International, described the changing political situation in India in an interview given to Gerry Foley at the end of
1988, as well as the impact of Rajiv's failure in Sri Lanka.
W
HAT ARE the prospects for a change in the Indian political situation?
The decay of the Rajiv regime does not come as a surprise to our organization. We predicted it. We said that the central framework in which you have to look at Indian poliucs is that there is an endemic crisis of political leadership. Rajiv
Gandhi cannot solve it, and no foreseeable successor can either. So, you have a peculiar sort of paradox between an endemic crisis of bourgeois political leadership, but within the framework of an overall durability of the political system. We have been having a series of political crises that have not sharpened to the extent that you see a large-scale social confrontation.
You have to understand that since the decline of the Congress Party in the late
1960s, there has been no adequate replacement for it for the bourgeoisie. So, elections have taken on a sort of plebiscitary character. By that, I mean two things. First, programs are no longer that important for different political parties. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that the electorate has acquired a considerable
16 experience. They know that these different bourgeois parties are not going to be able to
International Viewpoint #159 • March 20, 1989 fulfill their particular programs. They've heard it all before.
Another reason is that any political party that comes to power at the center has to appeal to a broad spectrum of people, ranging from the core minorities - that is to say the Untouchables, the Muslims - right through to the middle castes, and the rich farmers or the agrarian bourgeoisie, who occupy a very important position. Now the agrarian bourgeoisie are different from the industrial bourgeoisie in the sense that although their economic weight is declining relatively speaking, their political and social weight is increasing. They have one capacity that the industrial bourgeoisie does not have. They have the capacity to mobilize mass scale support. The aspiring agrarian bourgeoisie is a mass category in India. That is one of the reasons why they are so effective at the level of the states.
So, because at the central level you have to appeal to this kind of central bloc, you cannot by definition have a program that appeals only to a particular bloc. You have to find a program that is multi-caste, multi-class in appeal, regional in appeal. • That means that the political contest is essentially between pertral to the formation of this party, just as once upon a time it was Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv Gandhi who were central.
If you look at all the general elections since 1971 — this is really since 1969 when Mrs Gandhi split the Congress Party -every one has been a single-issue referendum. In 1971, the election was won by Mrs Gandhi on the slogan "Garibi hatao, which means remove poverty. The 1977 election was won by the Janata party on the principle "Emergency hatao, Indira hatao!"
— "End the emergency, remove Indira." The 1980 election was won on the principle "Janata hatao!" — "Remove the Janata party." The 1984 election was won by Rajiv Gandhi on the slogan "Desh bajao!" or "Save the country!" in the wake of Mrs Gandhi's assassination.
This is because it is only at the level of a single issue or a personality that that the bourgeois parties can offer what appears to be a meaningful choice. Similarly the next election will probably follow the same pattern, and the likely issue, on which Rajiv Gandhi can lose, is "Corruption hatao!"
In June of this year, there were important by-elections. V.P. Singh himself ran in the Allabad constituency. Despite the immense resources poured in by the Congress party, he defeated the Congress candidate by an overwhelming margin, by 100,000 votes. • With power traded back and forth between programmatically almost indistinguishable parties, you probably get big swings, with every election.
Since 1971, we have had wave elections. This is not like the British type of two-party system, in which the real electoral contest is over the marginals. There you have two political parties with stable political programs, relatively stable social bases of support; and the contest for coming to power is really a struggle for what are called the marginal constituencies. • What is the role of the regionalist parties and the parties that have a regional base, like the left parties?
At the state level, program counts for more; stability of social base also counts for more. At the center it is different. But the very strength that enables the CPM to rule in Bengal, or bourgeois parties in other states disqualifies them from being able to seek power at the center. The experience of Janata party in power showed the inherent instability of a coalition of regional parties, especially if one of those parties represents
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
INDIA the wane
March 20, 1989 • #159 International Viewpoint the agrarian bourgeoisie. The reason is that the agrarian bourgeoisie is increasingly a crystalized caste with very clear class interests, and in this kind of coalition it is going to press very strongly for its interests. And that is going to create tensions that will break up the coalition. That is why any leader, if he is going to be a successful leader on an all-India scale, cannot be a peasant leader. He cannot be identified too directly with the agrarian bourgeoisie. The only such prime minister India has had, and he was a prime minister for a very short period of time, was Charan
On the other hand, the rise of regional parties to power at the state level has enhanced and strengthened the political system as a whole. After the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Congress Party declined, the endemic crisis of bourgeois political stability would have been much sharper if it had not been possible for regional bourgeois oppositions to enjoy power at the state level. • Have you seen new parties coming out of mass social struggles, say out of the Bombay textile workers' strike?
