Assassination highlights leadership crisis
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THE assassination of the leader of India's Congress Party, Rajiv Gandhi, at an election rally in the state of Tamil Nadu, has focussed world attention on the country's deepening political and economic crisis. IV asked Indian Marxist political analyst M. Navid for his view on the immediate and longer term implications of the killing.
NDIA's crisis is chronic. On the one hand there is constant political instability, on the other there is a political system which remains unshaken in its fundamentals. Thus, we will not see in the near future either the break-up of the Indian state nor the end of bourgeois democracy there. On the other hand, the instability will get worse.
Rajiv's death highlights the acute crisis of leadership of the Congress party the party that led India to independence, the party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
The party has no national leader to thus a huge foreign debt and balance of payments deficit.
According to the Financial Times (Thursday May 23, 1991): "India, a country desperately concerned to limit interference by the World Bank and now to be at their mercy.» Fund, seems International Monetary
• The rise of intermediate castes, with interests at odds with those of the central government.
• The increasing communalist tensions and particularly the rise of Hindu fundamentalism.
Indeed, just before the assassination, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party looked set to make big gains in the elections, notably through majority of the seats in the Indian capital,
They may do less well now, given the sympathy vote for Congress and the fact that the killing of its leader has given weight to Congress' main election plank; in favour of stability.
This appeal to the voters has come against a background of unprecedented election violence, especially in the north of the country, where most of the coun try's Muslims live and where the aggres-
INDIA sive policies of the BJP have inflamed the situation.
However, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism will not be definitively reversed. The BJP, a petty bourgeois party, puts itself forward as the party of law-and-order, criticizing central government for its lack of vigour in crushing separatism and its attachment to secularism. The BJP's economic programme is clearly in favour of liberalization, and thus to an extent in line with the "spirit of the times" on the world scale.
It is thus not comparable to, for example, the Khomeinite fundamentalism in Iran, with its strong poor against rich rhetoric. If it turns out that Tamil or Punjabi separatists were responsible for Rajiv's death, then the BJP's law-and-order stance will gain added weight.
The major left wing parties in India are the two Communist parties; the CPI(M), •which controls the state government in West Bengal, and the CPI, which runs Kerala state in the south.
Both of these parties have thus far bucked the international trend set off by the crisis of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe and are maintaining their ground and even picking up new support.
They are, of course, firmly in the secu larist camp, and their fortunes are closely bound up with the struggle over the secular nature of the Indian state currently underway. *
International demonstration and replace Rajiv, or even with equal standing to that of other party leaders such as carnival against the Third World debt the present prime minister Chandrasekhar or Janata Dal's V. P. Singh. The invi-
DID you know that:
tation to Rajiv Gandhi's widow Sonia to lead the party is both a sign of Congress'
* Between 1983 and 1990 developing debtor countries paid the North
US$325 billion more than they received.
crisis of leadership and an attempt to capitalize on the sympathy vote, which was
• Deaths of children are on the increase. It is now estimated that 500,000 chilused in his day by Rajiv Gandhi after the dren die each year in Africa and Latin America as a result of the debt.
assassination of his mother.
• Third World governments, under instructions from the International Mone-
At the same time over the past two tary Fund and the World Bank, are imposing harsh austerity programmes that years there have been signs of a centrist penalize the poorest peoples - cutting back or even wiping out food subsidies, regroupment involving the Congress and health and education services.
other parties, such as the Janata Dal, which have their origins in dissident fac-
• The Gulf war proved that debts can be cancelled. Egypt's military debt was wiped out - an instant reward for supporting US war aims.
tions of Congress. This process will be made easier by the death of Rajiv Gan-
On July 15-17, 1991, leaders of the world's seven richest nations will meet in
London. With help from their friends in the IMF and the World Bank they will dhi.
However, even if such a re-alignment decide what's best for the Third World is carried through, the country's instabili-
On Saturday July 13 an international demonstration and carnival to demand ly will continue to get worse, fuelled by a the unconditional cancellation of the debt will be held in London, supported by number of elements:
Labour MPs and many charitable, human rights and political organizations, as
• The economic crisis. This is more well as by anti-debt campaigns in other countries. On July 15-16, 1991, an alterthan merely a conjunctural crisis; it is a native economic summit will be held crisis of the economic model, pursued
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since the 1950s, of attempting to build up an independent Indian economic structure through nurturing Indian industry and systematic protectionism. A big budget deficit has led to massive borrowing from imperialist banks and agencies, and
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