Daily Times

The not so surprising landslide electoral victory of the reactionary Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the meteoric rise of the religious/nationalist chauvinist Narendera Modi in the 2014 elections laid bare the deep social and political malaise that has set in in India, the largest capitalist democracy in the world. Congress was decimated and some of its most senior leaders had to bite the dust. Although corruption, price hike and other incumbency factors led to the defeat of Congress, these are not sufficient to explain the massive victory of the BJP.

In the first seven to eight of the last 10 years of Congress rule, India sustained a growth rate of about eight to 10 percent but after the crash of the world capitalist economy in 2008, the Indian growth rate, along with the other so-called emerging economies, started to lose steam and it collapsed to 4.4 percent. India’s growth story has come off the rails. This fall particularly started to hit the middle class, which is more than the total population of the US, about 300 million. The pain of this contraction caused alarm and panic amongst this upstart petit bourgeoisie and the violent swings of its capricious moods also had an impact on the lower strata of the population. The rather belated subsidising schemes by the Congress government of providing food and meagre monetary handouts to the food insecure, downtrodden masses (which, according to official figures, amounted to 810 million out of a total population of 1.24 billion) failed to give any respite to these wretched of the earth.

On the other hand, Congress, the left and so-called secular parties desperately tried to use the card of ‘secularism’ and tried to use Modi’s past of communal massacres to discredit him but the voters were more concerned with their socio-economic woes. The wily Modi and the BJP cleverly used these economic issues and the corruption of the incumbents, hypocritically promising jobs, development and alleviation of poverty as main election stunts. The masses went for the economic issues concerning their day-to-day lives rather than ambiguous constitutional issues and so-called secularism, which seemed to be far off from the sufferings that the oppressed masses have to endure. Modi tried to use his humble beginnings and poor background in a pretentious campaign, claiming to be part of the poor people. Like Mohandas Gandhi this was nauseating gimmickry, glamourising his childhood poverty to deceive and fool the teeming millions.

However, Modi’s main support bases were the rich, criminals and powerful gangsters. As early as November last year, out of the 100 richest corporate leaders polled, 72 opted enthusiastically for Modi as the prime minister. No wonder this election was the most spendthrift and expensive election in the history of India. The BJP spent more than any other party as the capitalists poured their wealth into the campaign and bought record media airtime and space in the electronic and print media. The media bosses, themselves part of the top elite, used the press and television to prop up Modi as a charismatic and mesmerising leader of the people. Money was spent like water to buy votes, change loyalties and even force opposing candidates to withdraw from the contest. After all, the ruling class will use this Hindu bigot to launch an onslaught on the working classes in this class war to amass huge profits and expand their businesses. No wonder this lower house of parliament has more billionaires and criminals that any other ever elected in India.

A report in The Hindu graphically illustrates this: “One-third of new MPs face criminal charges, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms, which analysed the election affidavits filed before the Election Commission. The 16th Lok Sabha will have the highest number of MPs with criminal cases against them. Thirty four percent of the new MPs face criminal charges. The percentage in 2009 and 2004 stood at 30 and 24 respectively. Across parties, candidates facing criminal charges were more than twice as likely to win as compared to those with a clean record, the ADR data shows. As many as 82 percent of the new MPs have assets worth over Rs one crore each, making it the richest Lok Sabha as compared to 2009 (58 percent) and 2004 (30 percent).”

However, the most crucial factor that led to the victory of this Hindu chauvinist party was the reactionary objective situation and of course the lack of a subjective factor showing a way out of this misery and oppression for the toiling classes. The Congress government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a virtual stooge of Sonia Gandhi, tried to continue the neoliberal economic policies that Singh himself began in the Congress government of Prime Minister Narasima Rao in 1991 by ditching the previous Congress’s traditional Keynesian economic model, so-called ‘Nehruvian Socialism’. The previous BJP government of Prime Minister Atal Vihari Vajpayee, which faced humiliating defeat in the 2004 elections, had only intensified these policies of aggressive capitalism. The rhetoric of BJP’s ‘shining India’ with high rates of growth proved to be a cover up of the teeming poverty and deprivation in the urban slums and what novelist Aravind Adiga called “the darkness” of rural India.

In spite of some cosmetic measures, the basic policies of the now defeated Congress government were no different. The Communist parties and the left front could have posed the only real alternative but the CP leaders, until the early 1990s, were pursuing the disastrous policy of ‘two stages’ — first the bourgeois democratic revolution in alliance with the bourgeoisie, then in a distant future the socialist revolution. In the garb of this ideology they were trying to find the ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie and support it to complete those tasks. However, the Indian national bourgeoisie has utterly failed to complete any of them and now have even chosen a reactionary Hindu fundamentalist leader and party as their representative. This exposes their real ‘progressiveness’ and ‘secularism’.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, the CP leaders have in reality switched over to ‘one stage’ — bourgeois revolution. They abandoned even the pretension of carrying out any socialist revolution and totally plunged into bourgeois parliamentary politics. That was a policy that Lenin termed as ‘parliamentary cretinism’. Now, as reformists, the CP leaders have failed to give the masses a way out of this harrowing capitalist coercion. They thought that by softening policies and watering down the revolutionary programme they would get a wider base amongst the masses in the elections. The outcome has been exactly the opposite. They have been almost wiped out from parliament. From 64 seats in 2004 they have collapsed to about eight now.

(To be continued)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com