Rajiv's landslide how much did it change?
traditional Hindu communalist party, the BJP-RSS, raised a hue and cry about the Congress (1) organizing the Delhi riots, about the failure to rehabilitate Sikhs, and about the need to bring alienated Sikhs into the nationa. mainstream. Rajiv Gandhi made no such statements.
The following interview was given to Gerry Foley in Geneva on February
4 by M. Navid, a leader of the Indian section of the Fourth International, the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (Revolutionary Communist League).
Comrade Navid has not been able to review the edited text of the inter-
Question. What did the landslide victory of the Congress Party-Indira and
Rajiv Gandhi in the December 24 general elections actually represent?
Answer. I think it was the result of a complex of three or four factors. was the sympathy vote that Rajiv Gandhi got after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. The second was the disarray of the opposition. The opposition was unable to agree and come together on a common platform and present one candidate in the various constituencies. factor is that this election was not fought on the basis of program. There was no program that distinguished the various opposition groups.
In fact, the only program the opposition had before the assassination of Mrs Gandhi was to get rid of her. The bourgeois opposition parties had no alternative program. Nor did even the mainstream Communist parties, the Communof India (CPI, the old pro-Moscow party) and the Communist PartyMarxist (CPM, which began as a proPeking split). All they proposed was getting rid of the authoritarian force represented by Mrs Gandhi through an alliance of the "left and democratic" opposition, meaning an alliance of the mainstream left parties with the bourgeois opposition forces, with the exception of the right-
Hindu party, Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, the political front of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh - RSS - National Volunteer Corps).
However, there is another factor that is more fundamental than all these. Historically, the Congress Party (I) has based itself electorally on the so-called Core Minorities - the Muslims, who constitute about 12% to 13% of the population, about 90,000 million people; the Dalits [Oppressed], or Untouchables, who constitute about 110 million; and the Tribals, who are about 45 million. these minorites make up about 33% of the population and roughly the same proportion of the electorate.
Historically, the Congress always come to power with a minority of the votes, less than 50% The vote that Rajiv Gandhi received this time was the closest that they have ever come to an absolute majority, something like 49.6%. Generally, the Congress (I) has gotten International Viewpoint 25 February 1985 between 38% and 45%, and this has been based on the solid, en bloc, support of the Core Minorities, plus a certain section of the Hindu vote, say from the Brahmins [the top caste of the Hindus].
However, the majority of the Hindus, who make up 85% of the population of the country, falls into the Middle Castes, that is, the castes that come between the
Untouchables and the small section represented by the Brahmins and the ward Castes" (the non-Brahmin high-caste
These Middle Castes are also known as the "Backward Castes."
The Middle Castes account for the bulk of the Hindu vote, and what they represent in class terms is urban traders and landowning farmers, rich farmers, aspiring capitalist farmers.
The important thing in this election is that for the first time the Congress Party (I) got solid support from the Hindu had previously supported either the Dalit Mazdoor Kisan
[Oppressed Working party] of Charan Singh or the BJP-RSS, which has been the party par excellence of the urban traders.
Rajiv Gandhi got a still sizable section of the vote from the Core Minorities in these elections. But the historic trend is a decline in the support of the Core Minorfor the Congress. This is why Mrs Gandhi decided to move toward wooing the Hindu caste vote, and it explains the active Hindu communalism of the Congress Party (I) in recent years.
Basically Rajiv Gandhi won his landslide because he got a solid bloc of support from the Hindu middle class, And he got it by exploiting the shock created by Mrs Gandhi's death, by claiming that the unity and integrity of the country was at stake and that only the Congress Party (I) could preserve this unity and
You remember that anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi and elsewhere that followed Mrs Gandhi's death. After that, Rajiv Gandhi made the unity and integrity of the coun try the focus of his election campaign, claiming that the country was faced by forces out to destabilize it, both inter-
- i.e., Pakistan, accused of supporting the Sikh move ment, the Akali Dal - and, more importantly, domestic forces. He gave his campaign a strong and clear anti-Sikh bias.
So, how do you explain the support that the Congress (I) got in the
South and among the minorities?
