India - rightward shift in new parliament
Elections in late September confirmed the sharp rightward shift in Indian politics under the Hindu-fundamentalist government of Vajpayee, reports KUNAL CHATTOPADHYAY.
Big business at home and abroad was enthusiastic about the comfortable (though not huge) majority of Vajpayee’s BJP-led coalition government. The stock market broke the symbolic 5000 mark, and the Indian rupee never a strong currency strengthened on currency markets.
Bolstered by this support, Vajpayee’s caretaker government went on the offensive. It increased prices of petrol and diesel drastically. Prime Minister Vajpayee warned that the nation would have to brace for tough decisions. The fat cats of the nation however remained unperturbed, showing they knew quite well on whom would fall the burden of these decisions. India’s Standard and Poor rating rose slightly, indicating that Western bankers see the country as a less risky customer after the election results.
Vajpayee’s next project is legislation to open the insurance sector to multinational private insurance companies. Insurance in India is far from ideal, with a corrupt bureaucratic machinery, and all kinds of "fine-print" limiting protection. But premiums are still affordable for workers in the organised sectors. True, this is a small minority of the population. But affordable insurance is still one of the gains obtained by Indian workers since independence in 1947.
Workers and employees in the nationalised insurance corporations have decided to agitate and strike against the "liberalisation of the insurance market." But such responses are fragmented, and often dispirited, because of the collapse of the left .
This is one of India’s most right-wing parliaments. The far right parties, led by the BJP, but including smaller parties like the Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena, have almost 190 seats. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has nearly 300 seats.
The main opposition party is the Indian National Congress, with over 100 seats. Congress is the historic party of the Indian bourgeoisie, and, since it was led by Rajiv Gandhi, it has been getting rid of all "socialist" rhetoric and populist policies.
It was Congress, under the Prime Ministership of P.V.Narasimha Rao, and during the period when Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister, that began the current project of inserting the Indian economy into "globalised" capitalism.
It is now clear that Indian capital is aiming for the silencing of Indian labour in order to further develop this goal. An indication of just how far they are willing to go comes from BJP ruled Gujarat, where the government has run a 10-month union-busting campaign against the Vadodara Kamdar Union, a Baroda-based "class struggle" trade union. ( see next page)
The BJP has also exposed its extreme antidemocratic politics in a campaign against Communalism Combat newspaper.
The Home Ministry accused to magazine of breaking foreign exchange legislation after it published a series of advertisements protesting BJP policies (one of which was co-signed by some women’s NGOs with foreign connections). Communalism Combat was subjected to a vilification campaign and forced to shift from Mumbai to Delhi.
The two main left parties, the CPI and the CPI(M) have spend 20 years trying to create a third front, equidistant from the Hindu right and the Congress. On two occasions, this left-democratic, or left-secular unity appeared to be on the verge of maturing.
When Viswanath Pratap Singh became Prime Minister in 1989, and in 1996, when first H. D. Devegowda and later I.K.Gujral headed United Front ministries including CPI leader Indrajit Gupta as Union Home Minister it seemed as if they might have some success. But both these governments were unstable divided internally and under heavy external pressure.
The left parties extended a degree of respectability and democratic credentials, but the main constituent of the front, the Janata Party, shifted to the right and collapsed. Most of the fragments are now allied to the BJP. The main exception is Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party.
The collapse of their main partner meant that the left contested these elections alone, for the first time in 25 years. The results were disastrous. The CPI(M) won 32 seats, including a few outside its strongholds in West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala. The CPI less fortunate, and less skilful at alliance-building, only won four seats, three from West Bengal.
The old strategy of the left now lies shattered. Meanwhile, the CPI(ML), which over-reacted against its previous anti-parliamentarism, and presented a huge number of candidates (trying to replace the CPI(M) as the centre of radical protests) did far less well than it had expected.
The left block won 42 seats, plus one won by the radical left CPI(ML) Liberation.
The weakened parliamentary situation of the left means it will be even less able to act as a pole of attraction for progressive forces, and resist rightward moving legislation, especially economic legislation. This was the only justification for the final days of "left and democratic" bloc making.
All left currents now need to seriously rethink their political line and tactics. Parliamentarism coupled with local actions will not halt the BJP. The early pronouncements of Vajpayee, of Finance Minister Sinha, and of the leading spokespersons of the Indian bourgeoisie, make it clear that tough, and if necessary violent attacks on the working class are being prepared.
Building country-wide resistance means encouraging and supporting struggles against price rises, social security, health and safety, unemployment, and democratic rights.
With every bourgeois party shifting rightward, every left alliance with them will not just mean calling a halt to workers’s struggles as in the past but actually helping them to stamp out the struggles.
Look at West Bengal, where the left has been in government for over two decades. The state government is trying to behave responsibly, in other words to stop "unnecessary" strikes, to evict hawkers from city roads, to beautify Calcutta at the cost of the urban poor, and offering special incentives for capitalist investors.
As a result, the bosses have been milking the factories dry. Innumerable small, medium and big factories are locked out, the workers retrenched, or their pay reduced or workload increased.
Not surprisingly, all but one of the industrial seats of West Bengal have been won by bourgeois parties. The left block has 29 out of 42 seats, down from 33 in 1998 and 37 in 1996.
The left’s share of the vote remained constant, at around 47%, but the total vote cast declined, as many refused to vote. In many parts of the country, voters are tempted by tactical voting, in which the left could lose to bourgeois candidates.
The Indian left has learned nothing from the disastrous coalitions with "progressive" bourgeois currents in Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the early 1970s. But the Hindu-nationalist version of fascism is to be fought, mobilisations have to be organised and battles have to be fought. Time is running short.