There was the Workers' Front set up by
Datta Samant, the leader of the Bombay textile strike. It ran in the 1984 elections, really only in the state of Maharashtra. This slate was a clear expression of working- class discontent and anger. The Rajiv wave swept the whole country, and of the five constituencies in Bombay the only one that held out was in fact the constituency that returned Datta Samant. But since then this party has had no success. This is largely because Datta Samant has no program beyond that of reformism. Insofar as he is prepared to make alliances with the bourgeois opposition parties, he is certainly not
Indian and Sri Lankan presidents, Rajiv Gandhi (left) and Jayawardene (DR) maintaining any kind of class independence.
So, the workers have realized that he is not much of a real alternative. So, there's only one way for such a party to go, and that is down. He'll probably be swept away by the V.P. Singh wave. If workers feel there's going to be an alternative to Rajiv, it'll be Singh. • Is there no political organization coming out of struggles?
Interestingly, you have sections of the Maoist left, which have emerged out of struggles in the most backward parts of India, particularly Bihar. They have organizations that have a mass base among landless laborers. One such groups is the IPF (Indian Peoples' Front), it is a broad organization with a Maoist party behind it. The IPF has become bigger and bigger in Bihar. It has definitely led very militant struggles of the landless laborers. But as it has become bigger, it has succumbed to a certain extent to the temptation to get involved in electoralism, and to make unprincipled multi-class alliances. • How successful has Rajiv been in
This foreign policy oblectives?
His rise to power was paralleled by a greater self-assertion on the part of India, a greater readiness of India to play the role that it sees for itself. The Indian government's key bourgeois advisors all see India as becoming a major power in the world arena. They see this as being preordained by India's natural resources, size and pre- eminence in the region. We have seen two important examples of this recently, the
Indo-Sri Lankan accord and the sending of
Indian forces to suppress the coup in the
Maldive islands.
The Indian involvement in Sri Lanka was a very important turn, as well as a remarkable one. Shortly beforehand, the Indian government had been warning the Sri Lankan government that it would not tolerate its attempt to impose a military solution on the Tamils, on the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. In fact, when the Jayawardene government carried out a blockade of Jaffna [the heart of Tamil territory], you had airlifting and airdropping of supplies by the Indian government. Then suddenly, in the space of one and a half months, as
Premadasa, a minister in the Jayawardene goverment put it so accurately, the protectors of the LTTE became their hunters.
The accord itself was flawed in many ways, it was fatally flawed because the
Indians were so hasty to draw it up that they did not bother to involve any of the representatives of the Tamil groups, even those Tamil groups that would have
INDIA jumped at the call of the Indian government. So, you had an Indo-Sri Lanka accord to decide the fate of the Tamils, in which the representatives of the Tamil groups were completely excluded. This itself was bad enough, but the clauses were something like a marriage contract with divorce written into it. It talked in terms of a merger of the Eastern and Northern regions, but subject to a referendum of the people there, ignoring the fact that over a large period of time you have had Sinhalese colonization and displacement of Tamils from that region, so that in any event a referendum that took place would be very unlikely to ratify such a merger.
However, in our opinion the most important part of the accord was the letter appended to it, which was later incorporated. In our opinion it was this that explained the India's turnaround from the protector to the hunter of the LTTE. It committed Sri Lanka not to engage in military alliances with any third power which the Indians did not approve of. • It amounts to a protectorate.
I think that the most accurate characterization of this would be to say that it was a partial Monroe Doctrine, a sort of bargain.
For this big gain at the foreign policy level, the Indians would take the responsibility for crushing the LTTE. The whole thing has collapsed because the Indians have not been able to bring the LTTE to heel.
• You think that It Is clear that they have failed?
They have failed, and they know it. They bit off more than they could chew. Beyond a certain scale, it is very difficult to crush insurgency. The Indo-Sri Lankan thing would fall into "low-intensity insurgency, which can drag on and on. Now, the Ameri: 17 cans are engaged in low-intensity warfare
INDIA all over the place. They have the resources to keep it up. But India does not, beset as it is by tremendous pressures both in the Punjab and by all sorts of other difficulties on the economic and social-domestic fronts.
This was India's first exercise in taking on a foreign insurgency. For the first time, the Indian government was called to act as a kind of guarantor of civic peace in a third country. So, on one level it was a big step forward in India's regional foreign policy ambitions. On the other hand, it has met with a very severe defeat. India wants a way out. It's looking for a way out. If it just pulls out, it's too much of a loss of face. At the same time, because the Indians have not been able to keep up their end of the bargain, the clamor and the opposition within Sri Lanka, within the Colombo govemment and among the Sinhala masses for ending the Sri Lanka accord has also increased. At the same time, if the Indians cannot finish off the LTTE, certainly the
Sri Lankan government can't do it.