A. In Kerala, where there is a sizable
Christian and Muslim minority, Rajiv
Gandhi got bigger support than the Congress (I) has gotten before because of his line that unity and integrity of the country were in danger. Obviously, this had an immediately frightening effect on the minorities. In Tamilnadu, the most southern state, the support for the Congress Party (I) was directly related to its alliance with the AIADMK, the All-India
DMK [the Dravida Munetra Kazahgam party began as a Dravidian nationalist party and has since gone through several avatars]. Both parties gained from this alliance. The AIADMK is headed by the film star, M. G. Ramachandran, who also got a sympathy vote because he had been fighting for his life in an American hospital.
There is a clear political division in India between the North and the South, in the sense that the Hindu caste vote is particularly important in the North, the Hindi-speaking belt, which is also known
"Cow Belt." Up to 1980, the Congress Party (I) had come to power nationally because of its support in the
In the 1977 landslide against Mrs Gandhi and the Congress Party, the only parts that held out for Mrs Gandhi were parts of the South. (1) This trend was reaffirmed in 1980, when the Congress Party (I) regained national dominace based on the support of the the South is also divided. There is the Upper South, consisting of the two states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; and the Lower South, consisting of the states of Kerala and Tamil
The former tends to be more favorable to all-Indian parties, the latter to regional parties.
In these elections, however, the Congress (I) suffered one of its few setbacks in Andhra Pradesh. This was the result the Congress Party suffered a disaster at the polls in backlash against Indira Gandhi's attempt to restrict democ ratic rights under the state of emergency she declared in 1975. In his book, Nehrus and the Gandhis, an Indian Dynasty Taria that the reason the Congress did such losses in the Dravidian areas greater resistance of the local pol to arbitrary rule from the cente there were less concrete griet the state-of-emergency governm less of a backlash. -IV
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INDIA.
Indira Gandhi (DR) of very specific factors, the undemocratic attempt by the central government to oust the government of the regional Telegu Desam party headed by former film star Rama Rao. In other states where Mrs Gandhi made similar attempts, Sikkim and Kashmir, the Congress (L) also suffered defeats.
Q. What effects do you think the Congress (I) landslide will have on Indian politics now, besides promoting communalism?
A. The first and most important impact of this election is the devastation of the bourgeois opposition and the very substantial defeat of the small left opposition, represented by the two mainstream Stalinist parties, the CPM and the CPI, between them in the previous elections, they got 49 seats. This time, they got between them, 36. The CPM lost 14 seats and retained 22. The CPI dropped from 13 seats to 6.
The bourgeois opposition was shattered. The DMKP, the party of Charan Singh, a class-based party of the rural rich, ran something like 169 candidates and elected only three. The BJP, which ran around 226 candidates throughout the country, elected two. The Janata party (People's Party, the main bourgeois opposition party got only nine seats.
The blow suffered by the main bourgeois opposition parties was a devastating, possibly fatal one. It is hard to see a revival of strong opposition to the government coming from this quarter.
But one thing is certain; that there will be a reemergence of opposition in some form. That is because the central problem for the bourgeoisie in India remains. That is the crisis of bourgeois political leadership, the crisis of endemic political instability. 12
This crisis arises basically because the Congress Party (I) is no longer able to play the role that it has historically as an effective instrument for mediating conflict in Indian society, both those within bloe and those between the ruling bloc, or sections of the ruling bloc, and the oppressed classes.
Rajiv Gandhi's victory will not reinvigorate the Congress Party (I), whose tum to communalism represents its historic exhaustion. What the new government does have is a certain breathing space, a period of some months in which Rajiv Gandhi's authority will be unchallenged and in which he can do virtually
Indeed, the tremendous majority for the Congress Party (1) in the legislature has not strengthened the role of that branch but rather of the executive. What Rajiv Gandhi has already done is to make the prime minister's secretariat the most powerful secretariat that has ever existed
That is, he established a body outside the control of the legislature that will be the key center of decision making.
Because of the inability of the Congress Party (I) to play its historic mediat-
Rajiv Gandhi will build up the role of the executive and the civil appar-
This is also in tune with his own proclivities, his lack of ideology and his technocratic managerial approach to the problems of running the country. In this sense, Rajiv is less political than his mother who because of and experience took a much more political approach of balancing between the various social forces. reality will obviously impose itself on Rajiv. But he is starting out with the idea that the country's problems can be tackled by managerial techniques.
