not to deny, however, that men behave in certain ways which are oppressive to women…. But the blame should be placed squarely on class society, not on its individual agents. Women’s oppression damages the interests of both working women and men.” (Cliff, 229)

Elsewhere, Cliff lumps theoretical disputes around violence against women as minor, or issues that divide women from men.

“Many women in the women’s liberation movement have consistently focussed on the areas where men and women are at odds — rape, battered women, wages for housework — while ignoring or playing down the areas of struggle where women are more likely to win the support of men — such as opposition to the cuts in hospitals and schools, the right to abortion, and battles at work for equal pay or the right to join a trade union….(T)he women’s liberation movement has come to concentrate on where women are weakest. (177-8)
This implies that fighting too seriously for an end to rape and violence against women should take a very low priority in the agenda of a Marxist party or a Marxist-led women’s movement — an especially appalling position in the context of violence against women in India!” (My own response to Cliff’s harnessing of Zetkin to his narrow position appears in my essay “German Socialism and Women’s Liberation,” 2003.)

Marxist Antifeminism vs. the Real Tradition

To make sense of Kanak Mukherjee’s attacks, it is worth looking at one of her earlier essays, published in a Bengali collection of her writings, Nari Andoloner Nana Katha, titled “Patitar Paap.” Originally published in 1958 in the women’s association journal Ghare Baire, it deals with prostitution.

The title sums up her attitude, for Patita means “the fallen woman,” and paap is “sin.” Apparently, back in the 1950s there was already some agitation among prostitutes for organizing, to demand better conditions. The essay looks at Engels, at Lenin’s dialogue with Zetkin, and at real or supposed achievements in the USSR and China, and discusses existing laws to eradicate prostitution in India.

About the prostitutes themselves and their demands there is a brief statement: “What the fallen women themselves are saying or doing is not important. … The first demand of the fallen woman is the demand for freedom from her fallen life. What they want is unimportant, the real issue is what we want for them and what we are doing about it.”

Rather than a long polemic over this, I want to move to Marx, at a very young age, provides with a different approach. In The Holy Family, there is a considerable discussion of gender in the context of Marx’s critique of Szeliga’s analysis of the French socialist Eugene Sue’s novel The Mysteries of Paris.

For Sue, the emphasis is on a questionable altruism shown  by the German Prince Rudolph. In Marx’s discussion, we find an examination of Fleur de Marie, a Paris prostitute, and Louise Morel, a sexually exploited servant of a bourgeois man. Marx’s description of Fleur de Marie rejects the specious philanthropy of Sue, which later affects the attitude of Mukherjee.

“We meet Marie surrounded by criminals, as a prostitute in bondage to the proprietress of the criminals’ tavern. In this debasement she preserves a human nobleness of soul, a human unaffectedness and a human beauty that impresses those around her, raise her to the level of a poetical flower of the criminal world and win for her the name of Fleur de Marie.” (The Holy Family, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4, 168)

It is not an abstract moralism by which Marx judges Fleur de Marie, but by how her actions affect herself and others. Pointing to the hardships of working class women and girls, Marx rejects the priest’s description of Fleur de Marie as sinful. “The priest had made up his mind concerning Marie’s penance; in his own mind he has already condemned her.” (172)

As members of the proletariat have no way to survive but to sell their labour power, when there is not enough other work the women are forced to sell their bodies to survive. Marx sees her entering the nunnery as an illusory consolation which focuses on the mind at the expense of the body. Christian values forced her to focus on supposed crimes that she had committed, ignoring her reality.

Marx’s sharp remark is: “Convent life does not suit Marie’s individuality — she dies. Christianity consoles her only in imagination, or rather her Christian consolation is precisely the annihilation of her real life and essence — her death.” (176)

It could be argued that Kanak Mukherjee did not ask that all prostitutes be made to enter convents, whether by persuasion a la Rudolph or by the force of law. However, this is precisely the point — that her condemnation of the prostitutes as “fallen women” willy nilly pushes her in the same direction as Sue and Szeliga.

It is the moral degradation of the prostitute, not the society that has produced her, that Mukherjee’s article ends up stressing. Marx’s view of what she had done is put in other terms:

“The memory of the catastrophe of her life — her selling herself to the proprietress of the criminals’ tavern — puts her in a melancholy mood. It is the first time since her childhood that she has recalled these events…. Finally, contrary to Christian repentance, she pronounces on the past the human sentence, at once Stoic and Epicurean, of a free and strong nature: ‘Enfin ce qui est fait, est fait.’” [“In the end, what is done is done.” — ed.] (MECW v. 4, 169)

Coming from Marx, the identification Epicurean needs to be understood as “materialist.” And selling herself is caused by her need to survive. So she “considers her situation not as one she has freely created, not as the expression of her own personality, but as a fate she has not deserved.” (169)

The voice of Fleur de Marie should be given due attention: instead of a sweeping assertion that what she wants does not matter, what matters is what “we” (the liberators from above) want to do to her. It is ironic that a fictional Prince Rudolph is to appear in a Marxist garb over a century after Marx wrote.

Marx’s attitude to the issue is clear. He is not glorifying the initial condition of Fleur de Marie, when she certainly did not voluntarily choose to become a prostitute. But the alternative life she was given was far worse, as Marx saw it, for she was made to atone for something for which she was not responsible. To treat the prostitute as a fallen woman is to put the spotlight on her, and not on the social system that repressed her.

Marx and Engels on the Family

It is also worth looking at both The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, for the way Marx and Engels look at the family. Rejecting the possibility of looking at the family as a unit through the ages, they stressed (this was of course a joint work) that one has to look at the historical context, particularly the social relations involved in production.

“One cannot speak of the family ‘as such.’ Historically, the bourgeois gives the family the character of the bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link, and which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family, which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to exist. … Where the family is actually abolished, as with the proletariat…the concept of the family does not exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely real relations is certainly to be found. In the eighteenth century the concept of the family was abolished by the philosophers, because the actual family was already in process of dissolution at the highest pinnacles of civilisation. The internal family bond, the separate components constituting the concept of the family were dissolved, for example obedience, piety, fidelity in marriage, etc; but the real body of the family, the property relation, the exclusive attitude in relation to other families, forced cohabitation … (MECW v. 5, 180-81)

The argument is repeated, with more rhetorical sweep, in The Communist Manifesto: “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.”

As with much of the Manifesto, there is a compression involved. What they seem to be arguing is that the family in bourgeois society needs to be viewed distinctly from pre-capitalist families. This family, in its ideal form, existed among the bourgeoisie, while the absence of ownership of the means of production meant that in practice such a family  tended to be absent in the working class.

In the later writings of Marx we can certainly see that he recognized the existence of families among workers in practice. But there is no idealization of the family. There is no need to argue that Marx had arrived at positions developed by feminists. There is certainly no elaboration of the concept of patriarchy. What I am getting at is that Marx is simply pointing out that there is no universal form of family across time.

The German Ideology also provides some evidence of a much more complex attitude to women’s supposed inferiority. The discussion on the gender division of labour points out that the natural division that exists due to women’s different biology turns into something social, with wife and child being described as the first slaves of the husband.

Since this original “natural” division is seen in societies that have underdeveloped productive forces, social and productive development would render the division no longer necessary. At the same time, since women are “enslaved” (whether this was based on Marx’s class analysis and/or whether it was a linguistic turn of phrase), this suggests that technological improvement alone would not lead to women’s improvement. Rather, a suggestion exists that they would have to fight for their emancipation.

In an essay of 1846, to which Michael Löwy draws attention in his The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx, Marx looks at family-based and other “private” oppressions. Löwy argues that the essay “amounts to a passionate protest against patriarchy, the enslavement of women, including bourgeois women, and the oppressive nature of the bourgeois family.” Löwy adds that there are few things like this in Marx’s later writings.

Talking about the French Revolution and its aftermath, Marx wrote:

“The revolution has not overthrown all tyrannies; the evils of which the arbitrary authorities were accused persist in the family, where they cause crises analogous to those of revolutions.” (MECW v.4: 604)

Marx and Feminism

This is not to argue that Marx had prefigured every progressive step made by feminism. However, it suggests that Marx’s ideas very often put him closer to many feminist arguments and in opposition to Marxist Antifeminism. The argument that a political and economic revolution might not automatically mean the overthrow of all other oppressions, including particularly gender oppression, is one that would be made by socialist-feminists and Marxist-feminists about the Russian and other revolutions.

Kanak Mukherjee’s book Women’s Emancipation Movement in India ends with a quotation from Lenin. It is in fact a good argument that Lenin makes, since he talks about the communist women’s movement as a mass movement, not only of the proletariat, but of all the exploited and oppressed. (Mukherjee, 107-8)

What Mukherjee does not say, and what Karat would hesitantly admit in her book, is that the overthrow of capitalism did not mean gender equality. “With the general erosion of the commitment to socialist theory by ruling communist parties in many of these countries over a period of time, the conscious ideological and cultural struggle against patriarchal attitudes, which were the hallmark of the early years of the Bolshevik revolution, all but disappeared.” (Karat, 44).

The problem, however, was not simply the absence of “ideological and cultural struggles,” but the failure to understand the material roots of sexism. This is where in recent times Marxist-feminists have taken important strides forward, but basing themselves firmly on Marx.

Identity, Intersectionality and Class Struggle

Anti-Marxist arguments sometime come from those who claim identity politics, regarding each kind of oppression in itself as a distinct entity. My argument is that each of these oppressions are real. But they cannot be solved (a) within capitalist society, or (b) each on its own as if there were no connections. Thus, Dalit caste and gender are both real classifications. As the #MeToo campaign in India has thrown up, sexual harassment of Dalit women is rarely acknowledged.

Ruth Manorama, speaking at a meeting in late October, stressed the need to speak about the sexual harassment of Dalit women, which has been ignored for hundreds of years. Cynthia Stephen, writing about NGOs in Tamil Nadu, points out that when she protested against an abuser (who had abused another person, not herself) she was thrown out. She notes:

“Information was shared by others, not by me, to the funders of the organisation where I worked about the various wrongdoings of the executive director and the board members. But as far as I know, they did nothing to intervene at the time or maybe they chose to believe his lies and nobody asked me for my side of the story. Was it because I was seen as a Dalit woman and therefore one whose opinion did not matter?” (https://bit.ly/2Tg1Ugn)

One way of dealing with these problems is to create a hierarchy, deciding that certain oppressions take priority. This is what Antifeminist Marxism does in a way, arguing about class first, others later. Reversing the signs, this is what is sometimes done by anti-Marxist critics.

Marxist-feminists have been in the forefront of a new analysis. From Lise Vogel and a small number of others to Tithi Bhattacharya in recent times, a line of argument has been developed, stressing that Marx’s analytical tools and his own discussions in Capital and elsewhere can be extended.

Workers are sustained their paid and unpaid labor, which includes the care of workers, themselves as well as the care of the non-working members of the working-class family (the elderly, the children, the sick). Their survival ensures the replacement of their generation of workers by the next. This has been called social reproduction theory.

In the essay “How Not to Skip Class,” Tithi Bhattacharya writes: “Instead of the complex understanding of class historically proposed by Marxist theory, which discloses a vision of insurgent working class power capable of transcending sectional categories, today’s critics rely on a highly narrow vision of a ‘working class’ in which a worker is simply a person who has a specific kind of job.”

Bhattacharya follows closely Marx’s analysis of capitalism, and stresses, not that he had made all the connections, but that within his analysis there is scope for its expansion to a full-fledged social reproduction theory. Bhattacharya points out that workplace struggles are not the sole form in which class struggles are fought out.

“Workplace struggles thus have two irreplaceable advantages: one, they have clear goals and targets; two, workers are concentrated at those points in capital’s own circuit of reproduction and have the collective power to shut down certain parts of the operation. . . . But let us rethink the theoretical import of extra-workplace struggles, such as those for cleaner air, for better schools, against water privatization, against climate change, or for fairer housing policies. These reflect, I submit, those social needs of the working class that are essential for its social reproduction. They also are an effort by the class to demand its ‘share of civilization.’ In this, they are also class struggles.” (Viewpointmag.com, October 31, 2015.)

Bhattacharya, as well as David McNally in “Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory,” his essay in a volume Social Reproduction Theory (2017) edited by Bhattacharya, both argue that intersectionality theory leaves unexplained the potential for a unified theory of oppression and exploitation.

Nonetheless, whether we look at the context of intersectionality theory in the USA where Black Feminism arose as a response to exclusions, or to its current applications in India where both Dalit women and Queer activists have been talking about it as a response to their exclusions from the “mainstream,” I would argue that we cannot treat intersectionality as a failed framework.

Patricia Hill Collins had argued that oppressions should be seen as a single, historically created system. There do indeed exist multiple layers of oppression, and unless the specially oppressed and their conditions are understood and they have their own voice, one can collapse into the Cliff-type position where those points where men are “willing” to help must be foregrounded, while uncomfortable issues like rape and assault should be pushed to the rear.

Intersectional politics of oppressed social groups is not necessarily revolutionary. But neither is it reactionary. What is called “identity politics” involves struggles of different social groups. Intersectional identity politics is a step to recognising that it is possible to be oppressed in one context and privileged/oppressor in another.

Dalit women in recent times have challenged the #MeToo campaign in India, not because they are misogynists but because they feel it is focussing excessively, or even solely, on upper caste, comfortably placed women, ignoring much more systematic sexual harassment and sexual violence perpetrated on Dalit women.

When recently one queer activist made a Facebook post expressing happiness that the #MeToo campaign was showing that heterosexual women could also be facing trouble, most other queer activists took strong exception.

Intersectionality is therefore an awareness that there is not one homogeneous, simplified exploiter beating in the same way upon all the downtrodden. And it is an attempt to raise the awareness that unless the struggle for social progress consciously incorporates all the oppressions, they can never be overcome in some automatic manner. The struggle for empowerment and representation of one oppressed group can even further the oppression of another oppressed group if it does not act self-critically with regard to its own tactics and rhetoric.

Intersectionality may not lead to revolutionary directions. But the concept of the proletariat as a “universal class” in Marx suggests how Marx also provides a possible link between class struggle and intersectionality. If the emancipation of the proletariat is not possible without the emancipation of all the oppressed, this needs to be understood, not as an automatic function of an ideal proletarian revolution, but as the process where multiple oppressions are seen, addressed, and given proper representation.

For example, it might mean the need for building mass working class organizations where women, Dalits, Dalit women, queers, are represented in the program, in the organization, and in the leadership in increasingly growing numbers.

So we need to see that Marx’s method provides us with the tools to integrate different oppressions and shows how capitalism binds them together. Intersectionality shows us that these distinct oppressions do have autonomous dimensions. Today we find that a (re)turn to Marx has a lot to do with the pressure of concrete struggles.

If we did not acknowledge this, we might again turn to a wooden Marxism that would reduce class to abstract, casteless, raceless, genderless humans who simply sell their labor power at the marketplace. Marxist theory and practice must move forward, not back.

References:

Brinda Karat, Survival and Emancipation, Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon, 2005.

Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family, Haymarket, Chicago, 2013.

Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx (Historical Materialism book), Haymarket paperback, 2005; Brill hardcover, 2016.

Kanak Mukherjee, Women’s Emancipation Movement in India, National Book Centre, New Delhi, 1989.

Kanak Mukhopadhyay, Nari Andolaner Nana Katha, National Book Agency, Kolkata, 2001.

Kanak Mukhopadhyay, Marxbad O Narimukti, Paschimbanga Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti, Kolkata, 2001.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, vol.4, 1975.

Karl Marx, “Peuchet: On Suicide,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, vol.4, 1975.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, vol.5, 1976.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, vol.6, 1976.

Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (with an introduction by Susan Ferguson and David McNally), Haymarket, Chicago, 2013.

Soma Marik, “German Socialism and Women’s Liberation,” in Anuradha Chanda, Mahua Sarkar and Kunal Chattopadhyay (Eds), Women in History, Progressive Publishers, Kolkata, 2003.

Tithi Bhattacharya (Ed), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, Pluto Press, London, 2017.

Tony Cliff, Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation, Bookmarks, Second Printing, London, 1987

Reproduced from Against the Current March-April 2019

Defeat the BJP

Strengthen the Working Class, Left and All Progressive Movements

A: Five Years of the BJP Rule

In 2014, the National Democratic Alliance, headed by the BJP, won 38.5% votes, but, due to India’s first past the post electoral system, that was enough for it to get 336 out of 543 seats. The BJP itself got 31% votes and 282 seats. This had a dramatic effect. It meant, that while there was a coalition government, it was now firmly under the grip of the BJP, which no longer needed the Vajpayee type of conciliatory mask. The core RSS agenda could be brought forward without any hesitation. The push for Modi for Prime Minister had been funded by a considerable part of the Indian big bourgeoisie. Thus, the rise of Narendra Modi was also connected to Indian big capital.   To assess the five years of the Modi-led government, therefore, we need to grasp the totality of the following elements: a sluggish neoliberal economy mired in cronyism, a sharp attack on democratic rights, attacks on Muslims and Dalits, a determined Hindutva pushed and a splintered opposition to these developments.

The Economic situation: Cronyism, mismanagement and widening inequality

A general economic malaise

The five years of BJP rule has not been a period of sustained high growth. Certainly a few favoured cronies of the ruling dispensation have profited tremendously. Adani’s growth has been staggering and most remarkable of all industrial houses. In 2017 alone the Adani group grew by 124.6%. In the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the helicopter personally used by Narendra Modi was provided by Adani. In the economy as a whole, however, much of the capitalist class has not done spectacularly. Overall growth rates, despite much massaging of figures, have remained well short of the performance of UPA I. Investment in the economy has remained low, with the Gross Fixed Capital Formation falling as a percentage of GDP over the period. Agrarian distress has sent even large landholders on protest marches in Delhi and Mumbai. Employment generation, one of the BJP’s signature poll promises, has been tellingly absent. The latest NSSO data, leaked despite government efforts to bury it, reveal that there has been a shrinkage in the male workforce for the first time since 1993.

Indeed, each of the BJP’s signature economic measures have been conspicuous failures.

·        The biggest of these was demonetization. It was carried out supposedly to check black money. The claim about recovering black money has been demonstrated to be false. The Reserve Bank of India has confirmed that 99.3% of demonetised notes were returned to the bank. The sudden decision had a massive negative impact on the Indian economy, including a slowdown in employment of labour and a dip in overall farm incomes. Growth slowed down to a four-year low of 6.7%.

·        Though planned by the Congress, the BJP executed the imposition of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which, besides causing a further decline in growth rates, effectively enhances the dependence of states to the centre, by replacing the state controlled Sales Tax in favour of an all India GST, whose rates are decided by a GST council where every state is just one member, together with the Centre, and therefore quite powerless to alter the rates it can charge, it is clearly taking away states’ powers.

·        The much touted Make in India scheme has, so far, floundered on the falling rate of investment by the private sector. FDI as a percentage of GDP has remained limited to around 2 per cent. Only a minuscule proportion of this has gone to the manufacturing sector.

This government has hardly proved an able steward of the economy, even by the standards of the capitalist class.

Rising inequalities

While growth in the economy has been sluggish and concentrated in a select few companies, smaller firms have been hit by Modi’s penchant for spectacular authoritarian gestures. Demonetisation – an utterly ineffectual measure – devastated Small and Medium Enterprises, while leaving big capital relatively unscathed. The much touted Mudra loan scheme aimed at the former, has had a risible average loan of just over Rs. 45,000. Smaller business continue to limp back to normalcy while Gautam Adani waltzes into the list of the world’s richest people.

Among the ordinary people of this country, too, wealth has continued to concentrate among those at the top. The Global Wealth Report 2018 published by the Credit Suisse, an investment bank, says India now has 343,000 persons owning over one million US dollars, or about 7 crores of Indian rupees, worth of wealth. According to the World Inequality Database, the income of the top 1% of the Indian population was Rs 33 lakh per adult or Rs 275,000 per month, while the income of the bottom 50% of the population was Rs 45,000 per year per adult, that is Rs 3750 per month.

Spiralling inequality is an outcome of the effort to wind up or curtail welfare expenditures. After its initial frontal assault on India’s fledgling social safety net – the PDS and MNREGA – failed, the BJP settled for death by a thousand cuts. Overall welfare expenditure has increased only marginally while tall claims have been made about the pathbreaking nature of schemes that were essentially re-launches of existing government measures. There have been no countervailing expenditures by the state to check the growth of inequalities.

Rampant Cronyism

Cronyism, then, has been a keynote of this government. This has not been a regime that has spread wealth far and wide across even corporate India. Instead, a chosen few have been consistently favoured for positions of power and direct benefits transfer. The Planning Commission was replaced by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Ayog, which has already identified 74 central public sector undertakings (CPSUs) – including 26 for downright closure and 10 for strategic disinvestment. The government has appointed Reliance Mutual Fund Managers to provide consultancy and execute its project of quick selling 10 CPSUs strategic to the national economy, including ONGC, GAIL, Oil India Limited, Indian Oil Corporation, Coal India Limited, BHEL, Bharat Electronics Limited etc through the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). So the Ambanis, who are among the corporates sector closest to the BJP, are asked to oversee privatization. The numbers of Non-performing assets held by corporate houses has increased steadily over the period of the BJP government and have  contributed to making the position of the financial sector one of the most tenuous in the current economy.

