http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/images/the_indian_ideology.jpgHegel, basing himself on a colonial document of 1812 that talked of the unchanging "village communities", had famously said that India had no history, only a change of dynasties. Anderson's book says in effect that India will have no history, only a change of governments in a repressive parliamentary democracy that is simultaneously sustained and "debauched" by the caste system. Marx, while holding a similar view as Hegel's regarding India's precolonial past, had seen in colonialism a revolutionary agent of change. This was not just an empirical observation, but based on the theoretical position that once a society, no matter what its past, got drawn into the orbit of capitalism, it could no longer remain changeless. We cannot in other words talk of India's future, and colonial and postcolonial past, without reference to its relationship with capitalism. And to me the greatest problem with Anderson's book is that capitalism does not figure in it. Trapped within a paradigm where Hinduism is elevated to the role of an explanatory factor, without any reference to the capitalist system that is characterised by an immanent logic of its own to which India is inextricably tied, Anderson, not surprisingly, sees no dynamics in its evolution. He examines neither how capitalism impinges on this society, nor how Hinduism itself changes through the impact of capitalism. Once we bring capitalism into the picture, the narrative will change; and what is more, many things attributed by Anderson to the influence of Hinduism will appear to be explicable otherwise. . . . The basic difference between then and now is that the Congress Party has now abandoned all allegiance to an anti-imperialist nationalism. It has done so not because of its Hindu mindset but because of the nature of evolution of world capitalism that has led to the globalisation of capital, especially of finance. This has brought in its train a number of developments: the unviability from the point of view of the Indian bourgeoisie of the earlier trajectory of capitalist development, within a dirigiste regime, in relative autonomy from imperialism; its consequent progressive integration with globalised capital and, towards this end, the adoption of a neo-liberal regime; a change in the nature of the State, paralleling this change in economic regime, which has entailed its closer enmeshing with big capital and international finance, and its withdrawal of support and protection from petty producers and the peasantry; the precipitation, as a result, of a crisis in petty production, in particular an agrarian crisis that has led to large-scale peasant suicides (which curiously do not find a mention in Anderson); the unleashing with much greater fury than before of a process of primitive accumulation of capital; a vast increase in inequalities in income and wealth; and, during the years of bubble-sustained boom in metropolitan capitalism, a high growth rate in the Indian economy that has brought palpable economic benefits to wide sections of the urban middle class who have thereby become votaries of neo-liberalism (a situation that, in consequence of the world capitalist crisis, is already changing in economic terms and is likely to change in political terms as well). Thus instead of the continuity flowing from the Hindu character of the Congress leadership of the national movement, which is what Anderson suggests, we actually have sharp discontinuities flowing from the changing nature of world capitalism, which also portend not a future like the past, but major changes in India as well. The growth of communalism then has to be located not as the inevitable further development of the Hinduism already latent in the freedom struggle, but in the weakening of the overarching anti-imperialist nationalism, the "Karachi tendency", that provided such a strong counterpoint to Hindu communalism all these years. (This weakening had already occurred before the 1991 "reforms" were introduced, and provided the setting for their introduction.) Of course there have been other contributing factors: the Islamophobia in the metropolitan countries, especially in the US, to which the newly-flourishing middle class looks up; the fact that this middle class is unmoved by any anti-imperialism (it is on the contrary enamoured of capitalist globalisation); and the fact that, being predominantly Hindu, it combines the traditional upper caste Hindu contempt for the lower castes, including the Muslims, with the contempt of the nouveau riche for the poor that one typically encounters under capitalism. All these however have to be seen as part of the new development, following from the changing nature of world capitalism, and not as a mere fallout of the earlier national movement. With the Congress abandoning anti-imperialist nationalism, and the BJP abandoning for tactical reasons after an initial thrust (when it even set up a commission to amend the Constitution) any overt moves towards a Hindu Rashtra, the difference between the two parties has narrowed; and neo-liberalism is where they all converge. . . . The European Left, for historical reasons (the experience of two world wars), has a hostility towards any form of "nationalism" which is one reason in my view for its current theoretical cul-de-sac. It cannot put before the people of any country a credible alternative economic agenda opposed to that of finance capital, since any such alternative, unless implemented simultaneously at a pan-European level (which is not feasible) must entail a delinking of the country in question from the European Union, which its aversion to "nationalism" cannot countenance. There is also a genuine problem it faces, namely, the European countries are individually too small for any such national agenda (or even any pan-national agenda confined only to a few countries) to be either a viable or a credible one. In India, however, the size of the country, the diversity of its resource base (with the exception of oil, for which, however, it can always make arrangements that allow it to escape imperialist arm-twisting), and the long experience of dirigiste development, make the formulation of a national agenda, which is necessary for effecting a worker-peasant alliance against the current neo-liberal dispensation, a viable option as well. To be sure such an agenda will be opposed by big capital, but that is precisely why it can provide a means for transition towards an order transcending capitalism. If the Left is to propose such an anti-imperialist national agenda, then it must relate itself, howsoever critically, to the anti-imperialist nationalism of the earlier, colonial, period, of which in any case it was itself an integral component. . . .

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