What policies specifically do you expect him to follow?
His basic purpose now is to carry out a capitalist modernization of the In-
The Congress Party (I) now has a clearly right-wing economic program with virtually no concessions to the populist welfarism of the "Congress socialism" days. peared first in the 1980 elections, when in her manifesto Mrs Gandhi did not even mention the word "socialism," which in the Indian context has a special meaning, a populist meaning. But nevertheless, in her campaign she talked about populist welfare measures.
In this election Rajiv not only did not mention the word manifesto but he did not invoke it in any of his campaign speeches. very most, he would talk about the importance of economic growth with justice. So, the old hegemonizing ideology of Congress socialism is finished.
What this means is that Rajiv Gandhi out to promote the forces that are for capital accumulation
Q. So, you expect an Indian version of Thatcherism?
A. I would be hesitant to make that
But you might make such a comparison insofar as it means that Rajiv Gandhi is determined to allow the market and the market forces of the private sector to play the leading role. Actually this already started under Mrs Gandhi. In fact, pressures developing within the Indian economy began to move the coun try along this road beginning in the mid-
The difference is that unlike his mother Rajiv Gandhi carries no historical baggage of populism, so he can throw himself more fully behind these trends. He will pursue economic liberalization, the opening of the Indian economy to market forces, to the importing of technology, to greater opportunities for Indian firms to enter into collaboration for importing technology and perhaps for importing consumer goods, finished consumer goods. There is a considerable margin for this since India enjoys a comfortable balance-of-payments situation.
Rajiv Gandhi is under very pressure to introduce the electronics age in India. One of the first things he did after becoming prime minister was to revamp the administration of the telephone system, which has been one of the
The new government's second concern is raising efficiency, because one of the problems of the Indian economy, in fact also a barometer of its difficulties, has been the very high capital-output ratio, which is today something like 6.1. That is, you need 6.1 units of capital to get one unit of output. So, Rajiv Gandhi will try to reduce the capital-output ratio through introducing more modern managerial methods.
Secondly, he will bring in more computerization, reduce staffing and rationalwill lead to redundancies especially in the public sector.
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
bourgeois economists claim that overstaffing in the public sector because of relative security of employment there and other advantages for workers, is one of the reasons for the high capital-output ratio in the public sector and on the average throughout Indian industry.
Another area where Rajiv Gandhi will try to make big changes is the educational system. In fact, the Indian educational system is a very top heavy one, in that there is insufficient attention paid to the primary and secondary sectors and an overemphasis on the tertiary sector, that is, higher education. The result of this is what I would call mass miseducation, apart from a few universities and colleges that produce students of a relatively high standard. You have large numbers of people coming out of higher education who cannot find satisfactory jobs. At the same time, India has a literacy rate of 36%, which is quite shameful in comparison with the extent of investment in education and by comparison with China, where the literacy rate is
Rajiv Gandhi is not going to change this top-heavy structure. not be changed without making other fundamental changes in Indian society. But the system will be redirected toward producing the technical and cadres he needs for the sort of modernization he wants to carry out. same time, this will in fact increase the top-heaviness of the educational system.
Q. What will Rajiv Gandhi's vietory mean for the masses of workers and poor pr sants?
Despite Rajiv Gandhi's massive victory, a vietory that he could not have won without getting a substantial vote and peasants, is no doubt that we will see a rise in working-class and rural struggles in the near future. Over the last ten years, we have been seeing a rising trend of rural struggles, in fact. What has happened in the Indian countryside, as a result of the Green Revolution, is an increasing polarization of Indian rural society between agricultural laborers who form close to 30% of the rural popualtion, and rich and aspiring capitalist who comprise between 15 and Counting five per family, you can calculate that the latter amounts to about 75 million
In between the landless laborers and the rich farmers is a layer getting squeezed out of farmers who have some land but are forced to work for wages part of the year or are unable to make the transition to becoming capitalist farmers.
The number of aspiring capitalist farmers is thus very large in India because capitalist farming in our country is based on relatively small farms.