Government figures themselves inform that every year, the national exchequer is robbed of not less than Rs 5 lakh crore through non-repayment of loans and tax fraud. In 2015-16 alone, direct tax evasion amounted to Rs 6.59 lakh crore. In mid 2017, the bad loans of India’s nationalised banks amounted to about 10 lakh crore rupees. The top ten business group borrowers alone accounted for 5 lakh crores.

·        The Rafale Scandal is too well known to need a detailed discussion. In place of giving the contract to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, it went to the Anil Ambani owned Reliance Defence Limited, which has no experience. The cost of the aircrafts went up from what had been originally negotiated. The final version of the deal, in September 2016, saw India signing an inter-governmental agreement with France, in which India will pay about Rs. 58,000 crore or 7.8 billion Euros for 36 off-the-shelf Dassault Rafale twin-engine fighters.  According to Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie (dissident BJP leaders, not leftists) along with Prashant Bhushan,  the total price of 36 aircraft is about ₹60,000 crore, which works out to be Rs.1,660 crore per plane. This makes the price more than double the original 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft proposal.

Any question about the scam has been answered by accusations that asking such questions threaten India’s national security. We do not accept the bourgeois nationalist perception of national security in any case, where increasing military hardware is the main task. But even when that line of argument is advanced, we want to ask, if it was true that India needed 126 aircraft, buying 36 at a higher price benefits whom?

Why is BJP the chosen vehicle of the capitalist class?

If economic mismanagement, rampant cronyism and rising inequalities have characterised the current government what are we to make of the consolidation of the capitalist class behind the BJP? This is best captured in the vast gulf between the incomes of the BJP from any other political formation. According to an Association for Democratic Rights report, the BJP accounted for 80% of the income of national parties for 2017-18. For donations above Rs. 20,000 the BJP received 93% of such donations (Rs. 437 crores) while the INC received Rs. 26.6 crore of such donations. This gulf in funding is one of the many indicators of the capitalist consolidation behind the BJP. What explains such a one-sided choice?

The answer lies not so much in the performance, but in the promise of the BJP. Plans for over 11 industrial corridors lie with the current government. The scale of these plans is instructive. The largest of these currently ongoing is the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor; at $100 billion, this is easily the largest infrastructure project ever in India. It spans the states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. This project alone will urbanise an estimated 12 per cent of India over the next 30 years, displace 20,000 families. Other industrial plans on this scale and larger include the Bengaluru-Mumbai Economic corridor, Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial corridor and Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial corridor. Most of these will require the firm and cruel hand of the government of the day as millions of people are displaced.

On this count, the BJP government has made all the right noises. With the dilution of environmental clearances, the continual surveillance of people’s movements and the demonstrated willingness to use the coercive apparatus of the state to put down opposition, the BJP has repeatedly demonstrated both ability and desire to carry through repression on the truly mass scale that this industrial push will entail once investment picks up.

The Congress, initiator of most of these industrial plans, may feel a petulant envy at the favour the BJP currently enjoys with Indian big business. For Left and Progressive forces, however, this only underlines the need to think more comprehensively about our strengths and weaknesses in the coming battles.

.Democracy Under Threat

To the authoritarian stamp needed to push through neoliberal measures, this government has also added its own Hindutva twist. Attacks on democratic rights and constitutional provisions have increased since 2014. The secular and democratic elements of the constitution are being whittled down at the expense of the Hindu-tinged, communal and scholastic orientation.

Decimating Political opposition

There has been a concerted and systematic marginalization of the opposition typified by the slogan Congress mukt Bharat. Whenever possible, they have subverted democratic content within the parliamentary form to wipe out the opposition; but even otherwise they have not stopped at brazen attacks if needed.

The election of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi was one of the first electoral setbacks to the Modi regime. There has been an unremitting assault on this regime through a shameless campaign of obstruction using the peculiarly complex structure of the Delhi government. The lengths to which the BJP has gone have included the refusal of the Delhi Development Authority (controlled by the centre) to provide land to the Delhi Governement for neighbourhood clinics. The Lt. Governor has repeatedly refused transfers of officials requested by the AAP government. Municipal services (controlled by the BJP through the municipal corporations) have been repeatedly interrupted through non-payment of the wages of municipal workers.

Elsewhere, money power and the governor have been used to subvert democratic mandates. Take for instance the 2017 Assembly elections in Goa. The BJP got 13 seats (reduced from 21 in the previous Assembly elections) compared to the Congress’s 17 and yet ManoharParrikarwas asked to form a government by Governor MridulaSinha. The situation was reversed in the Karnataka Assembly elections when the BJP had more seats than the Congress, but the Congress-JDS post-poll alliance had more numbers than BJP. The drama unfolded on live television for the next few days as people could witness the brazen horse trading of MPs and recorded audio tapes of Yedurappa offering money to buy MPs.

More generally, opposition figures have been repeatedly painted as anti-national and betrayers of a supposed national consensus. Questioning the government in parliament has been painted as efforts to destroy the nation. This is, of course, when parliament has even functioned. The average duration of past Lok Sabhas has been 468 days. The 16^thLok Sabha compares badly, with 331 days of sitting in its entire life. Meanwhile, there was a mainstreaming of aggressive hate speech. Hate speech by MPs, MLAs and Ministers, defined as statements that are clearly communal, casteist, or calls to violence, rose by 490% between May 2014 and April 2018. 90% of such comments were by BJP politicians.

As socialists we have always maintained that bourgeois democracy is limited and partial at best, but guarantees of even limited political democracy are now being rolled back.

Capturing and Undermining Institutions

A bourgeois democratic system is of course first and foremost a democracy for the bourgeoisie. In other words, a major difference between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois authoritarianisms of various kinds is that in the former all sections of the bourgeoisie have greater access to the corridors of power and get opportunities for accumulating capital. But this government is characterized by weakening of all forms of democratic institutions. The institutions of the state are suborned and subverted to suit the narrow goals of the Sangh Parivar—a steady lurch towards a Hindu Rashtra.

Of these the first is the massive attack on the judiciary. In early 2018, four judges of the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of holding a press conference to voice their protest against the arbitrary allocation of cases by the then Chief Justice of India. This was not mere factionalism within the court, but a revolt against how the CJI was allegedly distributing cases to suit the Modi Government.

A second institution under siege is the system of higher education: at the level of the universityas well as the umbrella body of higher education the UGC. Right after getting elected in 2014, the BJP has relentlessly targeted the central institutes of higher education, most prominently JNU, HCU, etc. Vice Chancellors in these universities have transformed structures of university governance, ridden roughshod over Teachers’ Associations and threatened students. Structures of participatory and consultative administration are fast being replaced by a culture of bullying and intimidation of faculty and staff.

Along with branding any independent critical assessment of the regime as anti-national, the present government has tried to remove the very basis of assessment. By manipulating the figures put out by autonomous statistical institutes like the NSSO, a complete control over information has been sought. Data increasingly are either not released at all, or else are ‘massaged’ to a point that strains credulity. This has been true of the controversial GDP figures, data about demonetisation and its effects and, most consistently, data about employment. The resignation of two non-governmental members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) points to the direct government intervention in the workings of the statistical institutes.

The CBI has completely become a tool of the government to harass opposition party members. It must be recognized that unlike the courts, or civil society organizations, the CBI cannot even be thought of as any kind of pro-people institution. Furthermore it must be recognized that the independence of the CBI has always remained compromised no matter which government is in power. But, the functioning of the CBI has sunk to depths not seen in the past. It has been used to target opposition parties, and arm twist opposition leaders to change sides, etc. This of course shows the poor moral and political standards of such opposition politicians – like Mukul Roy, who switched from being a high ranking Trinamool Congress leader to the BJP -- but this also shows that the CBI is not probing corruption or crime. Instead, it has become an instrument for turning tainted or dubious opposition leaders into BJP leaders.

Crackdown on Civil Society Organisations

For workers, peasants, dalits, adivasis, religious minorities, attacks on other organisations matter more. There has been a relentless attack on civil society and human rights organizations, human rights activists and NGOs like the Greenpeace, INSAF, etc. Selectively using bureaucratic and legalistic mechanisms like the application of FCRA regulations the government has pushed human rights activists and NGOs to the margin by accusing that they take foreign funding, when the irony is that it is the Sangh Parivar which is one of the highest recipients of foreign funding from NRIs.

There has been seen a massive use of undemocratic laws against workers, dalits, adivasis, Muslims. The singling out of the Dalit protests over Bhima-Koregaon is particularly significant as a symbolic action. After violence on the peaceful gathering at Bhima-Koregaon by Hindutva provocateurs fake claims about their programme being Maoist was used to widen the net, and arrest many civil rights activists, seize laptops and plant fake “evidence”, seize books containing keywords like Marx, Lenin or Mao, etc. Between April and August 2018 there was a broadening of the net, with the arrests of artistes like the Kabir Kala Manch, civil rights activists like Professor Shoma Sen, SudhaBhardwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Arun Fereira, Vernon Gonlsalves, poets like Varavara Rao, activists like Sudhir Dhawale, the editor of the Marathi magazine Vidrohi and founder of the Republican Panthers, etc. However, the FIR the arrests were based on related to the violence that followed the Bhima-Koregaon event. In other words, there is an attempt to attack Dalit activists and civil rights activists as Maoists, and to say that if you are a Maoist then you have no democratic rights.

The cases have increasingly been made under the UAPA along with various sections of the Indian Penal Code. The UAPA is an act that allows ferocious violence on the accused. GN Saibaba, a wheelchair-bound teacher with 90 per cent physical disability, along with five others, were convicted by Suryakant Shinde, a sessions judge at Gadchiroli District Court, Maharashtra, under Sections 13,18, 20, 38 and 39 of the UAPA and Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).The UAPA, by its own definition, does not arrest citizens for committing a crime. It does so to prevent them from doing so. But what constitutes an “unlawful activity”? Just about any action that either “disclaims, questions, disrupts or is intended to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India” or causes or is intended to cause “disaffection against India”. Left intentionally vague, these words manage to cover almost any action that the “Designated Authority” feels can constitute a threat against the nation, thus justifying the drive to a police state.

Hate Crimes: Terrorising Minorities and Dalits

Most striking of all has been the free rein given by the BJP government to vigilante groups affiliated to the Sangh Parivar to carry on a campaign of terror and intimidation against minorities and dalits. Designed to keep these groups fearful and simultaneously rouse the social base for Hindutva, the incidence of these crimes has mounted steadily. Government data on communal violence shows a spike of 28 per cent between 2014 and 2017. In the name of beef ban and cow protection, there have been repeated attacks, murders.

Even more serious, the state has acted in favour of organised mobs carrying out such lynching activity. Thus, in 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq was murdered after being accused of beef eating. The police, instead of targeting murderers, wanted to investigate whether the meat in his home was beef or not. And Modi, after keeping silent for several days, issued an ambiguous statement, instead of an outright condemnation.  In October 2015, amid protests spurred by rumours of cow slaughtering, a truck was attacked with a petrol bomb, killing one Muslim man in Jammu and Kashmir. In March 2016, two Muslims were killed and hanged in the tribal state of Jharkhand after being accused of smuggling cows. On June 22, 2017, three Muslims were killed in West Bengal state after being accused of cow smuggling. On June 27, a Muslim dairy owner in the state of Jharkhand was attacked by a mob after being accused of killing a cow; the man was rushed to a hospital in critical condition after the police managed to save him from his attackers.

These were not accidental and stray incidents. The UP government of Adityanath made a ban on beef one of its first tasks. Cow protection, a Brahminical agenda, has been used to systematically generate violence on Muslims and Dalits.

There have, thus, been threats to democracy at every level: from the parliament to the grassroots. The effect has been a cumulative one: fuelling an atmosphere of of fear and intimidation among dissenting groups while emboldening the cadre of Hindutva.

Pushing the Hindutva Agenda

The last issue discussed brings us to the BJP-RSS offensive in pushing the Hindutva agenda. Many parties and organisations on the left, when they use the term fascism against the RSS, do not recognise that fascism or fascist-like itself implies two simultaneous dimensions –the economic offensive against the common people and in favour of the big bourgeoisie, and the ideological offensive of aggressive nationalism. In India, that means pushing the Hindutva agenda and generating hyper nationalism, against particularly Pakistan. It is not that only one of these is a “real” agenda while the other is a diversion. The strength of the RSS lies in the forces it has generated in civil society, basing themselves on aggressive Hindu nationalism. This is not the belief of all Hindus, but a very aggressive nationalism, where the nation is defined as Hindu. Its strength lies partly in the previous Hindu inflection of the nationalist movement, and the consequent Hindu bias in aspects of the Constitution itself. But the Constitution, and the nationalist movement, were both the result of compromises. The RSS was a purely aggressive Hindutva force. And in the last five years it has pushed its agenda very far, in numerous ways. It has attacked all major secular democratic institutions of higher education, and especially humanities and social sciences, because these teach youth to look at society critically. It has degraded science, by stressing fake ancient science.

Pushing the Hindutva agenda has also meant violence on rationalists. The murders of Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare and Gauri Lankesh show the extent to which the aggressive Hindutva forces are willing to go. The degree of their impunity has grown. When in some cases they are checked by law and court orders, as in the Sabarimala case, they attack the secular and democratic laws. Thus, in the case of Sabarimala, Modi attacked the state government of Kerala for doing the little it did to protect the women who wanted to enter the temple. In other cases, they have pushed the Hindutva agenda in other ways. Thus, the Supreme Court had struck down instant triple talaq. That is enough to make it illegal. But the passage of an Act that makes it a criminal offense and prescribes a jail term for the offending man, does not actually protect Muslim women, who in such a case would not get security, while the criminalisation would go against the reconciliation that they presumably seek. In no other religion are men (or women) flouting legal divorce procedures criminalised in this way.

Finally, pushing the Hindutva agenda means taking a far more aggressive stance on Kashmir, as well as on Pakistan. On Kashmir, by pulling out of the alliance with the PDP and establishing President’s rule, they have the province under their control. At the same time, by their collaboration with Israel and the extensive use of techniques originally used by Israel against the Palestinians, they have shown how violent they will be. And the Pulwama incident shows how aggressive nationalism will turn to war threats, even while there is the risk of its escalation between the two nuclear powered neighbours.

The Pulwama event and its aftermath are major electoral campaign issues of AmitShah, Narendra Modi and their cohorts. So let us look at some questions dispassionately. Why was the warning of an attack ignored? And why did 80 car loads of soldiers go in such a huge convoy, making it a tempting target? Third, why is the question never posed of what has made Kashmiri youth turn to militancy for decades or why so much violence is inflicted in Kashmir? The attitude is – the territory of Kashmir is an integral part of India,but the people of Kashmir do not matter. Their rights to maximum autonomy, promised in 1947 when India also promised a plebiscite, have been long betrayed. Today, even their elementary democratic rights, are violated by keeping lakhs of armed personnel there and continuously exercising violence against them.

Following Pulwama, in place of examining these issues, the government claimed to have carried out a bombing of a major terrorist camp deep inside Pakistan. This was accompanied by a campaign of nationalist fervour in the media. In the face of this aggressive nationalism a left perspective must stand implacably opposed and demand a focus on the rights of Kashmiris.

Working class and progressive social movements

The period of the current BJP government has not been one of working class strength. While there have been important workplace struggles in a number of places, The working class has not emerged at the forefront of opposition to the rise of Hindutva. More significant progressive opposition has come from a variety of groups: students, dalits, peasants and women.

The Working Class

The period has seen ominous labour law reforms being proposed which would make it harder to unionise and reforms to social security of organised workers. The Labour Code on Industrial Relations Bill was so draconian that it was rejected by the RSS’s own union (the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh). The 2018 Draft Labour Code on Social Security would similarly marginalise unions from negotiations over social security.

Despite this clear attack, the period has not been one in which militant labour struggles have been launched or supported by the established trades unions. Major strike actions  have been largely symbolic one or two day actions with little impact, though participation has been impressive. The divisions among the larger trades unions have deepened with the BMS often relying on its special connection to the government to bargain.

Outside the central unions also there have been militant struggles. A wildcat action on a huge scale (1.25 lakh workers) by largely women workers in the garment sector of Bengaluru  points to the continuing intensity of, both, exploitation and the fight back against it by workers. Less sporadic, more sustained and militant struggles have also occurred. Struggles have emerged along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor: those in Manesar and Neemrana by workers from Maruti, Honda, Daikin and other companies were particularly important. In this context, the effort by some of the unions leading militant working class struggles in those regions have come closer to form larger platform  ‘Mazdoor Adhikar Sangharsh Abhiyan (MASA)’. Similarly, building bases for united militant working class struggle and politicising these struggles elsewhere are critical tasks ahead.

Rather than from the working class, the sharpest opposition to the current regime has come a number of other sections.

Students

Among the earliest opposition to the NDA regime came from students in universities across the country. Beginning with protests in FTII, the emergence of Ambedkar-Periyar Study circles in IITs to the Ambedkar Students Association at Hyderabad Central University. These were determined and militant struggles against which the state took severe measures, including those that led to the death of Rohith Vemula. The struggle of students at JNU took on a wider scope with the effort to term students seditious. These major sites of revolt were mirrored by impressive student struggles in Jadavpur, TISS, and a number of other campuses.

The suppression of each of these movements has proceeded apace. But, through actual networks of solidarity, and through force of example, the students’ movements have tended to spread and support each other. Most recently, struggles against the state’s efforts to, in effect, nullify reservations among faculty have also sparked pitched battles on campus.

The unrest on university campuses are not the result of some greater awareness of students. The People’s Commission on Shrinking Democratic Spaces has revealed the breadth of actions required to transform India’s higher education into the neo-liberal university. High handed university authorities are required to create the more quiescent, pliable, and professionalised public university desired by the Hindu Right and neo-liberals alike. An agenda of surreptitious privatization has also been pushed. There has been a steady decline in the funds invested in higher education as a proportion of GDP, a reduction in enrolment of MPhil students, and in 2018, for the first time in India, the enrolment of undergraduate students in private institutes has exceeded those in the central institutes. Meanwhile, universities are also the sites of other social transformations. As the Saksham Committee report has revealed, with 47 per cent of students in higher education being women, this is nearly the only place in the entire economy where men and women are present in equal numbers. The OBC reservations have made universities more representative than ever before. Graduate employment prospects continue to be dismal.

University campuses are churning as a result of larger structural forces. Student agitations on university campuses seem likely to continue and a perspective of politicising and connecting them to other struggles is crucial.

Dalit Groups

Protests by Dalit groups have, in this period, continued to have a radical edge that has  worried the BJP regime. As mentioned, Dalits along with Muslims, have been direct targets of cow vigilantism. The incident at Una, Gujarat of publicly flogging Dalits sparked a grassroots mobilisation in that state. Earlier, Dalit groups were among those at the forefront of protests against the institutional actions that led to the death of RohithVemula at HCU. Most impressive of all, perhaps, was the response to the April 2018 Bharat Bandh call against the dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act. Particularly across North India, there was an unexpectedly large response which shut down many cities. Similarly impressive was the Maharashtra Bandh called by Prakash Ambedkar in response to the attacks by Hindu nationalist groups on the Dalit commemorations at Bhima-Koregaon.

The state and Hindutva groups more generally have adopted a two-pronged approach vis-a-vis Dalit Groups. On the one hand, to attack these movements and mobilisations. The sordid attempt to deny Vemula’s Dalit identity, the arrests and crackdowns against the protestors involved in the Bharat Bandh and the brutal attacks on the Bhima-Koregaon protests followed by efforts to imprison many of the organisers for being ‘Urban Naxals’. The second prong has been to try to assimilate and Hindu-ise Dalits. Partial veneration of Ambedkar (as an anti-Muslim thinker), the appointment of Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit, as President, patronising high-visibility stunts like the PM washing the feet of Dalits, and being prepared to bring in ordinances and legislations on SC/ST atrocities and the university appointments roster are all examples of this more conciliatory approach.

It is important to recognise that no Hindutva approach will successfully and stably incorporate Dalit demands. The ethos of the RSS is a fundamentally brahminical one and that will not change. It is equally important that historical suspicions, where they exist, between Left and Dalit groups must be overcome. Joining together in struggles – particularly working class struggles – are crucial for this to happen.

Peasants

Agrarian distress has reached a critical point and peasants have been on the march. Impressive mobilisations have happened in Mumbai, led by the All India Kisan Sabha and in Delhi with a coalition of various groups. At more local levels there have been agitations of farmers as well. Discontent about non-payment of dues to sugarcane farmers has put the BJP on the backfoot in Western Uttar Pradesh.

The farmers’ agitations have brought together a coalition of farmers. This includes rich farmers and marginal ones. The existence of this coalition reflects the depth of the crisis in which the agrarian sector finds itself. This has, moreover, been a long time coming. With the an industrial push in place, it seems quite clear that band-aids are all that is on offer for the deep gashes inflicted on the agrarian sector over two decades. The concessions won by the movement – the government’s announcement of Rs. 6000 per year to land holders – represents one such band-aid with little hope of addressing the underlying crisis in agriculture.

