Indian corporate media and politicians portray India as the world’s “largest democracy,” the “Incredible India” with serene landscapes, glamour of Bollywood, historical architectural wonders, colourful cultures, and a mystical land of ancient religions, civilisations and traditions.
Yet there is another India. Beneath the façade of the “Shining India” it is a tragic land immersed in the darkness of poverty, misery and deprivation. Almost one-fifth of the human race is suffering in spiralling urban filthy slums and dusty impoverished villages where life seems to have been stuck in medieval ages. But it’s also the India of the workers, young people, landless peasants, oppressed castes, supressed women and the impoverished millions struggling to survive. It is a democracy of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, presiding over the largest concentration of poverty in the world. India’s peasant revolts, oppressed nationalities striving for liberation and proletariat struggles with brilliant traditions have been somewhat hidden from the world.
The general strike on September 2 was another manifestation of this class struggle. Almost 180 million workers went on a day-long strike across India against greater privatisation and restructuring of labour by Modi government’s arch neo-capitalist regime, which is garbed in colours of Hindutva but is thrusting the vile interests of imperialist and Indian corporate capital. This was the fourth such strike to take place in India since 2009. “This strike is against the central government… for the cause of the working people … the world’s largest ever,” Ramen Pandey of the Indian National Trade Union Congress told the BBC.
Delhi had the biggest strike of nurses in the recent history. Such was the intensity and pervasive span of the strike that in the midst of the bloody conflict between brutal state repression and the youth in revolt across Kashmir, the strike was observed. Comrade Yousaf Tarigami, the Jammu and Kashmir president of the CITU and CPI-M, and member of the legislative assembly, led a mass demonstration in the centre of Jammu city.
Narendra Modi won the May 2014 general elections, promising business-friendly reforms against rights of workers to ‘boost’ the economy. His government aims to extract about 8.3 billion dollars through privatisations in 2016-17, and shut down several state-run companies. However, this bigoted and belligerent regime is spending a massive amount of $43 billion on military expenses, which is planned to be astronomically raised in the next few years, matching China’s military expenses.
India is among the 10 richest countries in the world with a total individual wealth of $5,600 billion, but the average Indian is suffering in stark poverty. It is the second most ‘unequal’ nation in the world where a handful of billionaires control 54 percent of its total wealth. Poverty, on the other hand, rose from 770 million living in extreme poverty to 836 million in the period between 1999-2010. India spends less than one percent of its GDP on health. With the introduction of neoliberal economics conditions of the masses have worsened. Decline in poverty went from 60 percent to 35 percent between the 1950s-early 1980s; trickle down economic policies reversed this trend since the 1990s with almost 80 percent of the population living in poverty now.
India has the largest population of youth in the world with about 66 percent of the population under the age of 35. Unemployment is rampant. In September last year, 2.3 million people applied for 368 posts of peon in the state secretariat in Uttar Pradesh. Among the applicants were 255 with a PhD degree, and more than 200,000 held B-Tech, BSc, M.com and MSc degrees. One million Indians join the labour market every month. Most will either end up as unemployed or in the informal sector with wages less than a tenth of those in the formal sector.
But even those employed in industry and services confront a spree of adaptation of ‘contract labour’ by the corporate capital and even small-scale businesses. Apart from being paid much less than regular employees, contract workers have virtually no job security, and are denied pensions, gratuity, provident fund and health insurance. The main demands of the general strike were for ending these cruel policies of restructuring and privatisations. Modi’s implementation of his pro-corporate agenda will face further setbacks by the resilience and the massive turnout of workers in this general strike.
However, with the success of the strike it doesn’t mean that workers’ demands would be met. Large sections of the advanced and young workers want to continue the struggle, and put an end to the routine of an annual general strike and not much action in the interregnum. Amitava Bhattacharya, co-ordinator of a new workers’ front, MASA, said on September 1, “We need to campaign for workers’ rights round the year, not just one day in a year. Nevertheless, we will join tomorrow’s strike in full force and use this day to kick-start our year-long campaign.”
All hopes of corporate capitalism that Modi’s attempts of privatisation might return the commanding heights of India’s economy nationalised in the 1960s to private hands have diminished. Inspite of a vile and hostile media, a repressive and frantically pro-capitalist BJP regime, and a certain lull in society, Indian workers and young people have come out in struggles and revolts in this daunting period of economic onslaught and corporate despotism.
This strike once again proves that the fundamental contradiction in India is not that of secularism and religious obscurantism but between the oppressed and the oppressors, labour and capital. The BJP, Congress and all other bourgeois national and regional parties, whether religious, secular or liberal, are entrenched in this redundant capitalist system.
To break the shackles of this vicious system a political force based on the ideas of Marxism with the programme of revolutionary socialism can only come up to accomplish the tasks posed by history. This massive general strike has once again brought the challenge of revolution to the doorsteps of the leaders of the huge communist parties of India. They have only the chains of compromises with bourgeois to break loose, but more than a billion of Indian masses shall have a world to win.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]