• What attitude do you think should be taken toward the Tamil move-
The principled position to take on this issue is very clear, and that is that the Indian government must be pressurized to give every kind of support to the LTTE to prevent the genocide of Tamils by the Colombo government. Now, one does not have to have any brief for the LTTE. The LTTE has sometimes been characterized in certain circles as a Marxist organization. This is not correct. There are really no Marxist organizations among the various resistance movements in Sri Lanka. They are radical nationalists. To some extent, the brutality of the repression creates a kind of counterbrutality of the resistance also. We have seen that in the case of Kampuchea with the Khmer Rouge.
It's important to recognize that before the Jayawardene government embarked upon the military solution — which was in 1986 — the political force that enjoyed the most popularity among the Tamils was not the LTTE but the TULF, the moderate bourgeois political formation. But after 1986, it was the LTTE, whatever its failings, that was in the vanguard of the resistance. And it is precisely because of this that it has earned the loyalty and support of a large
So, whatever the criticisms of the Khmer Rouge or others like them, the last thing to do is call for the decimation of this political force, which is at the forefront of the defense of the Tamils — whatever its political failings, which you should of course criticize when they are taking place. Even in an extreme case, like the Khmer Rouge, it would have been crazy to call for the decimation of the Khmer Rouge when the Americans were still bombing the Kampucheans and oppressing them.
188 To what extent ls the LTTE sup
ported by political forces in Indla® Internatlonal Viewpoint #159 • March 20, 1989
It had some support from the opposition party in Tamil Nadu, the DMK. But that support has been reduced somewhat. After the Indo-Sri Lanka accord, the DMK could not openly take a stand against the accord, and say that India should get out. No political party in India does this, apart from sections of the far left. The CPI and the CPM, the big reformist parties, have also endorsed the Indian action. But now, because it has turned out to be something of a quagmire for India, they are beginning to add their voices to the growing chorus for the Indians getting out.
There have been sources of support at the material level to the LTTE. There is no doubt about that. But I think that much bigger sources of support would probably be forthcoming from the Tamil community outside of Sri Lanka, in Europe • Is the resistance of the Tigers Important as a symbol for the Tamil people in the diaspora and in India?
In the diaspora, yes. Definitely. But while the Indian Tamils would be more unhappy about what is going on in Sri Lanka, they are not unhappy enough to actively support the LTTE. Their attitudes are a complex thing. Refugee groups from Sri Lanka in Tamil Nadu also alienated sections of the Tamil population, because of the special support they were given and
There is sympathy, definitely sympathy on the part of Indian Tamils for the plight of Sri Lankan Tamils. But that sympathy does not take the form of an endorsement of Tamil Eelam [a Tamil state on the island of Ceylon] by Indian Tamils. In fact, it is not entirely clear what the LTTE themselves mean by Tamil Eelam. Sometimes they talk about a very substantial kind of autonomy in which they would be the dominant force but within the framework of the union of Sri Lanka, and sometimes they talk about independence. That's why I think one has be be very careful about one's own political position. We respect the right to self-determination of the Tamil oppressed minority, and leave it at that, without ourselves spelling it out and saying that they must have a separate nation. I think that that is ultimately for them to decide.
• This letter appended to the Indo-
Sri Lankan accord that you mentioned, with Its prohibition of foreign bases. Is that almed against the Americans? There are those who claim that It gives the accord an anti-Imperialist character.
Well, the Americans were interested in
Trincomalee, which is one of the best natural harbors in that region. But when the
Indians made it clear to the Jayawardene government that they would not tolerate a military solution by Colombo, what did
Jayawardene do? I have no doubt that he had to turn to the West, and to the US.
Even before, there were indications of support by the Israeli Mossad. Jayawardene had to turn to the US and say, "Can you help me?" And the Americans replied
And what is very interesting is that even though the Americans have their strategic axis with Pakistan, they still came out clearly in support of the accord, applauded
India for signing it and sending the IPKF
[Indian Peacekeeping Force], and also applauded India's role in crushing the coup attempt in the Maldives. In a sense, what's happened is that the Americans have come to the conclusion that in these problems, it is the Indian government that is going to have to play the role of gendarme.
I don't believe that Jayawardene could have decided to go in for the accord with India unless it became clear to him that he could not get support from the US, and therefore he had no option except to bring in the Indians, for which he was prepared to make the kind of concession that could get Indian support. • This also raises the question of to what extent India Is antl-Imperlalist.
Of course it is not, one should not take that claim seriously at all. Its intervention in Sri Lanka is not an indication of anti-imperialism at all. That is the kind of nonsense talked by those who want to give a left cover to the Indian action. That must be completely rejected. This is what we heard from the CPI and the CPM. • Because the Indlan government has an alllance with the USSR?
Yes. But it is awkward for them to say that it is anti-imperialist when the Americans themselves are clapping their hands and telling them what a wonderful job they have done in the Maldives and Sri Lanka. *