Women’s movements

These past few years have also seen a remarkable explosion of popular energies on issues of women’s rights in public and private. Beginning from the mass mobilisations following the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, the issue of gendered violence, sexual harassment, rape and unequal work conditions for men and women have been brought to centre stage. Women have protested in academia, journalism, and a number of other professions. The debate has also posed the issue of caste-based forms of gendered violence with particular force.

While these movements have not taken direct aim at the BJP regime, their far-reaching exposure of the forms of male dominance in public life have brought a new generation of women (and some men) into radical activism. These were the actions and energies of the Pinjratod movement against the confinement of women through curfews in university hostels, the demand for the creation of safer workplaces through the Me Too movement and other protests such as the ‘Garima Yatra’ of survivors of sexual violence across 24 states. Even in BHU, often seen as a bastion of Hindutva organising, women’s protests have shaken the establishment. There is a fundamental incompatibility of the demands for equality and freedom being articulated in these struggles and the masculinist ethos and atavistic values promoted by the Sangh Parivar. Strengthening these movements will form a critical part of a resistance that points towards a more liberatory future. Indeed deepening the intersectional vision and connecting them to working class struggles will be critical to the winning of these ends.

These varied movements have given some hope of the persistence of a spirit of struggle. At times they have even been able to roll back this or that aspect of the Hindutva juggernaut.  Nevertheless, it must be recognised that these are not much more than the starting points of a potential alternative. There have been important fissures between these various movements. A broader vision of strengthening Left and progressive movements through strengthening the working class is necessary.

B: Is Congress the alternative?

There is considerable agreement over many of the issues we have discussed in the foregoing sections. However, the situation in India today calls, not for academic discussions, but concrete political actions. And this is where a wide range of views and perspectives come up.

The Liberal anti-BJP standpoint has as its principal axis the desire to replace a BJP parliamentary majority by a different majority. For many liberals, particularly the English speaking elite, the main target is to have a favourable outcome in the elections of 2019. This has made the Congress their principal choice. Indeed, even the parliamentary left seems enamoured of this option. The calculation is purely arithmetical. To block the BJP there has to be a firm parliamentary majority of 290 to 300. Unless there is at least one party as the core of the opposition bloc capable of getting at least 130 to 150 seats, no alternative government would be able to be sworn in. It is worth remembering that the Election Commission now has at its helm people aligned to Modi, that the President is an RSS man, as is the Vice President. With dice loaded so much, mainstream liberals have become admirers of the Congress. Rahul Gandhi, once mercilessly trolled as ineffectual, he is now constantly held up as a mature politician and contrasted favourably with Modi.

A minimal gloss of welfarism is given to this basically ‘mathematical’ affirmation of the INC. One measure referred to is the NYAY scheme announced just recently. This is a minimum income support scheme, to pay Rs. 12,000 per month to the 20% families in the poorest of poor category. The Congress’s own lack of interest in the scheme is indicated by how poorly it has been thought through. Proper estimation of household income cannot be done through NSSO household consumption surveys. Past experience has demonstrated that this kind of targetting generates huge errors: by including undeserving recipients while excluding those that need and qualify for support. Finally, the Congress has not said how it is going to raise funds for this scheme estimated at Rs. 3.65 lakh crores over the 5-year government term. Given the Congress’s fundamental neoliberalism, it is unlikely to raise taxes on corporates or the rich. Instead, the most likely approach will be to wind up other social welfare schemes to pay for this one. Nor is there likely to be any serious move to do what is most needed: prioritize the creation of free, universal, quality healthcare; make available quality public primary and secondary schooling for all; install adequate social security and pension for the elderly; massive investment on public housing and transport and so on.

There are some extremely important problems with support for the Congress. One or two may not trouble liberals overmuch, but they must trouble anyone claiming to be a socialist and to standing on the grounds of class struggle. There are troublesome problems even if we were to stay close to the premise of the liberals.

As socialists, we need to ask, apart from the demonetisation issue, and leaving aside Hindutva for a very short while, can we discern major differences between the BJP and the Congress? If we look at the period 1991-2018, the Congress was in government for fifteen years. The dismantling of the state sector, the destruction of the Public Distribution System, the privatisation of banks, all began under Congress governments, even if the BJP has been able to push these through with greater success in the last five years.

The plan for the GST, which we have seen takes away the autonomy of provinces, in the name of national unity, was also planned by the Congress. So was the UID scheme, now known as Aadhaar -- a step in creating a police state. At the same time, it is unsafe, as leakages have already shown. In other words, not only does the state gain massive control over people, but the data can be leaked to private corporate players. It is not surprising that the Congress criticisms about Aadhaar were all minor and over technicalities. It has not, and cannot, put up any principled opposition to the UID scheme as a whole.

A second problem that socialists should have is the attempt at moving the discourse to personalities and to a two-party system. On one hand, we are constantly asked to consider who will be the better Prime Minister, Modi or Rahul Gandhi. Or, we are asked, if an alliance wins, will there not be instability due to too many contenders for the position of Prime Minister? This is an attempt to move India more and more in the direction of a plebiscitary and a presidential style politics. Revolutionary socialists have always insisted that socialist democracy must be more democratic than bourgeois democracy. So we cannot support a shrinking democracy by making it a Modi versus Rahul Gandhi fight, but by fighting for proportional representation, so that any party getting 1 per cent vote gets five seats in the Lok Sabha, and by making it a transferrable ballot, so that no vote is wasted. If the party of first choice does not get 1 percent then the vote will be transferred to the party of second choice. We must remember, also, what US leftist activists say about the Republicans and the Democrats – the bosses have two parties, we have none.  The two party system is a conscious attempt to create a false choice for the masses, while the bosses and elites control both the parties.

The other problem with seeing the Congress at the core of a supposed secular-democratic alliance is, that it is neither very democratic, nor deeply secular. If we look at how the Congress has used the Constitution and other laws, it becomes clear that from the outset there was an attempt to strike a ‘balance’ between secular and Hindu communal tendencies, along with a centralising tendency which carried a whiff of the Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan politics. This is evident if we look at the Constitutional promise to promote cow protection: a Brahminical demand dressed up in a pro-agriculture garb.  This is also evident when we look carefully at Schedule VIII, with its promise of developing Hindi, and the concept that this would necessitate drawing resources from Sanskrit. The collapse of the Hindu Code Bill was likewise the result of a compromise with Hindu communalists. 

But it is not merely a matter of the past. In the last few years we have seen that the Congress has taken the view, that secular liberals have no option, but to vote for the Congress and neither do the Muslims.  It therefore sees its task as one of wooing the Brahminical forces. On a significant range of issues, the Congress has reverted to a policy of soft Hindutva. In very recent times, two of its actions describe this clearly. One is the Congress response to the Supreme Court verdict on Sabarimala. In Kerala, it tried to compete with the BJP in mobilising Hindu communal forces, since it hoped that this would weaken the CPI(M) in the province. And in Delhi, when Congress(I) MPs from Kerala wanted to stage a protest, Sonia Gandhi effectively told them not to do these things in Delhi. In other words, for the Congress High Command it was a tactical matter. In Delhi they had to compete against the BJP. In Delhi they had to negotiate with the CPI(M), and with secular liberal forces. So in Delhi the support to Hindu communalism should not be played up.

Another Congress action we can talk about is the support given to the call for building a Ram Temple by several Congress leaders, such as Harish Rawat, former Uttarakhand Chief Minister, or Kripashankar Singh, former Maharashtra Minister. Obviously, there is a difference between a party that has made the Ram Temple one of its signature campaign themes and a party that uses it as part of a huge set of issues. But these people clearly show that Hindu communalism will not die out if the BJP is ejected from power.

That the Congress is willing to support not just Hindu communalism but even people who kill in the name of religion was on display when they made Kamal Nath, one of the main accused in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom case, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh after the recent elections there.

So if the arithmetic alone is considered, key political issues are discarded. It is a matter of recognising how far to the right the political terrain as a whole has shifted. Only then can we acknowledge, that while we would oppose the Congress unhesitatingly, many exploited and oppressed people in several provinces may find that they have no option but to vote for the Congress (I). That might well be the choice facing Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and other provinces and union territories where they do not find significant alternative forces for whom to cast their votes.

We are not in the business of giving political advice to bourgeois parties. However, revolutionaries need to make sober estimates of political situations. The soft Hindutva of the Congress is one of the major impediments to cobbling together a “secular” front against the communal agenda. Just as the deep rightwing economic commitment of the Congress is one of the major impediments to cobbling together a “people’s front” against the economic offensive mounted simultaneously by fascism. So, when we are accused of being politically irrelevant forces who out of a misplaced purism oppose voting for the Congress, we ask, what is the programme for which we are voting? If the actions of the Congress over the past three decades, if the utterances and deeds of Congress leaders over the past five years, are any indication of the things they would do in power, it is clear that:

·        Congress in power would also be hawkish against Pakistan

·        Congress in power would now go for further militarization, with Rahul Gandhi accusing Modi of causing a slowing down of purchasing the Rafale planes

·        Congress would not fight openly against communalist forces on the ground, being content with cosmetic surgery, such as changing a few officials in certain academic and other bodies (UGC, ICHR, VCs of JNU, HCU etc) rather than passing severe anti-communal laws, banning the RSS and VHP under the same laws and for the same reasons which have been used to ban organisations like the SIMI, which have actually been able to inflict far less damage to the fabric of secularism and democracy in India, or taking up thoroughgoing struggles against the Brahminical ideology of the RSS.

·        Congress would continue along the path created by the BJP in centralisation, since the BJP in turn took over many of the weapons forged for previous Congress deeds.

In short, a Congress-led and Congress dominated government may keep BJP out for five years. But first, once the politics of the Congress are clear to the majority of toilers, to Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, they would hesitate to vote, which itself would make the coming of such a government more difficult. And secondly, such a government (even if it were to last that long) would restore the credibility of the BJP for 2024, since people would see that the economic policies of that government would not benefit them, while the BJP, out of power, would be able to use its forces to on one hand mobilise the oppressor castes on a Brahminical plank, while on the other, mobilising the toilers by pointing to the failure of the Congress. And since the front that the Congress aspires for, is a front that would include most of the opposition parties, its collapse would be the last throw of the dice. The RSS would be able to campaign openly for a full blooded Sangh regime, with majorities in both Houses, opening up real prospects for making decisive changes in the Constitution.

C: What about a Federal Front or a Third Front?

In different forms, this is the call that has been going round. This has two shapes, and we need to look at both. One is the very rightwing call for a Federal Front given by West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee. This has of course not materialised in a formal way. What most regional parties know is that their role will be finally determined by how the seatshares that emerge. So they are mostly content with province to province arrangements. But we must be aware that the TMC has been one of the most aggressive right wing parties in India after the BJP.[1]  We have identified it as such a long time back, and that was why, unlike many parties and groups on the far left, who in their so called struggle against “social fascism” supported the TMC in 2009-2011, we have never called for any political support or even any grassroots collaboration with the TMC. It has struck violently against working class struggles, fighting against every all India general strike called by Central Trade Unions since 2011, imposing a terrible “settlement” on tea-garden workers in West Bengal, refusing to pay Dearness Allowance twice a year to government employees and other workers paid by the government, and has waged war against the left forces (both parliamentary left and radical left), including arrests, false cases, deaths due to violence by party goons, deaths due to police action, deaths in prison due to action (or inaction, as when Sudip Chongdar, arrested on the charge of being a CPI Maoist leader, was allowed to die without treatment after he suffered a stroke).

The TMC has also been a partner in earlier NDA blocs, including being in an NDA government. Its current electoral opposition to the BJP stems from bourgeois political compulsions. At present the BJP is a rising force in West Bengal, while the Congress and the Left Front are both seemingly on the backfoot. Consequently it has formally declared its opposition to the BJP. The dubiousness of this opposition can be seen from many developments. Supposedly, TMC goons have repeatedly beaten up Dilip Ghosh, the BJP leader. Yet not once has he even had a few days of hospitalisation. This appears to be a TMC-BJP mutually agreed and staged ‘show’. It enables the TMC to act the role of opponent of the BJP at low cost, and it allows the BJP to also appear to be the real opponent of the TMC. Despite all its failings, in West Bengal, as the 3 February 2019 mobilisation showed, the Left Front is capable of really massive popular mobilisations. At election times, however, massive hooliganism at the grass roots level can have the effect of cutting down the transformation of that support into votes.

That the TMC has no principled secular agenda can also be seen from its use of Bengali chauvinism rather than democratic politics as a mobilising strategy. Its supremo, Ms. Banerjee, has as her declared goal the winning of all 42 seats from West Bengal, hoping this will make her party the strongest in a very fragmented parliament. And if that hope does not work out, she still expects that a lower tally will make the BJP turn to potential allies, possibly dump the Modi-Shah duo for a “secular” and “moderate” face (Gadkari, for example, has already been making the right noises), in which case she can provide her support for or even join a new NDA government in exchange for some of her key demands along with a few token gestures that she can hold up as great victories for secularism.

The second model of the Third Front/Federal Front is one that is more tilted against the BJP. This is a conception that many activists have been hoping to achieve in reality but has little basis in the political calculations of significant electoral formations. This is an Indian version of a rainbow coalition. It is put forward by activists who do not see class struggle as central, but at most as one identity (“class identity”) along with other identities. They believe that a coalition of the BSP, the Dravidian parties, the RJD and the SP, etc would highlight caste, regional and ethnic aspirations and create a more democratic space.

It is true that Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujan oppression is a major point of struggle. But India has seen the performance of the United Front Government too when the Left participated in it but was certainly not in the driver’s seat. Without stronger struggles being generated on the ground, a rainbow coalition will not lead to a rainbow government. Rather, first of all, the sheer numbers show that at least in 2019 such left-of-centre rainbow coalition government is impossible. In several provinces, the Congress is either a partner in such a rainbow, or the Congress is the major opposition to the BJP.

Moreover, such a coalition is unlikely to develop a coherent programme, even for the exploited and oppressed whose votes it is banking on. The refusal of Mayawati to have anything to do with Azad and the Bhim army shows that the BSP is trying to get a constituency under its hegemony rather than fight for Dalit rights. While some intellectuals keep talking about a rainbow, there are no significant gender or class slogans emanating from most of these parties.

D:What Strategy for the Left and Working Class

Conditions in India have worsened in a number of ways. The organised left – parties, unions, other mass organisations, have less striking power than they did thirty years ago. Our benchmark needs to be set at 1989, as a starting point, because that was when the BJP launched its new strategy. Our current has been arguing about that since then. In Parliament that year, the CPI, CPI(M), Forward bloc, Indian Peoples’ Front and Marxist Coordination Committee had 54 seats and had between them polled 10. 49% votes.The organised working class had a bigger striking power.

Indian capitalism had begun its turn to a neoliberal, privatised economy some years earlier, but at a slow pace. 1990-91 saw a drastic shift. A balance of payments crisis was used as the plea to ram through devastating pro-market, pro-rich policies. And the minority government of P.V. Narasimha Rao could do that, constantly holding the left at bay by raising the bogey of the BJP. The left had 58 seats and about the same votes as in the previous parliament. But its persistent policy of lesser evilism, of making a distinction between fighting class battles and fighting fascism, meant that it dealt gently with the Rao government. The result was a further massive growth of the BJP, and its ability to forge alliances with other regional bourgeois parties. In 1996 the BJP won 161 seats, and its allies a further 26. The Congress won 140 seats, a decline of 92 seats and nearly 7.5% votes. The Left Front won 52 seats with just over 9 per cent votes.

What was significant through all these years was the determination with which the parliamentary left clung to its illusions about progressive bourgeois parties. This was revealed in 1996 when the United Front Government was formed. The CPI entered the government, while the CPI(M) and RSP supported it from outside. This government showed absolutely no difference in its economic policies. P. Chidambaram as its Finance Minister presented a budget which Indian big business described as a dream budget. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, one of the principal market advocates of the government, wrote, in a paper for the Planning Commission in 1999:“That a consensus of sorts has evolved is perhaps reflected in the fact that the reforms initiated by the Congress Government in 1991 were continued by the United Front coalition which came to power in 1996 and have also been broadly endorsed by the BJP led government which took office in 1998”.

This popular frontism cost the left heavily in the end. Its last major opportunity had come in 2004. The BJP had gone into the 2004 elections with an arrogant, openly upper class campaign, talking about ‘India Shining’.  The national level perception went against the BJP, as did its local level alliance pacts. The left won 61 seats. But that was followed by the Left Front deciding to give “support from outside” to the Congress led UPA based on a Common Minimum Programme that was hailed as a great step forward. But in fact, the CMP did not do certain things. The CMP did not promise natural justice to the victims of the Gujarat Genocide. In the NDA period Murli Manohar Joshi had ensured the rewriting of text books. When Manmohan Singh, in a rotten balancing act, called for equal rejection of left fundamentalists as well as Hindutva fundamentalists, the left parties did not stand fully with the secular historians and their scholars fighting against the glorification of Savarkar, Hitler and the denigration of the Russian Revolution as a coup in school text books..

Nor is it the case that the left took stronger positions over bread and butter issues. It has been a persistent failure of the left to recognise that the strength of the left, even the non-revolutionary left, is primarily based on extra-parliamentary mobilisations. Despite the left parties not being in power in many provinces, it is the AITUC, CITU etc that have repeatedly mobilised vast numbers of workers in general strikes that have been considered the biggest in the world. But the left parties in the UPA period did not fight all out for the rights of workers and peasants, being satisfied with such sops as the MNREGA, which only offered 100 days of low paid work for one member of each family. Had the left fought resolutely, primarily outside parliament, but also using its MPs in Parliament, for full restoration of the PDS, for universal health care for all, for state funded education and teachers who are state employees, rather than farming it out to NGOs and ill paid workers, they could have both snatched greater gains from the ruling class for the exploited, and made possible a strengthening of their base. After all, the German Social Democratic Party in the period 1890s-1910 won victories, rights for workers, and parliamentary seats, through major trade union mobilisations. The CPI in the period 1951-1962 progressed in much the same way. The experience of being in government has so reoriented the reformist left that it has stopped being able to understand even this. Instead of solidly linking the parliamentary battles to the extra-parliamentary dynamics, the majority of left parties and leaders create separate calendars. They have mobilisations of workers, peasants. But that calendar ends and a separate electoral calendar begins once the elections are announced. As a result, thereafter the class battles are ignored. Absolutely current instances are the struggles of tea garden workers and the elections, or the struggles iof School Service Commission applicants, both in West Bengal. With the BJP putting up John Barla as a candidate, what was absolutely necessary was to fight for tea garden workers’ rights NOW. Similarly, with Mamata Banerjee and the TMC deeply implicated in turning the SSC into a shady racket, there was a need to make the struggle far more visible and to sharpen its focus, instead of leaving it to the handful of protestors.

In addition, the left continues to have a narrow vision of the class struggle that mirrors the politics of the identity politics forces. Where they see class as one among so many identities, the left sees a narrow economism as the class struggle. It does not look at the links between class struggle and caste oppression (and when it tries, it ends up with the failed theory of semi-feudalism). The left reduces gender and sexuality issues to a dogmatic definition of class struggle. As a result, whatever the potentialities, in fact the politics of the left remains a marginalised politics.

Our criticism of the left is based on that. We have an understanding of the class struggle that is potentially unifying. But to be actually capable of unifying the varioius exploited and oppressed masses, there is a need to develop theory and practice together, to struggle for every sector of the oppressed and exploited, and to connect that with the parliamentary struggles. Unless the struggles are linked, unless the left moves out of its eternal search for progressive bourgeois allies and fights together with the oppressed and exploited, there can be no revival of the left even in the parliamentary sphere. And only a stronger left in the parliament can resist the fascists. If we have to rely on chance combinations of bourgeois parties we constantly give ground to the fascists.

The left, whether the reformist or the radical left, needs to understand that the failure to make a Marxist analysis with a proper action programme for caste-gender-sexuality issues leads to either a wooden Marxism of the sectist type that alienates Dalits, Adivasis, women activists, queers, or leads to a post-modernist influenced collapse of the Marxist outlook.

From this perspective, we say that the real United Front in today’s perspective has to be a United Front with mass organisations of workers, peasants, Dalits, Adivasis, mass women’s struggles, queer movement organisations etc. A left alliance should be one that has candidates from such mass movements as well as from left parties, rather than candidates of non-BJP bourgeois parties, as the people we are asked to vote for.

In the concrete situation, our slogans are:

·        Defeat BJP.

·        Defeat all the most right-wing parties regardless of whether regionally they are in alliance with the BJP or not.

·        We understand that in seats where there is an essentially BJP vs Congress stand-off people will feel compelled to vote for the Congress. But we do not see that as the road out of the crisis. The road forward requires treating elections as part of the process of generating mass movements.

·        Hence we call for a vote for Left and progressive candidates.

·        Fascist type forces have never been defeated by bourgeois parties. Other bourgeois parties claiming to fight the BJP are neither anti-neoliberal nor capable of permanently defeating the politics of Hindutva. But they too are now opposing the BJP as they realise that its final victory could be their death knell. The Congress is an ugly rightwing party which cannot be a serious barrier to the progress of Hindutva in the long run but is not a far right fascistic force. Because it cannot be a serious opponent of the politics of neoliberalism or Hindutva  we cannot call for a positive vote for Congress even as we do call for a vote  against  BJP/Sangh as our principal political electoral slogan.