Rajiv Gandhi's agricultural policy is bound to reinforce the tensions that have developed because his basic policy is one of extending the Green Revolution. That means bringing more land under International Viewpoint 25 February 1985 irrigation more fertilizers and more highyielding seeds as promoting multiple-crop systems.
Indian agricultural growth has stabilized since the early 1960s at a truly re-
The average rate of growth in Indian agriculture is 2.6%, which is remarkable by any historical standards. If you look at the history of the US or Britain, countries that industrialized over many decades, a century or a century and a half, you will not find a comparable period of something like 15 years in which they sustained cultural growth of 2.6% a year.
This is one of the reasons that the Indian economy has been able to register an average growth rate of over 4% in the last ten years and why even the most pessimistic economists believe that during the life of the Seventh Five-Year Plan, from 1985 to 1990, the average growth rate of the Indian economy will be
Such development has meant that India has achieved self-sufficiency in food. But that is not the same thing as people having enough to eat. Some 50% of the population of India do not, because they lack the buying power.
Given the importance of the capitalist who produce most of the marketable surplus, the landless laborers have to fight hard to get basic minimum demands such as security of employment, minimum wages, etc. So, tensions are going to continue to rise. very often been reflected in the past and will continue to be reflected in caste conflicts since almost all agricultural laborers are Untouchables, although not all Untouchables are tinue to be tensions is that of relations between the all-India government and the
The rich capitalist farmers find themselves much more capable of exertgovernments than at the level of the cengovernment is committed to promoting the interests of the rich farmers, it has to look after the interest of the ruling bloc as a whole and so cannot give them all that they want. This conflict can express itself particularly in a conflict between the central government and the states, with the latter demanding more resources than the all-Indian government is prepared to give.
Another important contradiction that India is a bourgeois democracy,
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which means that the acceptance by the oppressed in some way of the rule of the oppressor is of more immediate significance than the element of coercion. The bourgeoisie has been able to rule India because it has been able to convince a substantial majority of the oppressed to support bourgeois rule and the bourgeois parties in parliament. To do this, it has had to have a hegemonizing ideology. Up to the early 1970s, that was Congress (I) socialism. This was successful because the pattern of Indian economic growth from 1947 to the early 1970s did result in certain partial but nevertheless real benefits for the majority of the people.
Already before Mrs Gandhi's death, Hindi nationalism began being pushed as the new hegemonizing ideology of the Indian state. This will continue to be pushed with varying intensities, depending on social tensions and the extent to which Rajiv Gandhi is able to achieve an even partial solution to the Punjab [Sikh] problem. But it will continue to be pushed. And this carries very important dangers because Hindu nationalism means the promotion of a sanscritized Hindi language, with all the problem that involves in the South [whose pre dominant Dravidian languages are gram matically unrelated to the Indo-European languages of the North] and in West Bengal [Bengali was the first of the In dian venaculars to develop a moder literature and has become the basis of a reinforced the alWest Bengal.
So, the CPM 1977. character. is slow this. India today.
West Bengal 13
urban areas. Those urban high working-class the Congress
Even in the rural areas, the margin of victory for the CPM was much narrower than in the previous election. On the allWest Bengal level, the CPM won 16 seats and the Congress about eight. But in fact
60,000 votes separated the two
Moreover, the CPM failed in its project of making a breakthrough in the Hindi heartland, states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and so on. It had hoped to maintain its base in West Bengal and through overtures to the CPI - since the CPM now lines up almost entirely with Moscow on foreign policy questions - be able to use the CPI bases in Bihar and in other parts of the Hindi heartland as a springboard for making a breakthrough. But it failed.
So, the CPM remains a regional party, has been gravely Kerala, where it had a regional base, and substantially weakened in West Bengal. There does not seem to be much of a future for the electoralism to which the party has committed itself. It might make a turn back toward class-struggle methods. I think that will depend on the outcome of the West Bengal state elections, that is, it is more likely if the CPM finds itself in the opposition. But even then, it would have to contend with tremendous pressures from the Soviet Union on both Communist parties to accomodate to Rajiv Gandhi because of the Kremlin's perspective of alliance with the progressive bourgeoisie and support for Rajiv Gandhi's postures of "nonalignment."