The Struggles to Which We are Committed, before, during and after the Elections

FOR A DEMOCRATIC ELECTORAL, ADMINISTRATIVE AND LEGISLATIVE REFORMS

1.      Proportionate peoples representation in parliament, legislative assemblies and local governments, instead of current first-past-the-post system for a true reflection of people’s aspirations.

2.     Thirty three percent reservations for women and people of other sexuality in parliament, legislative assemblies and local governments and gradually raising the same to fifty percent in timebound plan.

3.     Total state funded electoral system free from the evil of money, muscle, bribes and other ill practices, including media practices. EC should be appointed by multi-member constitutional committee.

4.     Legislative change in appointment and removal of top brasses in CBI, CVC, NIA, CAG through parliamentary committee without any extra weightage and advantage to the ruling party/(ies) and constitutional guarantee in their independent function without govt. interference and control.

5.     Non-Parliamentary top executive to be appointed/removed/replaced mandatorily by the legislature through committee of members from ruling and opposition parties without any extra weightage and advantage to the ruling party/(ies).

6.     A legally binding mandatory framework for pre-legislative consultation to ensure participation of the citizens in process of making laws which affects them for.

7.     Restore in the Electoral list the names of  lakhs of Muslim and Dalit voters, who have been eliminated in the last five years.

8.     Scrap the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Bill.

9.     Fix income for both governmental and private sectors at the maximum ration of 1:6. Bring back a progressive income tax up to a highest tier of 80%, restore the property tax and raise the tax on corporate profits.

FOR PRESERVATION AND EXTENSION OF DEMOCRACY

1.      Repeal (completely and unconditionally) the anti democratic laws and sections of laws/acts viz. UAPA, NSA, AFSPA, Article 124(a), 499 of IPC etc and administrative detention.

2.     An effective whistle blower's protection law.

3.     Legislative enactment of accessible, decentralized citizen’s grievance redressal mechanism to provide time bound redressal of citizen’s grievances with provisions for auditability & accountability and compensations.

4.     Constitutional guarantee of fund, functionaries and authorities for the local self-governments without discrimination for democratic and effective governance, as per the spirit of 73rd and 74th constitutional amendment with mandatory provisions for highest authority of the Gram/Ward Sansad in decision making, overseeing and action taking.

5.     Legal framework for punishable offence with respect to assault upon individual or groups reflecting diverse culture and identity, like food habits, religious practices, caste hierarchy, gender differences etc, mostly minority and weaker stratum and protection of victim(s) with compensations.

6.     Independent statutory body with quasi-judicial power to oversee and protect political and social opposition to the government and the state with right to protest, organise events without discrimination with equal opportunity as the ruling party.

7.     Any aggression or offence by the ruling party or administration, formal or informal with the patronage of the government should be dealt with proper and quick response actions by independent statutory body empowered for the same.

BASIC OF RIGHTS

1.      Constitutional guarantee of ‘Right to Work’ for living to all adult people, with compulsory unemployment wage equivalent to minimum wage, upto the age of sixty.

2.     Universal ‘Right to Pension’ at the age of 60, equivalent to last drawn wage.

3.     Declaration of national floor level minimum wage in consultation with trade unions, nutritionists, social activists with bi-annual upward auto-revision enabling based on CPI; irrespective of nature of work and employment. Mandatory revision of minimum wage with legal obligation after every five years.

4.     ‘Right to Food’ act for universal (nutrition and health compliant) subsidised PDS.

5.     Universal basic health and healthcare system by easy accessibility of safe drinking water, nutrition, housing, end-to-end free medical services with ensured quality and availability at all levels..

6.     Every school must be complaint of RTE. Every childhood education and care should be integral part of it. ITI must be increased in huge numbers followed by setting National Village Education Fund to support Government to improve quality of education in rural areas. Provide residential facilities for under privileged at least up to college level. No communalisation of education system.

7.     Strict implementation of existing labour laws including accountability and actionable provisions upon violation, with progressive reforms over time in favour for employees to minimise the difference in power and authority between employer and employee.

8.     Statutory assurance of remunerative prices as per Swaminathan Committee's recommendation for the peasants and their land distribution support for farmer's collective, sustainable/ecological agriculture promoting and ·full implementation of land acquisition Act, 2013.

9.     Recognition of local communities specially forest dwellers as custodians and share holders of local eco-system and natural resources of that area and legally empower the relevant local assemblies to govern the system while the forest department should be restructured to assist them. An independent and empowered environment commission should be set up to judge environmental standards and make regulations and ensure compliance.

MEDIA, JUDICIARY AND JUSTICE FOR VULNERABLE SECTIONS

1.      An independent institutional framework for accountability of the media and licensing power free from government control and independence of public service broadcasters.

2.     An accessible and accountable judiciary which can deliver justice for all. A full time body independent of government and judiciary which can examine is highly needed to make judiciary accountable and implementable..

3.     Establish an Equal Rights Commission through a law that all can easily understand and that covers all aspects of social inequality. Ensure through this the structural inequalities and the injustices that are faced by helpless social groups. Thereby ensure proper solutions. Reservation in public and private sectors for jobs and education only for the socially oppressed and repressed groups of peoples.

4.     Recognise the rights of all marginal sexualities as equals by creating law respecting self-identification by transgenders.

ENVIRONMENT, FOREIGN POLICIES ETC

1.      All natural wealth must be controlled neither by the government nor by corporate sectors. They must belong to the people. The direct producers must have rights over land.

2.     Maintaining the ecological balance in utilising natural wealth must be given proper weightage. Scrap all industries that destroy the environment.

3.     India must tread the path of friendly and fraternal relations among the peoples of South and South East Asia and West Asia, in order to achieve general development of the peoples of these regions, rather than developing conflict-based relationships. Halt war madness, reduce military expenditures. Stop the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

Press Statement of Vame Handa („Left Voice‟)

Colombo, 26 April 2019

“President and Government should be held responsible for Easter Sunday carnage”

At least 253 people were killed and 500 were wounded due to the suicide attacks carried out by religious extremists on Easter Sunday on three churches and three luxury tourist hotels in Sri Lanka. The Left Voice, an organisation of socialist activists in the trade unions and peoples’ struggles, unconditionally condemns this barbaric attack.

We express our sorrow to the families of the affected. It is disclosed that this attack was carried out by National Thowheed Jamath, an organisation based in Sri Lanka. In the meantime, Islamic State (ISIS) has claimed responsibility for this atrocity.

Full responsibility for all the damages to lives and property in this tragic violence should be taken by the Government of Sri Lanka. Even though intelligence information including the identity of some of the individuals who exploded the bombs were received by the police around 4 April. The government did not inform the public of this credible threat nor take any preventive steps to stop this disaster. The Secretary to the Ministry of Defense (who has since resigned following public outrage) confirmed that he was aware of this intelligence but didn't act on it, believing it to be exaggerated.

While the public is rightly criticizing the entire government for its criminal irresponsibility, the President and Prime Minister are passing the buck onto others including each other. The opportunity for Sri Lanka to become a bombing ground has been created by the unstable political situation for which both leaders are responsible.

It is necessary to understand the socio-economic roots of this type of extremism among young Muslims. Sinhala chauvinist forces which strengthened after the military defeat of the LTTE in May 2009, considered the local Muslim community as its next antagonist.

The Muslim community, especially in the Eastern province, is economically disadvantaged. The post-war campaigns against halal food certification and the slaughter of cows as carried out by Sinhala racist forces were actually campaigns against Muslim commercial interests. The war-time Secretary to the Ministry of Defence (and brother to the former president), Gotabhaya Rajapakse protected the Bodu Bala Sena (‘Buddhist Army Force’) movement who led those racist campaigns. He aspires to be the next President of the country with the backing of those same forces.

The Muslim businessmen of Colombo city have been under threat from Sinhala racists who organize boycotts of their stores as well as attack them, with no protection from previous and present Governments. It appears that some of the suicide bombers were well-educated children of rich businessmen. The context of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia has clearly helped ISIS and other reactionary groups to penetrate into the Muslim community in Sri Lanka.

The present opposition leader and ex-president Mahinda Rajapakse has stated that he too was aware of the possibility of terror attacks. He complains that the present government enabled this situation through arrests of a few intelligence personnel implicated in abductions and disappearances during his regime. Now all three parties, the President, the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are committed to strengthening the security forces and police by introducing new oppressive laws. The President has declared a state of emergency which threatens democratic rights. Other authoritarian steps include blocking access to social media platforms and the cancellation of May Day rallies next week.

The crisis in the present Sri Lankan Government (Ranil-Sirisena) which developed since 26th October 2018, has now shattered the Sri Lankan state. It is now an opportune moment to rally round all the forces to push this Government out of existence which is strongly echoing in the peoples' sentiments demanding the Govt. to resign. If we delay in the task of defeating this Government, a right wing coup will be hatched in the very near future.

A dangerous turn is that the government has requested the support of imperialist countries such as the United States, labeling them as international terrorist activity. At this moment operatives from FBI & Scotland Yard are active in Sri Lanka. We should not exclude the possibility of imperialist intervention in the name of crushing terrorism.

The most dangerous situation is the possibility of attacks against Muslims all over the island by racist forces. The Left forces should take the leadership to avoid this type of situation. One important step towards such activity is to hold the May Day despite the state ban. Further, progressive forces should come forward to defeat the government’s open invitation to foreign intervention.

Linus Jayatilake Leader – Left Voice Organization

Documents broadcast on ARTE

Tuesday, June 4, 2019, by AUBRY Émilie , Pierre HASKI , LEGRAS Gaël , MAC MILLAN Ian

   

Kunal Chattopadhyay

The Indian parliamentary elections of 2019 ended with a huge victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). What was significant was not just the huge increase in votes and seats of the BJP and the NDA, but the total shift of votes and discourse to the right. Any attempt to minimise this by mechanically referring to classical Marxist texts and quotations would be suicidal.

Before we go into left responses, though, we have to begin by looking at what happened and explain why.

A summary comparison between the 16^th and the 17^th Parliaments would be useful, as a starting point. In 2014, the BJP won 282 seats with about 31% of the votes, and the NDA as a whole received 38.5% votes and 336 seats. Later, some of the NDA partners left, notably the Telugu Desam Party led by N. Chandrababu Naidu, which had won 16 seats. Given India’s first past the post system, opposition parties and intellectuals had often pointed out the voting percentages.

In 2019, the BJP obtained 303 sears and the NDA as a whole 353. This involved the BJP getting 37.4% votes and the NDA as a whole claimed about 48% votes, which means practically one in two Indian voters voted BJP and its allies. The two BJP allies who got badly mauled were the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu whose seats came down from 37 in 2014 to just 1 in 2019, and the Shiromani Akali Dal in the Punjab which got 2 seats.

The main opposition bloc, the former ruling bloc for a decade from 2004 to 2014, was the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by the Indian National Congress. In 2014 the UPA had 60 seats, while in 2019 it has 91. But the Congress seats have gone up from its worst ever performance of 44 seats to only 52, its second worst. In terms of vote share it has actually lost 0.8% compared to 2014. The main gain for the UPA has come from the DMK in Tamil Nadu. It had no seats in 2014, and has secured 23 this time, making it the third largest party in parliament.

Parties outside the two blocs have fared worse than in 2014. In 2009 such parties had 122 seats, in 2014 147, while in 2019 this came down to 98. Among those most badly hit were, on the extreme right, the Trinamul Congress, which is the ruling party in West Bengal (34 in 2014, 22 in 2019), and on the left, the CPI and the CPI(M), the two major parliamentary fragments of the original Communist Party of India.[1] The left had  11 seats in 2014 and 6 in 2019, of which the CPI and the CPI(M) together had 10 seats in 2014 and 5 in 2019. The final seat in both cases was held by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, allied to the CPI and the CPIM in West Bengal, but opposing them, and allied to the Congress in Kerala, from where it won one seat. On terms of vote share the CPI(M) shrank to 3.28% in 2014 and 1.75% in 2019, while the CPI was 0.78% in 2014 and 0.58% in 2019.

The Bahujan Samaj Party, which is the most powerful Dalit (the formerly untouchable castes who are still oppressed and marginalised despite the formal abolition of untouchability in the Indian constitution), had formed an alliance with the Samajwadi Party, the most powerful party of Other Backward Classes in the key province Uttar Pradesh. But the SP barely retained its 5 seats with a slight drop in votes, while the BSP won 10 seats, up from zero in 2014. However, it had polled over 4% votes across India in 2014, and it does not seem to have increased that.

So what were the factors that led to this rise of the BJP?

We need to make a distinction between the longer term narrative and the immediate background. The BJP, and its previous incarnation, the Jana Sangh, were electoral arms of an aggressive Hindutva nationalist political outfit, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh. It was founded in 1925 to assert Hindu dominant caste (primarily Brahmin) supremacy. By the 1930s, its leaders were in touch with Mussolini and then with Hitler, and were among the most fervent supporters of the Nazis from the time of the Krystallnacht, arguing that such should also be the future of Muslims in India. At the same time, they were loyalists in Indian politics, refusing to take part in the freedom struggle, while explaining to their cadres that the real fight would be the one between Hindus and Muslims, not between the British colonial rulers and the Indian people.

The murder of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, who had formally resigned his RSS membership before the murder , resulted in a ban on the RSS. It finally came out of the ban by promising not to take part in politics, a promise it interpreted simply to mean that the RSS would not contest elections. Hence the electoral arms like Jan Sangh. A strategy of long term penetration in civil society by building up a wide range of institutions followed. They included schools, where through philosophy, history, and literature, Hindutva (political Hindu nationalism) was glorified. They also included specific organisations targeting different segments of the population, including Dalits and other subordinate castes.

The 1970s saw a change in the fortunes of the Hindutva right, as mainstream bourgeois and socialist/Stalinist left all displayed some degree of willingness to collaborate with them in order to defeat the congress, led by Mrs. Indira Gandhi. In the 1977 elections she did lose. But much of the cadre base was provided by the RSS in the fight against her. As a result , the united opposition that fought the Congress (I) during the elections of 1977 enabled them to get a considerable number of their members elected to parliament, and for the new government to carry out quite a bit of the RSS agenda.

By the late 1980s, the Congress, the traditional party of the Indian capitalist class, was facing a crisis. 1984 was the last time the Congress won a majority in parliament on its own, and it did so by a shift to Hindu communalism, with Sikhs as the target. Again, there was an attempt by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to create a balance of communalisms, including opening up a dormant  communal tension over a mosque in Ayodhya, supposedly built by destroying a temple back in the 1520s.

The elections of 1989 and 1991 saw new issues coming to the forefornt. The BJP, founded in 1980, initially attempted to present a more moderate face than the erstwhile Jan Sangh, talking about “Gandhian Socialism”. But it won only two seats in the parliament of 1984, and decided to shift to more aggressive Hindutva thereafter. Meanwhile, a dissident Congress minister, Viswanath Pratap Singh, pushed for the recognition of oppressed castes and social groups (collectively Other Backward Classes) who had never been “untouchables” but who were part of the socially marginalised. Aware that this posed a threat to its strategy of Hindu consolidation, the BJP, which had supported Singh during the 1989 elections and had propped him up in his coalition government, went for a very aggressive campaign to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a so called Ram temple there.

Three issues would dominate thereafter – Indian capitalism and its march to globalisation, and the rival discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism versus Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi-Muslim alliance building. The shift from a welfare state model to the neoliberal economy however took place initially under the Congress. The BJP was far from being the first choice of the ruling class during the 1990s. However, the weakening of the Congress led to a change in ruling class attitude as well. The various attempts at building “third fronts”, whether sponsored by the left or not, saw regional parties, concerned with local voter bases, making demands that often went against the core demands of the bourgeoisie. And anytime the parliamentary left was a partner, for all its limitations, it insisted on reforms that would provide (within capitalism, certainly) some benefits to its core constituencies. As a result, while the 199-2004 Vajpayee government was formed initially without any huge bourgeois support, the performance of that government changed the attitude of the ruling class. From 2004, the BJP has increasingly become the preferred party of the bourgeoisie. This also has links with the specific problems faced by Indian capitalism.

Globalisation, Indian Capitalism and the BJP:

Indian capitalism has developed an aggressive appetite. The Global Wealth Report 2018 published by the Credit Suisse, an investment bank, says India now has 343,000 persons owning over one million US dollars, or about 7 crores of Indian rupees, worth of wealth. According to the World Inequality Database, the income of the top 1% of the Indian population was Rs 33 lakh per adult or Rs 275,000 per month (just under US$ 4000). Mukesh Ambani’s wealth is currently put at 53200 million US$, Ratan Tata’s wealth is seemingly much less, but that is because much of it is concealed as company property which he fully controls. But the Tata group has under his stewardship acted aggressively to take over Tetley (by Tata Tea), Jaguar Land Rover (by Tata Motors) and Corus (by Tata Steel). However, Indian capitalism has been forced to compete with much more powerful US, European and Japanese capitalism, and recently with Chinese capital, from a weaker base. As a result, and lacking any historic colony, Indian capitalism has the need to impose super-exploitation on the Indian working class. This includes a huge burden on the adivasis (including evicting them from forests where they have dwelt, compelling them to work for abysmally low wages, etc) as well as destroying the organised working class altogether.

This is where the Congress has been unable to deliver the goods. The privatization of the finance sectors have been slowed down due to massive struggles by finance sector employees. The very existence of some of the older labour laws, however much they are flouted, create benchmarks against which workers can raise their demands. And this was something that became clear in 2004-2009, during the UPA-I government, when the left had 61 MPs, and Congress had to rely on the support of those MPs. Some reforms which from above appear very insignificant actually provided quite a bit of bargaining power to the rural poor. These included the MNREGA, which provided that one person per poor family would get 199 days guaranteed work per year.

The Gujarat Model of Narendra Modi consisted of ignoring labour laws, ignoring environment protection (since that increases the cost for the individual capitalist), and promoting big capital.[2] In 2002, after the Gujarat carnage, sections of the Indian capitalist class, members of the Confederation of Indian Industries,  had criticised the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Led by diamond merchant and businessman Gautam Adani, a group formed an alternative body, Resurgent Group of Gujarat, and even threatened to leave CII.

Adani pledged a sum of Rs 15,000  crore for the first Vibrant Gujarat summit (held in September-October 2003). Thereafter, Adani was one of the principal lobbyists for Modi consistently, including outside India. Other capitalists began to see the value of the Modi/Gujarat model. Unlike in the case of previous BJP leaders, the Modi for Prime Minister campaign was launched at Vibrant Gujarat summits, with prominent Indian capitalists sounding the tocsin.

The Modi government started repaying their friends. When it became a Modi government at the all India level, this repayment was even more fulsome. The BJP had a few campaign planks in 2014, one of which was its opposition to corruption. But from Anna Hazare down, all the “anti-corruption” crusaders who had targeted the Congress, remained silent as India’s big capital, and to a certain extent certain major international capitalist concerns including Monsanto, made huge inroads.

But it was not simply a matter of corrupt practices (the so-called crony capitalism). It was a matter of systematic inroads on the workers and poor peasants’ livelihoods for the profit of big capital. However, there were roadblocks. The Indian working class is much weaker now than it had been three decades back. Nevertheless, the call for changing the labour laws, the speeding up of the privatization of Public Sector Undertakings, got slowed down primarily because of labour resistance. While only about 5-7 per cent of the working class is organised by now, the twenty-first century did see attempts, including by some of the bureaucratic Central Trade Unions, to mobilise not just their immediate members but others as well. General strikes across India, and regular struggles in the financial sectors, meant that the plans could not always proceed.[3]

The ideological mobilisations:

But in 2004, Vajpayee had stumbled here. He too had sought, as BJP leader, to serve big capital. But the India Shining campaign had resulted in huge popular rejection. That was also the last occasion when, as we saw, the left votes had gone up along with seats. Though that was a matter of 59 seats of the four LF parties ( CPIM 5.66%, 43 seats, CPI 1.41%, 10 seats, RSP – 0.43%, 3 seats, All India Forward Bloc – 0.35%, 3 seats) along with 2 more by their allies , this was an indication that the masses of people were willing to vote for alternatives if these were posed before them.  Also, the BSP had won 19 seats (5.33%), the SP 36 seats (4.32%), and in Bihar the Rashtriya Janata Dal (the SPs rough equivalent in Bihar) had won 24 seats (2.41%). In 2009 too the UPA had trounced the NDA. But this was followed by the old guard of the BJP being pushed aside, and a firm, aggressive new leadership taking over. Between 2014 and 2019, this leadership consolidated itself.

The Hindu nationalist rhetoric was modified, because it was clear that merely pushing for Hindu unity was not paying adequate dividend. At the same time, a series of policy measures by the government had created popular anger. This was eventually translated into votes in several state assembly elections in 2018. In May, the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress tied up after the elections to form a JD(S) led government. The BJP tried to spend huge sums of money to buy up several MLAs but was foiled. In November-December, there were elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, and Telangana. The Congress lost Mizoram to the Mizo National Front, but gained Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh from the BJP. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi swept Telangana, defeating both BJP and Congress.

The BJP showed that it was prepared for these setbacks. While this also calls for a discussion of the errors and flaws of its opposition, we need to understand that right from 2014, the BJP had taken up a multi-pronged strategy. One was a shift from merely Hindu nationalism to a full-fledged appropriation of Indian nationalism in its ugliest form. The distinction lies in the past of the RSS. The RSS does not have, as we saw, the freedom struggle in its genes. So it has in the past stressed that it is fighting for the real rights of Hindus. But this time, Kashmir, Pakistan, these became important buzz words. In place of previous governments with their attempts at some degree of carrot and stick policies in Kashmir, under Modi there was simply a big stick with no attempt at either carrot or talking softly. From a very early stage, Modi projected himself as a strong man. Kashmir was a key component of this chest thumping nationalism. Violence in Kashmir was firmly justified. This was the way in which the Sangh worked itself into nationalism. Violence in Kashmir is not new. Between 1990 and 2017 about 41,000 persons have died due to the conflicts. They include 14000 civilians and 22,000 real or alleged militants. However, there was clearly an upward graph from 2014. And this has resulted, with the Pulwama incident, in the emergence of purely home-grown cases of militants, even though Pakistan had to be blamed for political (primarily electoral) reasons.

National security trumps civil liberties –this was the message. The failure of the RSS student wing, the ABVP, to win the JNU Students Union election, led to aggressive nationalism and fake propaganda, which however was dramatically effective. The JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar (a member of the CPI dominated AISF), along with students belonging to other left organisations, such as Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, were accused of having raised anti India slogans at a meeting  which was held over the commemoration of the hanging of Afzal Guru. Guru was a Kashmiri who was hanged in a case that will remain one of the worst cases of legal violence, with ample evidence that he was framed by the police. Many lawyers, civil rights activists have protested his conviction and hanging. Kumar and others were charged with having shouted anti India slogans. They were arrested, Kanhaiya Kumar was assaulted in front of the Patiala House  Court.  While no legal case could stand, the bulk of the electronic and print media were used, with shouting brigade leaders like Arnab  Goswami (then Times Now, currently Republic TV) leading the pack. The aim was manifold. First, Kashmir was made into a seat of evil. Modi was shown as the first muscular leader tackling Kashmir the way it should be, namely by massive and unrelenting violence. Second, leftists of all shades were depicted as “anti-national” for talking about civil rights in Kashmir. Of course their utterances were distorted so that they, including someone like Kanhaiya Kumar, belonging to the CPI (all moderate left parties take the position that Kashmir is an integral part of India, and differ only over how to conduct control there), was supposed to have advocated Kashmir’s right to self-determination to the point of secession. Third, as these were JNU students, and much of the left and liberal intellectuals of Delhi, and because it was a Delhi based incident, intellectuals and students all over India stood by them, it was argued that liberal intellectuals by definition were suspect, with a tendency to become anti nationals.

The focus on national security and nationalism was successful. The elections of 2004, 2009 and 2014 were all fought on primarily economic issues. In 2004 BJP went into the polls claiming India was shining. It had a fully articulated aggressive neoliberal policy, while the Congress, the original party that had ushered in neoliberalism in India, was talking about social security. The left won its highest ever number of seats. In 2009, the UPA-II government was formed because UPA successfully defended its economic record, including the MNREGA. In 2014 Modi and the BJP focused on corruption, economic failures. Hindutva was worked in, but with a distinct economic tinge in areas like West Bengal and Assam, where “infiltration” by Muslims was linked to outsiders (real or alleged immigrants) taking away jobs from locals. In 2019 by contrast, the economy was in a mess. So much so that the government of India stopped data from being published. As we write this the Government, now securely in place for five years, has acknowledged that the growth rate had plummeted to 5.8% and that India’s unemployment rate hit a 45 year high in 2017-18. But the success of the BJP lay in its ability to move the entire campaign away from the economy. The Congress did try raise issues relating to the economy as well as corruption (the Rafale deal), as did other parties. But the BJP stayed firmly on course for an ideology driven campaign that stressed national security, a strong leadership, and anti-Pakistan rhetoric. Nor was this last something invented only after Pulwama and the Balakot strike. This chest thumping belligerent nationalism was ratcheted up immediately after the 2014 victory and stayed the entire course. And no party, not even the left, was in a position to take this on adequately (in most cases not at all).

Ideology, Institutional Subversion, Force:

There is a need to understand the different dimensions that were integrated in this success. The ideological triumph, while backed by force and fraud, cannot be discounted. The RSS-BJP has succeeded in becoming the hegemonic voice across much of India, spreading beyond the North and the West to Eastern India and to parts of the south. It has used local issues, but woven them into its core outlook.

Three decades of neoliberalism have shown that there is no trickle down. Wealth accumulates at the top, and simply stays there. This has created frustration. There is a tremendous  sense of anger, insecurity and frustration among the youth, many of whom were the first time voters in the elections of 2019. The BJP government's policies over the last five years certainly contributed strongly to their economic crisis. Yet, a disproportionately high fraction of them appear to have voted for the BJP. No mechanical understanding can explain this. For this, it is necessary to look at how their imagination has been captured, how their anger has been shifted in certain directions by astute politics.

This involves taking on and defeating the challenges from left and subaltern politics. Electorally, one of the challenges mounted from the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, was the attempt to create political identities called Dalit politics and OBC politics. While caste oppression is a living social reality in India, specific caste groups or jatis are linked to particular occupations. The change from pre-capitalism to capitalism has partially transformed that. That has also given the opportunity of cobbling together a discursive alternative based on shared experiences of oppression, humiliation and the desire to fight back and gain social identity and pride. B.R. Ambedkar started this process, but it was in independent India, with the adult suffrage, that a serious attempt was made to build table, cohesive political projects around this.

The Dalit assertion for greater dignity, and recognition as equal humans, as well as the struggle for material benefits, came up against the recognition that without political power these were not going to be possible. The Dalits, their aspiring political leaders and intellectuals, saw the left as non-serious about them at best, because of the repeated arguments that when all the exploited improved their social conditions Dalits would find themselves in a better situation. This seemed at best a failure to recognise the special oppression they faced, and at worst a reassertion of upper caste (in recent parlance, savarna) domination in the name of class leadership. So there was an attempt to build Dalit parties within bourgeois politics, the most successful being the Bahujan Samaj Party of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. Historically Dalits were the “outcastes”. The “shudras” were people who came to occupy places a little above Dalits but were also oppressed. This essay cannot trace fully the class-caste interfaces and linkages. However, a large part of them were the ones who came to be identified as the Other Backward Classes. Here too, social engineering and a political project based on that went together. But that political project fragmented into state level entities, like the Samajwadi Party in UP, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, etc.

These were however political processes based on discursive identity politics. There was no easy road to unity based on the argument that Dalit-Bahujans constitute the majority and are oppressed. Both parts of the statement are true, but they could not easily be turned into lasting political vehicles. Apart from the interests of the elite, and certainly Brahminism is a component of the elite in India, this political process required a material basis that did not necessarily emerge. Thus, in UP, the core area of the BSP, the Jatavs formed its most enthusiastic supporters, and got disproportionate support and patronage from it, so that it has been argued by analysts that other Dalit castes have not remained as strongly loyal to the BSP as in the past. Equally, the RJD and the SP were backing mainly the most powerful OBC group, the Yadavs. In Bihar this led to the split between RJD leader Laloo Prasad Yadav and the Kurmi leader Nitish Kumar.  The BJP has taken note of these processes and has encouraged the formation of small parties based on one or two smaller but significant castes, or forged alliances when such parties existed, in order to ensure that the project of a Dalit unity or OBC unity does not materialise.  Hindutva, allegedly very catholic and capable of embracing diversity, was pushed as the key to how these different castes could all be accommodated. At the same time, the BJP has shown greater flexibility in recent times. It has moved to acceptance of reservations while diluting them ( e.g., through the so-called economic  reservation) It has absorbed gods and goddesses traditionally worshipped by people outside the elite brahminical hierarchy, while ultimately ensuring that the cooption is on the terms of the Sangh. And through sustained scapegoating of Muslims, it has actually managed to make Dalits in many parts of India hostile to the Muslims, so that even real brahminical oppression has not led to Dalits siding with Muslims. One of the ugliest cases in the past was of course the successful mobilization of oppressed castes against the Muslims during the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat.

The scapegoating of Muslims has been done systematically, and taking into account local issues. Thus, in Bengal it is “infiltration”. In Assam it is linked to an older anti Bengali sentiment. So while it has variations, there has been generated a massive fear, hatred and anger against the Muslims within a considerable part of the Hindus. While leftists have often pointed out rationally that the Sachar Committee Report and other documents show that the majority of Muslims are actually socially and economically in a worse position than for example Dalits, the BJP-RSS way of handling popular religiosity and promoting the hatred against Muslims rides over such rational arguments.

At the same time, there have been massive institutional shifts. This needs to be understood to recognise the nature of the BJP victory. The BJP had sustained support from most newspapers and TV channels. This is not surprising. It is sometimes said by well-intentioned but totally erroneous commentators that the media has been purchased, the journalists have been purchased. The reality is simple. Most newspapers and television channels are owned by capitalists who are part of the hegemonic bloc that sees the BJP as the sole stabilizing force. So journalists are instructed to take pro BJP lines. The social media was also dominated by the BJP. There were large numbers of paid social media operators sending out messages, cartoons, memes, fake news to vast numbers of citizens. There was the tapping of the UID (Aadhaar) data and its use. There were the shifts in the Supreme Court and the Election Commission. There is no need to accept conspiracy theories like the EC creating EVMs where whatever button is pressed the BJP would get the votes. The EC did other things which were quite visible. This began with the EC waiting till Modi’s all India tour of inaugurating various projects was over before it announced the election dates. This continued with the EC giving clean chits to Modi’s numerous violations of the Poll code.

From the point of view of funding for the elections, this time there was simply no comparison. The BJP had about fifty times the funds all others had. It was like a super heavyweight fighting with a number of bantam weight boxers, and the media gleefully attacking the bantamweights for not being able to go the entire distance.

To this we need to add the matter of force and fraud. A vast number of Muslims and Dalits found their names deleted from the electoral rolls and therefore could not vote. During the election campaign there was massive show of force and threats. Thus, Muslims in many UP seats were subjected to threats of various kinds, like Maneka Gandhi, the BJP candidate from Sultanpur, openly threatening Muslim voters that if they did not vote for her, after the elections she would not help them. This is not an empty threat, because the EC’s use of EVMs mean that its Form 20 data, released after the polls, allows everyone to check how each booth, or each EVM, voted. This breakdown practically nullifies the secrecy of the vote.

The Opposition and the Strategy of the Congress:

The possibility of defeating the BJP rested on forming a wide block of parties. Any such alliance would have been a bourgeois alliance, and there is no question of our supporting it. But an objective analysis would show that whereas in the first half of 2018 the Indian National Congress was keen on moving to some sort of alliance of that type, the victories it got in a few state assemblies changed its outlook.

In UP the major alliance was the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance, which tried accommodating others. But the Congress made huge demands. For the SP-BSP alliance to accommodate a very weak Congress any further than they did (they did not put up candidates in the seats contested by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi), the Congress had to respond in places it was stronger (Madhya Pradesh, Punjab etc), which it simply did not. The Aam Aadmi Party, which controls the Delhi government, tried negotiations about the Delhi seats but the negotiations fell through. The Left front in West Bengal all but begged the Congress for at least a seat adjustment if not an alliance, but there too it was the Congress that showed disdain.

It was clear that the Congress was more interested in putting itself forward as the only legitimate alternative to the BJP than with winning elections and putting together a coalition government. Its pitch was successful among liberal and soft left intellectuals of certain types, who were urging votes for the Congress. One key element in the liberal arguments for the Congress was that all other parties had at certain times allied with the BJP and given it legitimacy (including the Left front), while the Congress had not. Of course – since the Congress was usually the party against which such alliances had been put together in the first place. Moreover, the Congress took a soft Hindutva policy over a series of issues. In Kerala, where the contest was primarily between the CPI(M) led Left Democratic Front and the Congress-led United Democratic front, there was a Supreme Court verdict that stopped the regressive practice of not permitting women who were of roughly the age when women would menstruate into a temple known as the Sabarimala temple. In order to win the Hindu conservative vote, it was the Congress which aggressively mobilized people, basically demanding that the provincial government should not help any woman trying to enter the temple. Certainly, in Kerala the UDF won 19 out of 20 seats, though not only for that reason. Finally, of course, if we look at the economic policies that the Indian capitalist class, or at least its dominant sections, want, it was the Congress that started pushing for them from the end of the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s onwards.

Why the Congress wanted this seemingly suicidal policy of going alone and ensuring its defeat has to do with its alliance experiences and a strategy it seems to have developed. Alliances, whether with the Left in 2004-2009, or even with regional parties (2004-2014) compel the Congress to give too much ground on core issues of interest to the Indian capitalists and international capitalism. So the Congress strategy, on looking back over what it did since November 2018, was to appear progressive, as the left of centre alternative to the BJP (a fake appearance) while concentrating on the collapse of regional and left parties. Just one example will clarify this. It was the left that was primarily responsible for the big kisan marches  In Mumbai and Delhi. The Congress picked up the rhetoric. But after the November victories, the Congress did not hike the crop procurement prices in the provinces where it won, contrary to its pre-election promises. As a result, when the Congress made an electoral promise to give Rs 72,000 annually to 20% families in poorest of the poor category, benefiting around 25 crore people (the NYAY scheme) in  Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, it made evidently zero impact. The BJP swept those provinces, bouncing back from its defeat just six months back.

The Disaster of the Left:

For Marxists, discussing the rise of an ultra-right force, the key questions are, what is going to be the line of march in the coming period, and how do we fight it? To answer these questions however, we have to begin with examining the extent of the disaster of the left.[4]

The mainstream left, as it is often called, consists of four main parties – the Communist Party of India, the CPI(M), the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and the All India Forward Bloc. The CPI and the CPI(M) belong to the same current, and the historic reasons for the split are long over. The CPI has repeatedly called or a unification of the two parties. The CPI(M) has in the past rejected the appeal with arrogance, arguing that as it is a bigger party, the CPI should enter it instead. This is something that would also enable the CPI(M) to argue that it remain the “correct” legatee of the undivided CPI, even though in fact today the CPI(M) no less than the CPI is a fervent campaigner for an alliance with the Congress.

What is far more important is the experience of being in government and how it has transformed the mainstream left. The CPI and the CPI(M), emerging from the Stalinised milieu, had not been revolutionary parties at any time in independent India. But they did have militancy, and a degree of focus on extra-parliamentary mass action. Even the toppling of the Namboodiripad government of Kerala in 1959, and the toppling of the United Front governments of 1967 and 1969, did not mean a total rupture with that outlook. But between 1977 and 2011, the Left front was continuously ruling West Bengal at the provincial level, and it also had a long stint I Kerala, alternating with the Congress led alliance. In the small state of Tripura it ruled for a quarter century. These experiences, and above all the West Bengal experience, transformed the CPI(M), not only in West Bengal, but across India. CPI(M) cadres in West Bengal did not take part in any real mass movements since 1977, because only when the government had decided what to concede were fake controlled movements launched. This had an impact at the all India level too. While the left parties and their mass fronts continue to be important (the CITU and the AITUC among trade unions, the AIDWA and the NFIW among women’s organisations, the two Kisan Sabhas, etc), movements have become peculiar. Thus is most clear when we look at the working class. There has been unremitting assaultsin the name of globalisation and reforms since 1991. The left trade unions have responded by periodic general strikes. The massive support these general strikes have evoked show that there is huge popular anger at the government and ruling class policies. Since 1991 there have been 17 general strikes. Yet the grass root work of rebuilding unions, organising the contract workers, launching struggles or deepening existing struggles, these have been seldom done, either in the provinces where the Left ruled in the past, or elsewhere.

Instead, the central thrust became the question of the popular front, adapted to India. The popular front is the Dimitrov version of the United Front, which is not an attempt to unite the working class, and behind it the other oppressed, but an alliance between workers’ parties and so-called democratic or anti-imperialist bourgeois parties. Its Indian version, originally worked out by two British Stalinists, R. Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, continues to be the dominant ideological guide for the CPI and the CPI(M).  Finding bourgeois allies and contesting elections with them remains their key task.

These two dimensions – the transformation of the mass struggles and the crass electoral line have resulted in a deep transformation of their cadres. The fact that the Left Front in power was capable of distributing patronage, and that its very high votes represented that, not just its ideological strength, was ignored. So the decline in its vote shares from 2009 was not properly understood by its own cadres or even leaders in West Bengal. Once it was out of power, and unable to provide patronage, that mode of securing votes was gone. The Trinamul Congress saw to it that even when left leaders were MPs or when the left won municipalities etc, their funds could not be spent or they would not even get funds. A major example is the case of Siliguri. A Left Front-Congress bloc managed to get the majority and Ashok Bhattacharya of the CPI(M) became Mayor of the municipal corporation. The corporation has not been getting funds, and all road development and other work, along with patronage, in Siliguri, has been done through a bureaucratic agency created by the state government. 

To top it, there was the massive violence on the left, unleashed during the last panchayat (rural local self-government bodies) elections in West Bengal. Conducted by the state election commission with the state police ‘ensuring’ law and order, it saw  total mayhem by the TMC. And when that happened, while in some areas the BJP-RSS cadres stood up to resist, even at the cost of being beaten up, the Left leadership simply abdicated. Large numbers of left local supporters, candidates or would be candidates, were beaten up, forced to leave their villages for months, while the leaders confined themselves to statements, dharnas (sit down protests) in front of the state election commission office, etc. This made a large part of the electorate feel that the left was not serious about resisting the TMC and the violence it had unleashed. Meanwhile, as the BJP has never ruled in West Bengal, they did have illusions about the BJP as the alternative force that might resist the violence of the TMC.

In West Bengal, the TMC and the BJP succeeded in achieving a communal polarisation. It has been argued that the Left votes were transferred to the BJP (seemingly plausible because the decline of Left votes and the rise of BJP votes between 2016 and 2019 seem to match). In fact the case is more nuanced. Muslims earlier voting left have often switched to the TMC, as have Muslims voting Congress. Congress won in two seats in West Bengal, but it also saw a decline in its vote share. Many Hindus who had previously voted left voted the BJP this time. But while there have been cases where local CPI(M) leaders have been shown as urging people to vote BJP this is not a systematic case. Those accusing the left of doing so are firstly suffering from the same illusion that the left leaders themselves were  -- namely that these voters were inert people whose votes the left could transfer wherever they wanted at will. They are anything but that. Secondly, the left lost its deposits in 39 out of the 40 seats it contested in West Bengal. It is ridiculous to argue that there was a set up and a conscious transfer of votes. A covert alliance, or a tacit understanding, between the BJP and the left, would have had to involve the left also getting BJP votes switched in a couple of cases at the least. Finally, had the left not fought with whatever its real and not inflated cadre strength was, there would ha e been around 8 more seats where the anti-TMC vote would have gone to secure seats for the BJP.

One of the charges that have been levelled against the left, from post modernist intellectuals as well as people claiming to be on the radical left, is that the left parties were bhadralok parties, or parties of the upper caste elites, while it was the TMC led by Mamata Banerjee that represents the subaltern. We cannot discuss this at length here. But even if we look at the elections of 2019, something emerges clearly. In Kolkata, the seat that above all represents the bastion of the bhadralok is Kolkata South. From 1971 to the present, the CPI(M) has won this seat only twice (1980, 1989), while from  1991 to 2011 it was represented by Mamata Banerjee. It was not a subaltern (defined in caste terms) backlash that resulted in the collapse of the left, but its failure to be even a good reformist left (i.e., ensure that extra-parliamentary struggles continue).

What to expect and how to resist?:

The BJP government in the first few days has given clear indications of what we should expect. In brief, it will seek to retain its position as the preferred party of the Indian big bourgeoisie. This means an aggressive attempt  to reform labour laws in favour of capital.[5] The draft for a new labour code will now be pushed rapidly, depending on the degree of resistance that can be generated.

In foreign policy, the pro US thrust will be retained, along with something that is distinct to the BJP, namely its extreme closeness to Israel. The anti-Muslim internal ideological politics will be supplemented by anti-Pakistan rhetorics. One especially significant aspect of this is to remember that Balakot was the first case of two nuclear armed states coming into direct military confrontation of the order where one country sends in its air force so deep into another. Much has been written in the Indian media and social media about how many actually died etc. Much more significant is the fact that this happened, and may embolden the BJP to try it again, with aggressive retaliation by Pakistan at some point.

In 2014-1019, the Modi government had already started a process of controlling all segments of the state apparatus. Institutions that previously had some autonomy by law have been gradually brought under control of the Prime Minister’s Office. This is likely to deepen.

This means that under a formal retention of “democracy” there will be a steady erosion of all democratic content. The institutional subversions will be backed by the deepening of communalism so that all non-Hindus are relegated to the status of second class citizens. Within a couple of years, it will be likely that the NDA will also have a clear majority in the Upper House (Rajya Sabha). The constitutional changes that the RSS has been pushing for can then be pushed through, making India formally a Hindu Rashtra. We are not predicting that these will all happen, but these will certainly be attempted, and only mass resistance can stop them.