2. Given the declining credibility o he CPs, what do you see growing up to 14
The elements to the left of the CPM have also become substantially disillusioned with the Maoists. variety of small groups which are hesitant now to characterize themselves as the revolutionary party or the nucleus of the revolutionary party. They say that they have to come together with a whole series of groups - including local ones that may not even be known on the allIndia level - to form the nucleus and foundation of a mass revolutionary party. That is one way the far left has gone.
The other main way the far left has gone in the last five to ten years is into nonparty political formations, groupings around magazines, documentation centers, cultural groups, groups concerned with deforestation, Along with this, there has been the rise of small united-front movements taking up various issues, democratic rights, women's questions, ecology, for example the question of Bhopal (See International Viewpoint, No 68, January 28, 1985).
The reason for the development of such fronts is twofold: first, the mainstream parties have neglected such questions; second, where they have construcdealing with such ques tions, they have kept tight control. This has alienated activists, who have then grouped themselves in united fronts.
The growth of these fronts is an expression of the fact that the far left is no longer attracted by CM polities, and so the CPM has come to regard it as a real threat. They have launched a big ideological campaign against such groups raising a big hue and cry about their purported misuse of money and links to foreign organizations, such as international charities, etc.
What about the Lal Nishan [Red Flag) party in Maharashtra that supported the Bombay textile workers'
Did they run in the all-India They supported Datta Samant [the leader of the union that conducted the strike]. For these elections, he set up what was called the Workers Front which ran candidates in Bombay. But only Datta Samant was elected.
The Lal Nishan is a Maharashtran party with a social base among the working class in Bombay and Poona, the two main industrial cities of the state, and a very substantial base among the landless laborers. During the textile strike they took the position, which was correct in our view, of supporting the textile strike from within the MGKU [Maharashtra Girni Kamgar Union, or the Maharashtra State Factory Workers Union], that is, the trade union of Datta Samant. As a result of its work in the strike, it has gained ground, its trade-union base is stronger today. Its ideological positions are quite bizarre. They combine rejection of the idea of a progressive bourgeoisie with acceptance of the two-stage theory of revolution. In practice, it's quite flexible, and yet in its ideologicial positions it is strongly Stalinist - which doesn't mean that it works easily with the other Stalinist parties, the CPI and the CPM.
Q. What is the situation of the workers' movement in Bombay after the defeat of the textile strike?
The long-term trend in Bombay is that we are getting a young militant layer of trade-union activists, who are not ideologically inclined but in some respects have a stronger class consciousness than their predecessors because umbilical cords to the countryside have finally been substantially cut.
This is a younger, more self-confident, assertive working class in middle
And this self-confidence reflects itself in an increasing disloyalty to the union leaderships. These workers do not yet have the ability to run their own unions but they have the confidence to say to the different union leaderships that they will not stick with them if they cannot deliver the goods. This phenomemassive shifts on the part of the Bombay working class in the last ten years from one maverick trade-union leader to another. context that we had the rise of Datta Samant as a maverick union leader, and he is now the single most important
The victory for Datta Samant in the election was, of course, a protest vote against the government's handling of the textile strike.
On the other hand, the defeat of the strike has meant that the best militants in the MGKU are finished as far as employment is concerned in Bombay. They cannot get employment anywhere in industry in Bombay. They are marked people. You have a demoralization created by the defeat of the textile strike, which has reflected itself in the rise once again of communalist forces.
The MGKU has no real organized
This was a strength in some ways during the strike because it allowed for the creative initiative of the workers. But now the weaknesses of this are more
Furthermore, with the best decline in the standards of dedication of the activists, and a resulting disillusionment with the union, to some degree, among the workers. So, it seems that the pattern of shifting loyalites on the union front in Bombay will continue.
What position did the Indian section of the Fourth International, the Enquilabi Communist Sangathan (Revolutionary Communist League) take toward the elections?
A. We called for a vote for the workers' parties in general outside of West Bengal. There was agreement on that. In West Bengal, a majority was opposed to calling for a vote for the CPM, considering the record of the CPM in the state and that the election was a straight clash between the CPM and Congress (I). In these conditions, they thought it was best to call for a boycott.•
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
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