We can expect greater state violence in Kashmir and the attempts to scrap Articles 370 and 35A. There will also be efforts to pass the Citizenship Amendment Bill making it an Act, so that Muslims coming from Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Afghanistan are denied asylum or residency while non-Muslim migrants will find it easier to get naturalization and the right to stay permanently. Muslims across India may be forced to show their officially prescribed documentation or lose citizenship status. This will not only mean they lose their votes, but that they are likely to lose a whole series of basic rights as humans. Muslims are being clearly warned, that if they want to live in the new India they must accept ghettoization, they must not object to the RSS, they must not raise their heads and protest. Here too, what has happened to Muslims in Gujarat since the 2002 pogroms is a template for what will be attempted elsewhere.

The RSS has always had a deep interest in ideological control. This will now involve greater control over education and the media. Curriculum changes are already in the offing. Funding is being linked to loyalty, as well as to a competitive strategy that means that only a handful of institutions will be really high grade, while the rest will be far more easily amenable to control. The appointment of loyalists to key positions will be another way in which this control will be increased.

Finally, the last five years have also shown that there will be both state sponsored force – the wide use of laws like UAPA, etc, to arrest anyone who protests, the attack on NGOs who talk about issues like environment, health and safety, organic farming, farmers rights, etc.

The three major responses within left organisations and parties to all this are flawed. For the Maoists, the elections do not matter much. Certain Maoist inclined activists have even displayed greater happiness at the collapse of the reformist left than alarm at the growth of the BJP. But their strategy of a protracted Peoples’ War is at a dead-end. The focus on forests and extraction from there, along with the appointment of Amit Shah as Home Minister, presages a far more violent war in the core areas of Maoist influence. Unless there is a radical transformation of their outlook, doctrine, and tactics (which essentially means unless they stop being Maoists) there seems no prospect for serious widening of resistance by them.

For the mainstream left it is business as usual. Where even Rahul Gandhi of the Congress tendered his resignation after his party’s failure to gain many more seats, the left leaders, hiding under the cover of collective responsibility, actually do not acknowledge responsibility for the disaster to the left. Rebuilding the old left, with a few poultices here and there, one or two face lift operations, will not gain them anything. This is clearly seen by the fact that the CPI(M) daily in Kolkata has been printing news and op-ed articles that do not address this central issue, the devastating blow suffered by the left.

For many activists, the desire will be to say, we must focus on social movements. But unless all such fragments are brought into a coherent and focused politics, these efforts will all be targeted by the Congress and its liberal intellectual supporters each election time in the name of a rainbow coalition.

What we need to understand is that unlike in many other countries where also there has been a rise of radical right or fascistic forces, in India the opposition is divided, including the popular opposition. The struggle against Hindutva, with the RSS having some 36 organisations and over 800 NGOs working within all sectors of civil society, and having an existence of nearly a century, is different from a struggle against say, Bolsonaro. To damage the hegemony of the RSS-BJP calls for struggles beyond the electoral struggles.

This can however be done only by the building of a new, radical left. The forces for them will have to come from the existing far left, from the sections of the reformist left willing to challenge their leaderships and the drift to the right, the social movement oriented left activists, in particular caste activists. A separate discussion is needed to look further at why the Amedkarite movement in its various forms does not provide a full answer. But one key point is, as long as Dalit parties and leaderships try to fight for upward mobility within the caste system rather than its radical overthrow, they cannot get out of the ultimate trap of Hindutva. Also, as we saw, the political project of Dalit unity has often foundered on ambitions of particular Dalit castes. But a revitalized left has to be a left that takes caste oppression seriously.

Any such new radical left has to therefore reject the politics of Stalinism and Maoism, without going to a rejection of building revolutionary parties altogether. In this struggle, Radical Socialist will lay its role, reaching out to organisations and activists for collaboration and unity. Overcoming fragmentation is the call of the day in today’s India.

AchinVanaik

What makes India so distinct? Clearly no other country matches the scale of its religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. India’s racial heterogeneity is exceeded by only a handful of West European and New World countries—the result of, among other factors, colonial-era experiences of conquest, the slave trade and resettlements, as well as post-colonial migrations from the south to the north. But while systems of exclusions predicated on notions of purity and impurity have been widespread across societies—solidified through kinship networks, status hierarchy and endogamy—nowhere else in the world does there exist a system of such extreme gradations of human worth as the caste system.

India was not the only former colonial country that opted for a liberal-democratic political set-up following independence. Even so, the enormity of its territorial expanse, population, social diversity and economic backwardness made it unique among democratic states. In the West, universal suffrage was extended to women and all races long after large-scale industrial and economic advancement had taken place. India, under vastly different circumstances, erected a political framework based on democratic principles—and barring the 21-month Emergency, it has sustained this framework so far. It is part of the reason why the Constitution, since its promulgation in 1950, commands such widespread admiration.

But now, almost seventy years later, the country is in the midst of a general election that threatens to return to power an organ of the Sangh Parivar—a group that has, in word and deed, demonstrated its antipathy to the progressive elements that exist in the Constitution. In light of this, it is time to open a more critical debate on the foundational charter of the republic.

Any evaluation of the Constitution cannot but be influenced by the political beliefs of the evaluator. Unlike liberals or social democrats, I believe that a more just, free, humane, egalitarian, democratic and ecologically sustainable country and world can only come about through the transcendence of capitalism and its associated political forms. I would contend thateven a liberal democracy, in the pursuit of such a country and world, soon runs up against insurmountable limits. The belief that today’s neoliberal capitalist order and the restricted freedoms and social benefits it allows can be substantially extended, or that its great inequalities of wealth and power can be dramatically reduced, is wishful thinking. The guiding vision for judging the Constitution should be one of a highly democratic and anti-bureaucratic socialism. But even those who do not share my vantage point, may be persuaded to find  that even by the best standards said to be contained in the document—social justice and welfarism, liberal democratic freedoms, secularism—the Constitution is wanting.

How well the Constitution measures up to its stated aspirations depends in large part on an evaluation of what it does to protect cultural and minority rights. This is a familiar standard for those of a liberal democratic worldview. But there is another criterion by which the Indian Constitution must also be judged: its commitment to the promotion and pursuit of social justice in a much wider sense, beyond just affirmative action for select groups. We need, then, to look at three things—the democratic content of the Constitution, its social-justice thrust, and its particular ways in which it addresses India’s distinctiveness.

Many claim that the Constitution is basically very good, but that its implementation has been flawed because of the ineptitude of politicians, bureaucrats and judges. The scholar Madhav Khosla, in his book The Indian Constitution, quotes Ambedkar saying “however good a constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those called to work it, happen to be a good lot.” But even while recognising the value of this admonition Khosla would not place so much emphasis on the power of individuals.

The political scientist Samir K Das in The Founding Moment: Social Justice in the Constitutional Mirror points to weaknesses in the document, mainly of omission. He cites the constitutional doyen, Granville Austin’s famous 1966 text The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation to argue that the document’s makers understandably could not foresee or account for future complexities and developments. But Das also sees the Constitution as having “multifarious concepts of justice” circulating within it, and argues that despite its weaknesses, proper interpretation and implementation of the Constitution would nonetheless constitute a bulwark against democratic degeneration.

This view flies in the face of how the Indian polity looks today. One cannot take refuge behind the argument that the Constitution—meant explicitly to shape all spheres of society—is blameless for the chasm between its good intentions and eventual societal outcomes. Around thirty percent of the population is in absolute poverty. If we account for the costs of basic needs such as education, health care and housing, another forty percent or so fall under the category of what the late economist and former chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, Arjun Sengupta called the “vulnerable poor,” for whom the shock of a bad harvest, high inflation or an illness in the family can wreak havoc. Inequalities of income and wealth, and therefore of political power, are soaring. Hindu chauvinism, championed by the Sangh, has grown to be the single most dominant political ideal across the republic, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Sangh’s electoral arm, has achieved a truly national presence. Communal violence, previously episodic, in the last five years has become banal, with the police and courts doing little or nothing to stop or punish it. The one consistent bright spot in India’s trajectory over the last three decades is the political assertion of the oppressed castes, but even that is under constant assault.

The Constitution is widely said to be a “living document”—one that not only shapes the evolution of Indian society, but is itself influenced by evolving societal trends and patterns. If some countries replace old constitutions with new ones to keep them relevant, in India keeping the Constitution “alive” has required a steady accumulation of amendments. (The country has had 103 constitutional amendments in 69 years, where Australia has had eight in a hundred years, and the United States 27 in over two hundred.) It is then necessary to ask whether these changes, meant to address earlier flaws, have guided the Constitution in a more progressive direction, and by this helped to move society in the same way. Going by the current state of the polity, the answer is no.

 A chronological study of the complex interplay between the respective trajectories of the Constitution and Indian society is a worthy enterprise. I do not propose to take that ambitious course here, but this two-way interaction underlies all the questions I ask of the document. How much concern, past or present, is there in the Constitution for issues of social justice, or for generating stronger movement in that direction? What kind of democracy has the Constitution sought to promote? How much responsibility, if any, does it bear for sanctioning the undeniable authoritarian drift of the polity over time?

The asymmetries of class power are obscured in the Constitution by propping up a notion of the “people’s will,” as expressed through electoral democracy.  The Constitution is testament to the fact that the members of the original Constituent Assembly, incidentally not elected by universal suffrage, were overwhelmingly members of the Congress party—an organisation that headed an independence movement that sought not so much to overthrow colonial power, but to transfer it from British to Indian hands. It retains to this day, copious and detailed provisions for protecting the machinery of administration and governance. These were adopted almost intact from the Government of India Act of 1935, the colonial legislative instrument that preceded the Constitution.The senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan, in his book The Constitution of India: Miracle, Surrender, Hope, gives a somewhat cynical but not inaccurate portrayal of how the Constitution acquired its shape. “We the People of India,” Dhavan writes, “who had little say in the making” of the document, “have been informed to accept this Constitution ... part of which is a British India clone,” and which “makes unreal promises.” Indians “have no choice but to accept this arrangement ... which our leaders have given to themselves to rule over us.”

From the beginning, the constitution has carried Hindu, upper-caste, patriarchal biases. (Not by coincidence—the members of the Constituent Assembly were overwhelmingly Hindu, upper-caste men.)  For instance, in Article 1, the name given to the Union is “India, that is Bharat,” invoking a pre-Islamic past of presumed glory—a Bharat Varsha when a legendary Hindu king is said to have ruled. Many of the Constitution’s admirers—including such figures as the jurists Fali Nariman and HM Seervai, and Justice VR Krishna Iyer—do not appear to have drawn serious, let alone repeated, attention to these biases. Very few have dared to argue that the text exhibits any bias at allthem, thereby weakening its claim to secularity. One of those few is the scholar Pritam Singh, and I am indebted to his writings, particularly his paper “Hindu Bias in India’s ‘Secular’ Constitution: probing flaws in the instruments of governance.”

Consider also the kinds of nationalism that is enabled by the Constitution. Successive governments have misused constitutional powers to erode the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, promised to the state under the terms of its accession to India. Even among those who are critical of this trend, no one has gone as far as to state that a truly democratic approach to nationalism demands that the right to self-determination, even up to secession, should be a constitutional clause. The territorial “unity and integrity” of the country is paramount, regardless of what the public in the predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley, or anywhere else, may want. The land is more important than the people.

These concerns are heightened today, as Indian progressives fear attempts by right-wing groups to expand its control over state apparatuses and civil society. The Sangh, as Hindutva’s fountainhead, is pushing a truly transformative project—the creation of a Hindu state in all but name—and has been unabashed about its desire to muster a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament so as to amend the Constitution in line with its ambitions.

A number of liberal and even left voices have, in resistance, raised the slogan: Defend the Constitution. I suggest that this, as it stands, is inadequate, and propose a more nuanced, admittedly more wordy,slogan: Defend and deepen the progressive values and principles of the Constitution. This recognises the deficiencies in parts of the Constitution, but should still be a fitting rallying cry even for those liberals and social democrats whose admiration of the document is much less qualified than mine. And, should the Sangh ever succeed in amending the Constitution to further its anti-democratic aspirations, this slogan will retain its validity in the long term.

The underestimation of the communal and undemocratic features of Indian society has its parallel in the overestimation of the virtues of the Constitution. Given where India has come to stand, and as we look ahead, we must be clear-eyed about both.

CONCEPTIONS OF JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY are contested, and there exists  disagreements even about the value and scope of notions such as social justice. In the past, religions provided the moral framework that regulated everyday life. This generally involved the subordination of women and the justification of existing social inequalities. A more universal sense of the common good and of justice emerged with modernity. This owed to the Enlightenment, whose main ideological legacies are Liberalism and Socialism—the most egalitarian version of which is Marxism.

The philosopher Brian Barry, in his book Why Social Justice Matters, argues that until the Industrial Revolution, notions of justice pertained to individuals, not to society. It involved giving each individual what was their “due”: not being cheated; getting a “fair” price in trade; getting ones’ deserts under prevailing ideas of merit; receiving punishment fitting the crime. This view encompassed a corrective, but not a seriously distributive, conception of justice. It has been superseded by the newer notion that inequality among humans is wrong—that all people equally are of worth. This is not the same as saying all people are of equal worth, but recognising a dignity in all individuals simply by virtue of their being humans. It follows that society must somehow be built on this new ideal which constitutes a very significant moral advance, and which requires reforming the basic institutions that shape the provision and distribution of rights, opportunities and resources—be they the factory, market or state, going right down to families, schools, political parties and other civil associations. The question that remains is how inequalities of power, wealth and opportunity should be tackled. The answer has divided Liberals and Socialists.

An undisputed starting point is the need to ensure that all people have an equal opportunity to prosper. This does not, however, mean that a uniformity of outcomes is necessarily desirable. That is to say, there should be equal opportunities to become unequal. But then should greatly unequal outcomes be allowed to emerge? What limits, if any, should there be on inequality? The much-admired American liberal theorist John Rawls provides no real guide on what should be done. He holds that only those inequalities should be allowed that benefit the “least advantaged”.This leads to the argument that many make, in all good conscience, that  the wealthy should be allowed to grow richer as a way to promote more investment and hence economic growth, so that some wealth can trickle down to the poorest making them better off than they otherwise would be.

For liberals and even for social democrats, the “right to property” even in the basic means of production is crucial for the pursuit of the common good. For Marxists, with their socialist vision of the common good, this is not the case. Having a right is one thing. Being able to exercise it is another. Having the opportunity to successfully exercise a right requires resources. Where liberals, in talking of justice, engage in a rights discourse, socialists, because they give greater importance to opportunities and resources, advocate a more substantial change of the sociopolitical status quo.

Unlike liberals, socialists see a strong connection between the individual and larger groups. This is not the same as in the case of multi-cultural enthusiasts, who are preoccupied with the link between the individual and groups that are defined by, and differentiated from others, predominantly by their cultural attributes. The communities of belonging or association prioritised by serious socialists are perceived more in social than cultural terms, and are numerically much broader—for instance, class. Individual flourishing is inseparable from having a society where all can flourish, and the measure of this flourishing is not “happiness,” but that each individual is able to fulfil their distinctive potentials.

Must justice, to some extent, be trans-historical? Must we take responsibility for social injustices before our time? To a large extent, the answer is yes. We are born into unequal positions of power, wealth and status. For most people, what determines their social position in life is—in order of importance—inheritance, luck of birth, and merit (understood as the distance between one’s starting and end point). Some groups such as lower castes have been so historically oppressed as to deserve special social, economic, political and educational support. Minority rights are not enough—opportunities and resources must come into the reckoning.

From its beginning, the document betrayed its elitist character by placing some principles concerning socio-economic justice in the non-justiciable section of the Directive Principles, not in the binding Fundamental Rights. The Constitution’s claim to a progressive social vision resides in these principles, yet the Directive Principles as a whole are best described as a basket of mostly worthy sentiments that our rulers have had very little stimulus to put into practice. Under the constitution, the state has no obligation to fulfil social rights that are not included in the Fundamental Rights. Indian law and Supreme Court rulings only recognise a violation of such rights if the state announces a specific scheme to further them but fails to deliver the promised boon to identified beneficiaries.

This Constitution has often been an instrument for rationalising the status quo more than one for progressive change. Consider, for instance, the unfulfilled promise of universal education. Article 45 of the Directive Principles had called for free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of 14 within ten years of the Constitution’s promulgation. It was only six decades later, with the Right To Education Act coming into force in 2010, that this promise was translated into a fundamental right, and the Centre and states were obliged to fulfil it. But even this has not meant that such education has become universal, let alone that it is everywhere of decent quality.

Nehru’s version of socialism called for a welfare state, albeit a capitalist one. The fact that the term “socialism” did not feature in the original preamble to the Constitution is indication enough that the consensus in the Constituent Assembly was against a serious commitment to socialist ideals. Indira Gandhi introduced the term into the preamble during the Emergency, but the less said about the sincerity of her commitment to socialism the better.

Bourgeois liberal democratic constitutions—and the Indian Constitution is certainly one—are always tolerant of serious class inequalities, usually defended as part and parcel of “basic liberties” that entail the right to private property and to accumulation in productive assets. In India, in the immediate aftermath of independence, given the widespread concern for social justice and therefore for land reform, an uneasy compromise took place. The right to “acquire, hold and dispose of property” was put into the fundamental rights but made subject to reasonable restrictions in the public interest. What pro-poor land reform measures took place was unevenly spread, limited and half-hearted. An Amendment in 1978 removed this right from Article 19 and made it a legal right only. Overall, there has been no real hindrance subsequently to the steady accumulation of private wealth. The expansion of the public sector and even the nationalisation of banks in earlier years has proven to be much more an aid to the growth of the capitalist class than a hindrance. Indeed, over the last three decades, the trend has been to de-nationalise and de-regulate productive assets. With respect to reducing class inequality, India has performed no better than other liberal democracies with explicit constitutional protections of private-property rights.

What does the Constitution have to say on caste inequality? Article 15 declares prohibition of discrimination on grounds that include caste. But this is with respect to state services and the domains of public control and administration. It does not extend to the sphere of ordinary and everyday social relations in Indian society as a whole. The Protection of Civil Rights Act focusses on untouchability. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act  has been in existence for over two decades, and was set up to check crimes against oppressed castes. These Acts are worthy measures but banning untouchability and merely condemning caste discrimination does not go far enough. There should, at the very least, be an unequivocal and comprehensive ban on caste discrimination, and the document should take a stand on eradicating the caste system itself, an imperative that should be included in the directive principles.  

The fact that there has been no move to do this is revealing. It speaks of the nature of Indian secularism as it prevails in the Indian Constitution and is practised on the ground. Originally sanctioned by the predominantly dominant-caste Constituent Assembly, the current framework suggests that untouchability and even discrimination may disappear, but the caste system will remain intact. We must begin the debate on what steps should be taken to legislate against the caste system within the bounds of a democratic framework.

The Constitution itself affirms positive discrimination, in the form of caste-based affirmative action—through reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.. With the entrenched character of the caste system, this will remain a necessary means to counteract the caste system for many generations to come. Given this framework, it might be argued that a total ban on caste discrimination may not make total sense.  But that does not hold water. A simple comparison with liberal constitutions in other countries indicates that it is possible to outlaw racial and gender discrimination even while governments pursue affirmative action along racial or gender lines as a means to ultimately ending such discrimination. India could very well do the same on caste.

On the issue of gender discrimination, the makers of the Constitution should have established a progressive Uniform Civil Code rather than the current mishmash of personal laws specific to—and conceding to—the traditional customs of each major religion. This would have been difficult given that the Congress’s political mobilisation during colonial times rested on inter-religious collation, mediated in the Muslim case via Islamic clerics. But the party’s immense prestige and authority as the undisputed leader of the freedom movement could have allowed it to impose uniform personal laws during negotiations in the Constitutional Assembly if its leadership really desired them. Of course, the non-secular and pro-Hindu character of much of this leadership at Independence also had its part in determining the party’s course. A few years later, Hindu Personal Law was substantially reformed to give women greater freedom and equality, but it is still a long way from granting women their rights in full. The directive principles includes a call for a UCC, but this is another worthy sentiment which has never been seriously pursued. A gender-just UCC would require the abandonment of many current Hindu laws and practices regarding marriage, divorce, succession and matrimonial property, but India’s political leaders have never had much appetite to challenge the prejudices of the country’s dominant religious constituency.

AS WITH THE MEANING OF SOCIAL JUSTICE, the meaning of democracy is also contested terrain. In the conventional and dominant discourse on liberal democracy, the liberalism is given greater importance than the democracy. Liberalism is about the restriction of state power for the presumed benefit of the individual, where human fulfilment is essentially understood as the freedom to live as one desires as long as it does not impinge unfairly on the ability of others to do likewise. For liberals, the key attributes of a democratic order include free and fair elections with universal adult suffrage, as well as protections against arbitrary arrest, with a presumption of innocence upheld by an independent judiciary. There must be basic civil liberties—such as those of speech, assembly, association, occupation and trade—subject only to reasonable restrictions as determined by the judiciary. A liberal democratic order must also allow minority rights of varying scope. In addition, there should be checks and balances on state authority through a division of powers and responsibilities between the three main arms of the state—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

The liberal conception of democracy focusses on the proceduralist domain of legal and political rights. The legal commitments it insists on are all indeed important. But it can nevertheless be contrasted with the more substantive conception of democracy upheld by socialists. Democracy, in the classical understanding, entails popular empowerment in an ever-widening and deepening sense, making it always an unfinished business. This empowerment must go beyond the realms of political representation and civil liberty to encompass the social, economic and cultural domains of human existence. The political representation of the citizenry by some select group is unavoidable in any democratic set-up, but this should be seen as much as a problem as a solution. Democracy should be about the dis-alienation of state power, or the progressively greater capacity of people to influence the decisions that most affect one’s life within a collective framework of the pursuit of the common good. Here, human fulfilment or flourishing is not seen as a privatised affair. The aim is a levelling of power equations, and far more decentralised, participatory and direct forms of decision-making that can exist alongside the indirect structures and mechanisms of representative authority.

But hewing to the standards of liberal democracy, where do the Constitution’s democratic credentials stand? First, we must ask how effective its system of checks and balances between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary has been.

The Indian parliament does not exercise sufficient democratic control over the executive. This is due to powers constitutionally afforded to the latter—particularly the provisions for the executive to proclaim a state of emergency over the whole or part of the country, and thereby suspend fundamental rights.

The imbalance is further abetted by a host of laws in the Indian Penal Code and elsewhere, that were inspired by colonial forms of rule. Measures for preventive detention, like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, are used to restrict dissent, target political opponents and undermine progressive movements. So are laws against sedition. The central government, with the assent of the governor of a state—appointed by the central government—can declare President’s Rule and dismiss the state’s elected government. Laws such as these should simply be abolished.

Rather than function as a check on each other, the executive and parliament have all too often acted in cahoots. The task of making both organs accountable has fallen to the courts. The lower judiciary—magistrates and sessions’ courts—is mostly suborned by local or provincial powers. Even at higher levels—High Courts and the Supreme Court—justice is all too often greatly delayed, and therefore denied. The higher courts can hold the executive accountable by supervising its work as well as setting up investigations into its behaviour. Despite this, the higher judiciary has been very lax when it comes to curtailing repressive laws and state actions.

There has been an ongoing tussle between the legislature and the judiciary as to which is the final arbiter of the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the document has not been based solely on the text itself. Sometimes, it has aimed to give effect to the “intent” of the document’s framers. Other times, the court has leaned towards “creative adaptation” of the document in the light of what it understands to be “Constitutional morality.” The doctrine of the basic structure of the Constitution, formulated by the Supreme Court in 1973, has given the court decisive and often controversial powers. The elected legislature, presumably representing the people, has the power to amend the Constitution, but the unelected Supreme Court, under the doctrine, has the power to annul any amendments that it deems to be violating the document’s basic features.

The court has used its powers of interpretation to uphold progressive causes—as with the Right to Information Act, or its judgment on privacy being a part of Fundamental Rights. But should benches of the apex court act as guardians of the Constitution with only the court’s own higher benches able to check them? And what is to discipline and direct their power if there has never been judicial consensus on what all the basic features of Constitution are, beyond certain generalities such as secularism, democracy, federalism, human rights, republicanism, rule of law and so on? It is also alarming that there is neither sufficient transparency in appointments to the highest levels of the judiciary, nor any public accountability in how they reach their decisions.

Supreme Court judges, including chief justices, have played a part in legitimising the political behaviour and ideology of the Hindu right. The court never demanded the removal of the Ram idols illegally installed in the Babri Masjid in 1949, and refused to authorise the use of security personnel under the central government to prevent the demolition of the mosque when petitioned to do so. In 1995, it ruled that Hindutva, far from being an anti-democratic ideology, was a religious “way of life.” The most that can be said of the judiciary on this count is that it has sometimes acted to slow Hindutva’s forward momentum—for matters would have been even worse in the absence of the basic-structure doctrine and the Supreme Court’s use of it to defend the Constitution..

Next, we must consider whether the parliamentary and party system defined by the Constitution fairly represent the popular will. Here too, there are weaknesses. Members of the Rajya Sabha do not need to be domiciled in the state they are supposed to represent. In parliament and state assemblies, members are not free to vote against their own party on any matter that the leadership claims is central to the party programme. It makes obvious sense to prohibit voting against one’s own party in the case of a motion of no confidence, but beyond that the practice belittles rationality and quality in legislative argument and debate. What need for them if legislators cannot be persuaded to change sides?

However, what shines the harshest light on the Constitution’s claim to democratic representation is the first-past-the-post electoral system. The justification so often peddled for it is that, in contrast to a system of proportional representation whether partial, mixed or full-blown, the first-past-the-post arrangement ensures a certain stability. The argument goes that it encourages a competitive two- or three-party system that lends itself to sturdy governments, rather than one with multiple contenders creating unstable coalitions that all too often do not last a full term in office. But stability is not a virtue in itself, and should not be allowed to trump proper representation of and fidelity to electoral choices. Moreover, ruling coalitions have lasted full terms both in individual states and at the Centre—in the case of the latter, on three consecutive occasions between 1999 and 2014.

Some kind of proportional representation would today provide an institutional bulwark against the undemocratic thrust of Hindutva. From independence up to the 2014 general election, whenever the country came under single-party majority rule, the winning side never had a majority support. Always, its share of the popular vote remained within the band of 40 to 49 percent. In 2014, the concentrated support in the Hindi-speaking states for the Bharatiya Janata Party saw it secure a majority in the LokSabha with only 31 percent of the vote. This made a huge mockery of any claim that the government represented the popular mandate.

The Indian public’s sheer political and social diversity is better reflected by the country’s cornucopia of smaller regional parties, along with ones such as the Nishad Party, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party that have their bases in very particular social groups. These parties might be expected, in their own interest, to call for proportional representation in the Lok Sabha, but the problem is that a similar system would then also have to be put in place for the state assemblies. This the stronger regional parties would not want, because it would dent their own hopes of securing state-level power—which rest, more often than not, on acquiring a disproportionately high number of seats in state assemblies vis-à-vis their actual vote share.

THE CONSTITUTION’S DEFICIENCIES when it comes to social justice and democratic governance have enabled Hindutva’s ascension within the republic. But the document also has two other defects that have been wind in the sails of Hindu nationalism.

One defect is shared with almost all constitutions everywhere. It is based on a flawed and self-serving understanding of the nation and nationalism. Like the Indian Constitution—which, as the legal scholar Upendra Baxi has observed, helps to “uphold the belief that almost all practices of power directed to maintaining the unity and integrity of the nation are inherently justice enhancing”—they allow for territorial expansion from the original national boundaries prevailing at their birth, but disallow any secession of territory.

Constitutions do this partly on the assumption that all secessionism stems from some external attack or influence. They are generally blind to the notion that territorial unity is not an incontestable virtue in itself, but that its virtue is always subordinate to the voluntary and continuous assent to membership of a territorial unit from all of its constituent parts. That assent is never to be taken for granted. When substantial sections of people in a given province or region do not wish to be part of the Union—because of a pre-colonial history of separateness from the constituents of the new country, or because they suffer from disregard or even repression by the country’s rulers—then the call for respecting their right to self-determination, even up to secession, can arise. There are only a few governments that are prepared to consider or accept such a call by a section of their citizenry, even as their constitutions do not inscribe this highly democratic principle.

India practices an asymmetrical federalism, one where all the states in a Union do not have the same legislative powers. Put another way, some states have special ad hoc powers denied to the others. This kind of federalism often emerges from the dissolution of colonial empires whose masters did not administer their territorial units through uniform rules and procedures. In both Nagaland and Kashmir, the Indian government after independence has behaved atrociously in denying the aspirations of their respective populations. Longstanding repression has succeeded in ending the Naga quest for independence, now replaced by a search for some degree of autonomy. Kashmir is another story.

The exact circumstances under which the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Indian union, and whether the Indian state was involved in duplicity, are a matter of dispute. Not under dispute are the legal and formal commitments India made for the accession to take place. Jammu and Kashmir would have its own flag and premier, and its own constituent assembly to draw up its own constitution. The original arrangement was much more a “confederal” than a federal one—only the territory’s foreign affairs, defence and communications came under the control of the Centre. Jammu and Kashmir was not to be bound by any future Indian Constitution since it could have its own. But since Presidential orders can be used to bring in terms set by the Indian Constitution through “consultation” or “concurrence” with the state government, the key path for central efforts to undermine the original intent and spirit supposedly embodied in Article 370 lies in having obedient state governments in J&K.

What followed is a sorry tale of repression. In 1953, Sheikh Abdullah, the territory’s popular leader, was arrested and replaced as premier by the Centre’s toady, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. Manipulation of the Jammu and Kashmir constituent assembly diluted earlier commitments to maximum autonomy, and instead allowed the imposition of Union powers. Those articles of the Constitution were made applicable to Jammu and Kashmir that allowed the central government to dismiss an elected state government as well as assume its legislative functions. Both in the time of Jawaharlal Nehru and afterwards, Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy was systematically eroded as the region came under the jurisdictions of the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service, the Election Commission and the Supreme Court.

Jammu and Kashmir has suffered repeatedly from president’s rule and governor’s rule, approaching a total number of of 3,500 days in all, as it is still under such rule. Punjab, where the Khalistan agitation has long ended, was under president’s rule for 3,510 days. But even here, the single longest continuous stretch of this rule, well over six years, has happened in Jammu and Kashmir.

Between 1947 and 1964, all barring three of the 97 subjects in the Union list which allows the Parliament to make laws, 26 of the 47 in the Concurrent list which includes subjects that give power to both the state and central government, and 260 out of 395 articles from the Indian Constitution were extended to Jammu and Kashmir. Then and subsequently, repressive acts such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Public Safety Act and Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act were brought into play. It has come to the point where, today, many leaders of the BJP and the Sangh openly declare their desire to finish off even the limited autonomy available to the state, under the much-diluted provisions of Article 370. No arm of the democratic Indian polity—whether the legislature, executive or judiciary—has seen fit to seek a reversal of this systematic erosion, let alone a restoration of earlier commitments.

ANOTHER AREA THAT WARRANTS DEEPER ANALYSIS is the Constitution’s claim to secularism and therefore to democracy. There are political scientists who argue that a democratic state need not be secular—a view that allows for Israel, an explicitly Jewish state with formally constituted second-class citizenship for non-Jews, to be called a democracy. But most others, including those of a liberal democratic persuasion, see a fundamental overlap between secularism and democracy.

There are some key principles then that make a state secular. First, it should not be the job or goal of the state to help promote or secure spiritual or religious salvation for anyone. Second, its institutions are free from the control of religious personnel and institutions. Third, there should be equality of citizenship rights irrespective of religious affiliation though these rights may not be democratic. This points to the fact that a state can be secular but not democratic, such as Kemalist Turkey, Mao’s China or Stalin’s USSR.

How far should the state intervene in religious practices that many would consider morally offensive? Some general principles can help guide us at least. There are certain basic individual rights of equality across caste, gender and racial lines that must take priority over group rights. There must also be the “right of exit” for individuals from groups or religious injunctions felt as demeaning or imposed. None of this is to be taken as meaning that the principle of minority rights is to be rejected. The principle remains fundamental to any democratic set-up. So the attack on “minorityism” by Sangh spokespersons is to be completely rejected even as we can of course oppose specific abuses by those enjoying such rights. Religious bodies must also be pushed to change older injunctions in the light of modern democratic and humane values.

But states believing themselves to be secular must also be careful in how they address the issues of religious freedoms and personal choices even when these are to some extent the result of socialisation processes. For example, India sensibly enough and unlike certain European democracies has not, in the name of upholding secular principles, gone to the absurd extent of outlawing certain forms of dress by Muslim women such as the hijab, burqa or niqab when worn in public. Apart from certain professions as in medicine or teaching where full face-to-face interaction with patients and students may be required, there is no justification for such bans. Rather, there should be a ban on the forcible imposition of such apparel. The basic and innocuous freedom to dress as one wishes should be respected.

Many a progressive has pointed out that there is a disturbing gap between the secular principles laid down in the Constitution and their practice on the ground. This serves as an exculpation of sorts for the Constitution, but an unconvincing one. The fact is that the text of the document is itself religiously biased.

The Constitution makes concessions to clerical Islam, such as the lack of a uniform civil code, as well as to Sikhism, with provisions for the public possession of a kirpan. Furthermore, in the name of freedom of religion, the Constitution allows educational institutions set up by any particular religious denomination, sect or body to provide religious instruction to students, even if the institution is partially—though not fully—funded by the state. Moreover, it says that if an educational institution set up by an endowment or trust that insists on imparting religious instruction is taken over by the state, such instruction can continue at the institution. A forthright secular stand would be for the state to refuse both these things: to not provide any funding to such institutions; and to refrain from taking over institutions that insist on specific religiou instructions.

The most prodigious biases are those in favour of Brahminical Hinduism.

I have already mentioned the Constitution’s effective sanction for the persistence of the caste system, with its untenable position that this is quite compatible with ending untouchability and caste discrimination. I have also mentioned its controversial choice of the name “Bharat.” There is more to add to this set of faults.

In the Constitutional Assembly debates, BR Ambedkar defined religious freedom as entailing only the freedom to worship, and excluding all practices outside of that act. Such a definition would have created grounds to oppose Hindu practices such as sati and child marriage. The final definition of religious freedom in Article 25 of the Constitution reflected a compromise. It enshrined the freedom to practice and propagate religion, “Subject to public order, morality and health.” Given the wide latitude in how this clause can be interpreted, it is no surprise that many an unsavoury religious practice persists without state intervention.

Brahminical diehards in the Constitutional Assembly could not get a complete ban on cow slaughter, but smuggled an emphasis on the need to protect cows into the Directive Principles under the cover of animal husbandry. The overwhelming majority of states have since banned cow slaughter, and a few have even banned the killing of bulls and bullocks.

Many states have banned conversions if done by force, fraud or allurement. These bans are aimed at Islam and Christianity, since there is much eye winking at Hindu conversions passed off dishonestly as “reconversions” to the ostensibly “original” faith. The ban on forcible conversion is justifiable, but the two other grounds for prohibition allow for unwarranted state interference on flimsy grounds. Many a Hindutva stalwart has said that Christian beliefs in heaven and hell constitute fraud. The prohibition on conversion via allurement is particularly directed at progressive missionary groups setting up civic institutions such as schools and hospitals in tribal and other underserved areas. This as a criterion for preventing conversions should simply be dismissed. There are numerous religious sects worldwide—including many Hindu ones—that win converts by providing for their material as much as mental and spiritual welfare.

Article 25, while establishing the freedom of religion, also states in a sub-clause that this freedom shall not prevent the state from making any law for “the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.” The document notes that, in the sub-clause, “the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion.” Here, the Constitution can almost be seen in line with Hindutva’s assimiliationist project, which sees these faiths as having a lineage that goes back to ancient India, and being given shape by Hinduism, which preceded it. Unlike Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism these faiths are indigenous, not “foreign” and therefore acceptable, in the Hindutva view. Within the Sangh Parivar it is common to find references to Sikhs as protectors of Hindus against Mughal/Muslim oppression. Jains have been seen as a part of the wider Hindu fold. As Sikh and Jain identity has crystallized, this assimilationist attitude has caused some degree of resentment but this Hindutva position also ensures that Sikhs and Jains need have no or much less fear of a rising Hindutva. Ambedkar’s counter positioning of Buddhism to Hinduism has made little ground even as Dalit assertion has strengthened.

Article 26 allows every religious denomination to “establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes, but clause 2(a)  of Article 25 saves the power of the state to regulate or restrict “any economic, financial, political or other secular activities which may be associated with religious practice.” It can oversee the construction of facilities and look into the spending of monies given by devotees, and even ratify the qualifications of priestly candidates. Article 26 is seemingly impartial towards all religious institutions, but in reality a huge and powerful nexus has emerged between the state, the corporate sector and the Hindu religious establishment. The writer Meera Nanda, in her book The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, provides a devastating exposé of this nexus.

Sikh affairs are governed by the 1925 Sikh Gurudwaras Act, Muslim mosques and charities are largely unified under the 1954 Wakf Act, and Christian churches obey the National Council of Churches, set up in 1914. But the thousands of Hindu sects lack any single authority to watch over them. State governments have set up various regulatory bodies to oversee the affairs of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples.

The Constitution designates Hindi the “official language of the Union,” to be used along with English in Centre-state exchanges. Though Hindi is spoken by more people than any other Indian language—even as we ignore that a Hindi nationalism has been at work, wherein other north Indian languages have been subsumed by Hindi and rendered as dialects—it is still spoken by a minority of the country’s entire population. Achieving this status had not a little to do with north Indian and upper caste dominance of the Constituent Assembly. The Constitution also grants official status to Sanskrit, spoken by a perhaps few hundred people, by including it in the Eighth Schedule. The tribal languages of Bhili and Lammi, each spoken by over a million people, are denied that honour. Article 351 promotes a Sanskritised Hindi that relies for its vocabulary “primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.” The promotion of Hindi comes at the expense of Hindustani, which affords greater importance to Urdu with its stronger Persian and Arabic borrowings.

The Indian state, at the central and state levels, promotes the propagation of Hindu priestcraft through gurukuls, rishikuls and pathshalas, and “vedic sciences” through astrology courses at the college level. Governments sell lands at throwaway prices, or outright gift them, to Hindu religious bodies, for the construction of schools, hospitals and other institutions, to which the state also provides patronage and accreditation. These are then built and maintained by private and corporate donations. The end result has been a growing trespass of Hindu institutions into such supposedly secular areas as public education and health.

AT ITS VERY CREATION, the Indian Constitution was never the remarkable document many have claimed it to be. Its commitment to secularism, liberal freedoms and social justice was never whole-hearted, and was more restricted than it needed to be. The end goal of its “transformative vision” was the establishment of a welfarist, capitalist democracy, and the society that has emerged over time under its aegis in no way repudiates this. And so we have arrived at a neoliberal capitalism, averse to serious welfare provisions for the general public, that allows large-scale poverty to persist and inequalities of wealth and power to reach obscene levels.

Indian democracy, though it long enjoyed a relative stability in its macro-level structures and institutions, has forever tolerated violence and a lack of democratic practices at its meso and micro levels. Over the last three decades, things have turned for the worse. The legislature, executive and judiciary and the media have been gradually hollowed out through partisan appointments and corruption, including by the government itself.

Worst of all, the country’s single most dominant political force is now the Sangh Parivar, a far-right force with undeniable fascist characteristics. Other such forces are resurgent across the world, but, unlike them, in the RSS, the Sangh has a wellspring with an unbroken life of almost a century. The Sangh’s hegemonising drive will continue as it always has, with greater or lesser success, irrespective of the ups and downs of electoral verdicts. Its cadres and institutions have implanted themselves in Indian society at a depth unmatched by any rival, and key components of the Sangh’s own transformative vision for the country have found resonance among a wide public—even among many opposition parties that otherwise oppose the idea of a Hindu India.

What are some of the key themes of this growing public ‘common sense’? One, that there is no alternative to a neoliberal economic order, and that the only question for economic debate is whether this should take a more disciplinary or compensatory direction depending on the prevailing balance of social forces. Another, more directly spawned by Sangh success, is that any party aspiring to electoral success must pander to the Hindu majority, distancing itself from even the suggestion that it appeases religious minorities and adopt to a greater or lesser extent various aspects of the Hindutva worldview. Furthermore, that there is no escape from playing on the same ground as the BJP and Sangh—we are all for a more belligerent and militaristic nationalism and for asserting our regional dominance as the path to achieving the status of a rising global power.

There are enough positive aspects of the Constitution for us to take selective recourse to it in the struggle against the Sangh. But, we must ask, how well does the document stand against the new common sense seeping into ever more sections of the public?

The centre of gravity of Indian politics has moved very much to the right. The Congress is not a far-right force, but long ago transmogrified into a rightwing force. It has no inspiring transformative vision of its own. Constructing a counter to the Sangh will require a search for new ways on all fronts—economic, political, social, cultural and ideological. That must precede the emergence of a Constitution that can deliver more to the people of India than it yet has.

Saturday 15 June 2019

We condemn the use of unprecedented excessive force by the Hong Kong police in dispersing and arresting protesters. The use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, as well as beating up unarmed protesters have caused injuries to many. Such brutality is unacceptable.

Despite the massive peaceful demonstration on 9 June, the largest since the handover of Hong Kong to China, the Hong Kong government led by Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor continues to ignore the demands of the people. In fact, the refusal of the Hong Kong government to listen to the people’s demands and its insistence in pushing the extradition bill has ignited and expanded the protests.

In recent years, the shrinking of political space and the Hong Kong government’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in curtailing civil and political freedom has become a worrying trend in Hong Kong. Many political dissidents and activists have been targeted for arrests and selected prosecution with various allegations. The erosion of democratic freedom in Hong Kong also instils the fear that Hong Kong is losing its unique autonomy with the expansion of Beijing’s political control over the city. Deterioration of political freedom will definitely hinder efforts to tackle social inequalities in a city with a widening wealth gap.

Hong Kong is the only city in China which can still freely commemorate the June Fourth massacre. To protect Hong Kong autonomy is thus not only the concern of the people of Hong Kong but also of all the people of China.

We urge the government of Hong Kong to:

withdraw the proposed extradition bill;

stop the violence against peaceful protesters;

stop the repression and persecution of political activists.

We stand with the people of Hong Kong and express our solidarity with their fight to defend their political freedom and autonomy.

Signed by,

1. Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM)

2. Persatuan Sahabat Wanita Selangor, Malaysia

3. North South Initiative, Malaysia

4. Agora Society, Malaysia

5. Jaringan Rakyat Tertindas (JERIT), Malaysia

6. Liberasi, Malaysia

7. Socialist Alliance, Australia

8. Australia Asia Workers Link

9. Fightback Aotearoa/Australia

10. Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions (CATU), Cambodia

11. Europe solidaire sans frontières (ESSF), France

12. Forum Arbeitswelten – Forum Worlds of Labour, Germany

13. Centre for Workers Education, India

14. Worker’s Initiative, Kolkata, India

15. Radical Socialist, India

16. Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, India

17. Working People Party (Partai Rakyat Pekerja), Indonesia

18. People’s Liberation Party (PPR), Indonesia

19. Lembaga Informasi Perburuhan Sedane (LIPS), Indonesia

20. Confederation of National Union (Konfederasi Serikat Nasional), Indonesia

21. Konfederasi Pergerakan Rakyat Indonesia (KPRI), Indonesia

22. Konfederasi Persatuan Buruh Indonesia (KPBI), Indonesia

23. National Network for Domestic Workers Advocacy (Jala PRT), Indonesia

24. RUMPUN, Indonesia

25. Korea House for International Solidarity, Korea

26. Labour Education Foundation, Pakistan

27. Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM), Philippines

28. Sentro ng mga Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa (SENTRO), Philippines

29. Labor Education and Research Network (LEARN), Philippines

30. Kalipunan ng mga Kilusang Masa (KALIPUNAN) / Social Movements’ Coalition, Philippines

31. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women – Asia Pacific (CATW-AP)

32. Action for Democracy in Thailand (ACT4DEM)

33. Just Economy and Labor Institute, Thailand

34. New Isan Movement, Thailand

35. Socialist Resistance, UK

36. RS21, UK

37. TheOwl, Hong Kong

38. Borderless Movement, Hong Kong

39. League of Social Democrats, Hong Kong

by Ashley Smith, Au Loong-Yu

By Maroona Murmu

Note by Administrator:  Dr. Maroona Murmu, Associate Professor of History, Jadavpur University, wrote an article in Bangla in Ananda Bazar Patrika, which has generated a huge debate on social media. She has been supported, as well as condemned. Condemnation and criticism has come from dominant caste Hindus claiming as usual that casteism happens only due to reservations, but also from adivasis taking a kind of adivasi purist stance. Dr. Murmu has issued the following translation on Facebook with a short preface. We are reproducing the entire thing with her permission because the article, and the subsequent debate, raises important questions about how radical politics needs to be configured in West Bengal. -- Admin, Radical Socialist

Radical Socialist resolutely and unequivocally oppose and condemn the effective abrogation of the fundamental meaning and purpose of Article 370 and the overturning of Article 35A. This was carried out through anti-democratic, unconstitutional legal manoeuvrings and accompanied by the deliberate armed intimidation of the people of Kashmir. What has taken place is dishonest and a fraud on both the letter and spirit of the relevant Constitutional provisions.

Abrogation of Article 370 could only have been done with the assent of a reconstituted J&K Constituent Assembly which was dissolved in 1957. So first a Presidential Order impermissibly (without a Constitutional amendment) changes Article 367 so as to shamefully equate the J&K state assembly which has representative authority to the Constituent Assembly which has a superior sovereign authority. Since there is President’s Rule in J&K, on the recommendation of the Governor, the President then acts to scrap Articles 370 and 35A. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of independent India, a Reorganisation Bill was presented and passed in the two houses of Parliament to downgrade a region having the status of a state into two bifurcated Union Territories of J&K, which like New Delhi and Puducherry will be allowed to have a legislature, while Ladakh will join the five other Union Territories that have no legislature. This Reorganisation Bill at least would not have gone through if it was not for the pusillanimity of the opposition parties which went along with the BJP.

The Congress (most responsible historically for systematically eroding J&K autonomy) formally opposed these actions by the current government but with some of its leaders (e.g., Abishek Singhvi and Jyotirmoy Scindia) and members voicing objection to the manner in which this was done but not to the outcome. Only the mainstream left parties immediately organised street protests and called for an all-India day of protest.

Let us be very clear, the main motivation for this sanctioning of a brazen political and military occupation by the BJP government and Sangh is a) first, hatred of Muslims and the fact that this was the only Muslim majority state in the country. b) Second, it expresses the determination to humiliate the Valley population hence the prior sending of 35,000 more troops beyond the more than 650,000 armed personnel already there, along with house arrests of leaders of the mainstream Kashmiri parties, curfew orders and a complete communications lockdown on the whole of the Valley population. c) Third, it is to further advance the project of establishing a Hindu Rashtra. d) Fourth, it is a way of sending a geo-political message to Pakistan, the US and the rest of the world that there is no longer any ‘regional dispute’ that must be settled bilaterally with Pakistan, let alone that it should feature in any way on the UN or international agenda, humanitarian considerations be damned!

What now to expect in the shorter and longer run

• The issue will be taken to the Supreme Court (SC) and a Constitution bench will be set up. This bench, given how suborned the SC has now become to the will and power of the Executive, will never have the courage or integrity to even give a stay order temporarily halting and reversing what has been done till a final judgement is reached, let alone be honest and faithful to the precise constitutional provisions regarding these Articles. This bench can be fully expected to endorse by a majority, if not by consensus, the abrogation of 370 and 35A. It is possible, but still unlikely, that there will even be a ruling against the downgrading of status from state to Union Territory in either or both of the cases. 
• A Delimitation Commission is very likely to be set up probably before forthcoming elections to the J&K legislature to gerrymander more assembly and LS seats for the Jammu region so as to enable a majority for the BJP and allies via future elections.
• Scrapping of 35A was necessary to begin the process of changing the demography of J&K, including of the Valley, so as to eventually render Muslims living there a minority.
• In the Valley there will be growing anger and deeper and wider public alienation from the rest of India especially among the youth. There will very likely be greater recruitment and support for, as well as collaboration with, cross-border insurgent forces themselves abetted by the Pakistan government. This, and even non-violent mass actions will be taken as an excuse by the Indian government and armed forces for the exercise of greater brutality and repression including use of the newly amended legislations on ‘terrorism’ and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or UAPA to arbitrarily and pre-emptively arrest, harass and even torture those deemed as ‘suspects’.
• For all the talk about how development in the region was stalled and can now proceed, in actual fact the Sangh’s Hindutva project in the Valley is to ‘integrate’ it by trying to completely finish off all popular resistance through brutal force and enduring military occupation.
• The likelihood of cross-border military skirmishes with Pakistan rises significantly as also the possibility of these turning into a conventional war of some scale and degree thereby also raising the chances of a miscalculated or inadvertent nuclear exchange breaking out.
• The fact that this move by the current government will generate throughout the rest of the country far more public support than opposition, reflects how deep and widespread are the tentacles today of a hubristic, aggressively muscular Hindu nationalism. None of the opposition parties, including the mainstream electoral Left, have consistently or seriously opposed this anti-secular and anti-democratic way of trying to build a ‘strong’ India. This way of thinking has become largely hegemonic and requires a long term fight by a new intransigent Left.

Our Position

We warn that the erosion of federalism and state powers more generally, is very much part of the Hindutva project and carries a danger even for those regional forces who think they can grow and expand through their despicable alliances and tacit agreements with the BJP at the Centre.

We call on all progressive-minded people who recognise the Hindutva project for what it is and oppose it, to stand in solidarity with the people of Kashmir. Justice and respect for Kashmiris demands the immediate de-militarisation of the Valley and the complete freedom for them to move around, to voice their legitimate anger at how they have been treated and to democratically protest in whatever way they see fit.   

We strongly oppose the kind of exclusivist, culturally racist and militaristic nationalism that is being generated and of course reaffirm the right to full political self-determination by the oppressed people of Kashmir. 

র‍্যাডিক্যাল সোশ্যালিস্ট দ্ব্যর্থহীন কণ্ঠে ও দৃঢ়তার সঙ্গে সংবিধানের ৩৭০ ধারার মূল লক্ষ্য ও উদ্দেশ্য কার্যত বাতিল করা এবং ৩৫এ ধারা রদ করার বিরোধিতা করে নিন্দা জানাচ্ছে। একটি অগণতান্ত্রিক ও অসাংবিধানিক আইনি মারপ্যাঁচের মাধ্যমে এবং একইসাথে কাশ্মীরের মানুষকে উদ্দেশ্যপ্রণোদিতভাবে সশস্ত্র ভীতিপ্রদর্শনের মাধ্যমে এই কাজটি করা হয়েছে। যা ঘটেছে তাকে বলা চলে অসৎ, এবং সংবিধানের উক্ত ধারাগুলির মূল লক্ষ্য এবং উদ্দেশ্যগুলির প্রতি প্রতারণা ও জালিয়াতি ।

৩৭০ ধারা বাতিল করার একমাত্র উপায় হল জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের সংবিধান সভার পুনর্গঠন এবং সেখানে এই প্রস্তাব নেওয়া। কারণ এই প্রতিষ্ঠানটি ১৯৫৭ সালে ভেঙ্গে দেওয়া হয়। কোনরকম সাংবিধানিক সংশোধন ছাড়া অবৈধভাবে একটি রাষ্ট্রপতির আদেশ জারি করে সংবিধানের ৩৬৭ ধারা বদল করে এর মাধ্যমে নির্লজ্জভাবে জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের বিধানসভার ক্ষমতা ঐ সংবিধান-সভার সমতুল্য বলে দেখানো হয়। এই শেষোক্ত প্রতিষ্ঠান অনেক বেশি সার্বভৌমিক ক্ষমতার অধিকারী। যেহেতু জম্মু-কাশ্মীরে এখন রাষ্ট্রপতির শাসন চলছে সেহেতু রাজ্যপালের সুপারিশের ভিত্তিতে রাষ্ট্রপতি সংবিধানের ৩৭০ ও ৩৫এ ধারার বিলোপ ঘটায়। তাছাড়া স্বাধীন ভারতে এই প্রথম সংসদের দুই কক্ষে একটি রাজ্য পুনর্গঠন বিল পেশ করা ও গৃহীত হয় যার মাধ্যমে একটি রাজ্যের মর্যাদা হ্রাস করে তা অবলুপ্তি ঘটিয়ে দুটি কেন্দ্র-শাসিত অঞ্চলে ভেঙ্গে দেওয়া হয়। এই কেন্দ্র-শাসিত অঞ্চলগুলির একটির – জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের - পন্ডিচেরি ও দিল্লির মতো আইনসভা থাকবে আর লাদাখ দেশের আরও পাঁচটি কেন্দ্র-শাসিত অঞ্চলের মতো এই অধিকার ভোগ করবে না। চাপের মুখে নতিস্বীকার করে বিরোধী দলগুলি বিজেপির পক্ষ না নিলে এই রাজ্য পুনর্গঠন বিল পাশ করানো যেত না।

কংগ্রেস দল (যে দল ঐতিহাসিকভাবে জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের স্বশাসনের ধারাবাহিক অবনতি ঘটিয়েছে) সরকারিভাবে বর্তমান সরকারের এই পদক্ষেপের বিরোধিতা করছে। যদিও অভিষেক সিংহভি এবং জ্যোতিরাদিত্য সিন্ধিয়ার মতো কোন কোন কংগ্রেসের নেতা এই কাজের বিরোধিতা করেন নি, শুধুমাত্র পদ্ধতির সমালোচনা করেছেন। একমাত্র বামপন্থীরাই এর বিরোধিতায় রাস্তায় নেমেছে এবং সারা ভারতে প্রতিবাদ করেছে।

আমদের কোন দ্বিধা থাকা উচিত নয় যে বিজেপি সরকার ও সঙ্ঘ পরিবারের এই নির্লজ্জ রাজনৈতিক ও সামরিক দখলদারির মূল কারণ হল ক) প্রথমত মুসলমানের প্রতি ঘৃণা, এবং যেখানে জম্মু-কাশ্মীর কার্যত দেশের একমাত্র মুসলমান প্রধান রাজ্য ছিল। খ) দ্বিতীয়ত উপত্যকার মানুষের ওপর আরও বেশি আঘাত নামানো। সেই কারণেই ৬,৫০,০০০ ফৌজির উপস্থিতি সত্ত্বেও আরও ৩৫,০০০ সৈন্য পাঠানো হয়। কাশ্মীরের রাজনৈতিক নেতাদের গৃহবন্দী করে রাখা হয়, কারফিউ জারি করা হয় এবং উপত্যকার সমস্ত যোগাযোগ ব্যবস্থা ছিন্ন করে দেওয়া হয়। গ) তৃতীয়ত হিন্দু রাষ্ট্র নির্মাণের পথে এটি একটি গুরুত্বপূর্ণ পদক্ষেপ। ঘ) চতুর্থত এর মাধ্যমে পাকিস্তান, মার্কিন যুক্তরাষ্ট্র ও অন্যান্যদের রাজনৈতিক বার্তা পাঠানো যে পাকিস্তানের সাথে দ্বিপাক্ষিকভাবে মীমাংসা করার মতো কোন "আঞ্চলিক দ্বন্দ্ব" নেই। রাষ্ট্রপুঞ্জ বা আন্তর্জাতিক স্তরে মীমাংসার কোন প্রশ্নই ওঠে না। কোনরকমের মানবিক বিবেচনার বিষয় নেই এখানে।

অদূর ও সুদূর ভবিষ্যতে কী হতে পারে

• বিষটি সুপ্রীম কোর্টে যাবে এবং একটি সাংবিধানিক বেঞ্চ গঠন করা হবে। এই মুহুর্তে সুপ্রীম কোর্ট শাসকের ইচ্ছা ও ক্ষমতার যে পরিমাণ অধস্তন তাতে এই বেঞ্চ এই বিষয়ে চূড়ান্ত রায়প্রদানের আগে স্থগিতাদেশ জারি করে সাময়িকভাবে একে রদ করার কোন সাহস বা সততা প্রদর্শন করতে পারবে কিনা সন্দেহ আছে। এই ধারাগুলি সম্পর্কিত নির্দিষ্ট সাংবিধানিক বিধান নিয়ে তারা কতটা সৎ ও বিশ্বস্ত থাকতে পারবে একথা বলা দুষ্কর। সর্বসম্মতিতে না হলেও এই বেঞ্চ যে সম্ভবত সংখ্যাগরিষ্ঠের মতামতের ভিত্তিতে ৩৭০ ও ৩৫এ ধারার বাতিলের ওপর আইনী সীলমোহর দেবে সেই সম্ভাবনা প্রবল। রাজ্যের -- জম্মু-কাশ্মীর এবং লাদাখের মর্যাদা হ্রাসের বিপক্ষে আদালত রায় দিতে পারে, যদিও তা নিয়ে সন্দেহ আছে।
• আগামী নির্বাচনের দিকে তাকিয়ে জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের নির্বাচনের আগে একটি আসন পুনর্গঠন কমিশন গঠন করে বিধানসভা ও লোকসভা কেন্দ্রগুলির পুনর্বিন্যাস করা হবে। চেষ্টা করা হবে জম্মু অঞ্চলে যত বেশি সম্ভব আসন রাখা যায় যাতে বিজেপি ও তার সঙ্গীরা সহজে সংখ্যাগরিষ্ঠতা পেতে পারে।
• জম্মু-কাশ্মীরের এবং বিশেষ করে উপত্যকার জন অনুপাত বদলে দেওয়ার পদ্ধতি শুরু করার জন্য ৩৫এ ধারার বিলোপ জরুরী ছিল। চেষ্টা চলবে যাতে উপত্যকায় মুসলমানদের সংখ্যালঘু করা যায়।
• কাশ্মীর উপত্যকায় এর বিরুদ্ধে মানুষ, বিশেষ করে যুবসমাজ, ক্ষোভ-বিক্ষোভে ফেটে পড়বে। তারা আরও বেশি করে ভারতের থেকে দূরে সরে যাবে। আরও বেশি করে জঙ্গি তৈরি হবে এবং তাদের প্রতি সাধারণ মানুষের সমর্থন আরও বাড়বে। সীমান্তের দুই পারের জঙ্গিদের সহযোগিতা বেড়ে যাবে এবং পাকিস্তান সরকার তাতে মদত যোগাবে। এই ধরণের পরিস্থিতি এবং এমন কি মানুষের অহিংস আন্দোলনকে কাজে লাগিয়ে ভারত সরকার ও সেনাবাহিনী আরও বেশি নৃশংসতা ও দমন-নিপীড়ন নামিয়ে আনবে মানুষের ওপর। ‘সন্ত্রাসবাদ’ দমনের নয়া সংশোধিত আইন এবং ‘বেআইনি কার্যকলাপ দমন আইন ২০১৯’ বা ইউএপিএ প্রয়োগের মাধ্যমে নির্বিচারে এবং সন্দেহের বশে যে কোন ব্যক্তিকে আটক, হয়রানি এবং নির্যাতন করা হবে।
• এই অঞ্চলের উন্নয়ন কতটা আটকে ছিল এবং তা কীভাবে শুরু করা যায় – এই আলোচনার পেছনে রয়েছে সঙ্ঘ পরিবারের মূল লক্ষ্য উপত্যকার আরও বেশি ‘ভারতভুক্তির’ মাধ্যমে ওখানকার সমস্ত প্রতিরোধ পাশবিক শক্তি ও সামরিক দখলদারির মাধ্যমে গুঁড়িয়ে দেওয়া
• পাকিস্তানের সঙ্গে সীমান্ত সঙ্ঘর্ষের সম্ভাবনা ব্যাপক বৃদ্ধি পাবে। এগুলি কোন কোন মাত্রায় প্রথাগত যুদ্ধের রূপ নিতে পারে। এর ফলে ভুলবশত বা অনিচ্ছাকৃত পারমাণবিক অস্ত্র ব্যবহারের সম্ভাবনা উড়িয়ে দেওয়া যায় না।
• বর্তমান সরকারের এই পদক্ষেপের বিরোধিতার পরিবর্তে দেশজোড়া বিপুল সমর্থন প্রমাণ করে যে উদ্ধত, আক্রমণাত্মক পেশী-প্রদর্শনকারী হিন্দুত্বের বিষদাঁত আজ সমাজের কত গভীরে প্রবেশ করেছে এবং তা কি পরিমাণে ব্যপ্ত। কোন বিরোধী দল এমন কি মূলধারার সংসদীয় বাম দলগুলিও ধারাবাহিকভাবে এবং গুরুত্বের সাথে এই ‘শক্তিশালী’ ভারতবর্ষ নির্মাণের সাম্প্রদায়িক ও অগণতান্ত্রিক পদ্ধতির বিরোধিতা করে নি। এই আধিপত্যবাদী ভাবনার মোকাবিলা করতে এক দীর্ঘকালীন লড়াইয়ের মাধ্যমে যার জন্য প্রয়োজন এক নতুন আপসহীন বামপন্থা।

আমাদের সতর্ক করার কারণ এই যে যুক্তরাষ্ট্রীয় কাঠামো ও রাষ্ট্রের ক্ষমতার ক্ষয় আসলে হিন্দুত্ব প্রকল্পেরই একটি অংশ। যে আঞ্চলিক দলগুলি কেন্দ্রের বিজেপির সাথে অঘোষিত, অবাঞ্ছনীয় আপোষের মাধ্যমে নিজেদের শক্তি বৃদ্ধির আশা করছে, বাস্তবে তারা আসলে আরো বড় বিপদের সম্ভাবনা বহন করছে।

হিন্দুত্ব প্রকল্পের বিপদের কথা মাথায় রেখে যারা এর বিরোধিতা করছেন, সেইসব প্রগতিশীল মানুষের আছে আমাদের আহ্বান, আপনারা সকলে কাশ্মীরের মানুষের পাশে দাঁড়িয়ে সহমর্মিতা পোষণ করুন। কাশ্মীরীদের প্রতি ন্যায়বিচার ও সম্মান তাদের স্বাধীন চলাফেরা ও দ্রুত অসামরিকীকরণ দাবি করে। ইচ্ছানুসারে গণতান্ত্রিক পদ্ধতিতে ন্যায়সঙ্গত ক্ষোভের প্রকাশ ও সংগঠিত প্রতিবাদ তাদের অধিকার।

আমরা এই বেড়ে ওঠা প্রান্তিকীকরণ, জাতিগত বর্ণবৈষম্যবাদ, সামরিক জাতীয়তাবাদের তীব্র প্রতিবাদ করছি । আমরা দৃঢ়ভাবে মনে করি কাশ্মীরের নিপীড়িত মানুষের রাজনৈতিক আত্মনিয়ন্ত্রণের সম্পুর্ণ অধিকার আছে।

 Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists