India

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:01 pm

India’s BJP’s poor record in tribal welfare

Droupadi Murmu was recently elected as India’s first tribal president. However, behind the celebrations lies the reality of how the ruling party has failed to address the issues faced by tribals

July 27, 2022 by Subodh Varma

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President Droupadi Murmu. (Photo: ANI)

From the day the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Parliamentary Board announced that Droupadi Murmu, a Santhal [a major tribal community in India] leader from Odisha, would be the party’s nominee for India’s presidentcy, the media has been overflowing with opinions on how this was another ‘master stroke’ from the party’s high command, that it will win over tribal communities in the State Assembly elections due in coming months/years and even in the 2024 general elections.

While some goodwill may be created through the party’s propaganda and the mainstream media’s obsequious service to the BJP’s cause, all this hoopla begs the question of why the BJP needs these crutches? Why are tribals disillusioned in the first place? This, of course, leads to the next question. Will such symbolic moves assuage the deep frustration and resentment brewing among vast stretches of people in tribal areas, both in Central India and the North-East?

There are three key issues which have caused disaffection among tribals, especially in the Central Indian tribal belt that stretches right across States from eastern Gujarat to Odisha, including northwestern Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and southern West Bengal. It is notable that the BJP runs the State governments only in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and now Maharashtra. Even in these three States, it actually won the last Assembly election only in Gujarat, having managed to grab power in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra only by splitting the ruling party/alliance after a hiatus. This reflects the BJP’s rather weak position in tribal-dominated States and hence its desperation to do whatever it takes to woo back tribal communities. But the Modi government and the BJP State governments are carrying a very bad record on the three issues of implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), allocation of funds for the welfare of tribals, and curbing the rising atrocities on tribals.

Land titles under FRA

The FRA, passed by parliament in 2006, provides for, among other things, giving land titles to tribals and other forest dwellers for those parcels of land that they have been traditionally tilling. This was envisaged as a measure to economically empower the tribal community members. The chart below shows the record of various States in the implementation of this law in terms of the share of claims that were processed and land titles awarded as of end-March 2022. Clearly, most of the BJP-ruled States – shown in orange bars – are laggards.

BJP's record on tribal welfare India

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Among these BJP-ruled States, Himachal Pradesh (HP) and Uttarakhand are small States, while Uttar Pradesh (UP) has a very small tribal population, mostly concentrated in the Sonabhadra district. What is remarkable is that except for Tripura, none of the BJP-ruled States has crossed even the all-India average of 50.4% claims converted to titles. Gujarat, where BJP has been ruling continuously for nearly 30 years, has just reached that average level. Most of the other non-BJP ruled States have done much better, with Andhra Pradesh having distributed 77% of the claimed land titles and Odisha 71%. The data is derived from an answer submitted by the government in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament) on July 20, 2022.

What this means is those tribal farmers tilling forest land are subject to evictions and harassment by officials, making them dependent on other means of survival. During the pandemic period, there were reports of increased evictions of tribals, further aggravating their plight.

Allocation of funds for welfare
A certain proportion of the central budget funds are supposed to be kept aside and spent exclusively on welfare programs for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). The earmarked funds are part of the Central Schemes and Centrally Sponsored Schemes. The proportion is determined by the proportion of SC and ST, respectively, in the total population. According to Niti Aayog guidelines of 2017, these proportions are 15.49% for SC and 8.2% for ST.

As the chart below shows, the actual allocation for tribals was a mere 4.9% in 2018-19, which has subsequently risen to 7.3% in the budget estimates for 2022-23, still short of the 8.2% mandated. This analysis, based on budget documents, has been done by the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights-Dalit Arthik Adhikar Andolan, an advocacy group for dalit (lower castes) and adivasi (tribal) rights based in Delhi.

BJP's record on tribal welfare India

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However, the situation is even more dire than this, as the rights groups point out. Many of the schemes that are shown to have the allocation for dalit and adivasi communities are actually general schemes; that is, they are not targeted at these two underprivileged and deprived communities. For example, the allocation for schools is a general scheme for the whole school-going population, which includes dalit and adivasi children too. It is argued that such general allocation is not serving the purpose of targeted schemes for the empowerment of these communities. An example of targeted schemes would be the post-matric scholarship schemes for dalit and adivasi students. Analysis done by the NCDHR shows that targeted funds make up only 3.6% of the total funds, although this proportion should have been 8.2% for tribals.

Between 2018-19 and 2022-23, the total allocation for Central Schemes and Centrally Sponsored Schemes was Rs 49.3 lakh crore. Taking 8.2% of this, the due allocation should have been about Rs 4 lakh crore. The actual allocation was Rs 3.2 lakh crore, while the targeted and meaningful allocation was just Rs 1.3 lakh crore.

This gross neglect has a direct effect on tribal lives – children are deprived of scholarships or vocational training, houses are not built, laws that protect against atrocities are not implemented properly, and so on.

Rising atrocities

According to data collected by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) based on reports from States, 8,272 cases of atrocities were reported in 2020, the last year for which crime data is available. That means there was a crime committed against an adivasi person nearly every hour, every day, through the year. Atrocities include all the crimes in the Indian Penal Code like murder, rape, causing grievous hurt etc., read with the Prevention of Atrocities Act (POA) which defines deliberate insults, discrimination, humiliation or dispossession from land, etc. as crimes.

The chart below, derived from NCRB data over the past five years, shows that there is a rising trend in such atrocities against adivasis.

BJP's record on tribal welfare India

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The BJP-led State governments have shown scant attention to this heinous aspect of social life. It must be said that a similar situation prevails with regard to dalits.

Can electing President Murmu help?

While anything that lends a helping hand to this shocking condition of tribals would be welcome, unfortunately, mere symbolic actions are unlikely to bring about any change. After all, India’s outgoing president is a dalit himself, but that has not changed a lot for dalits in India. It is this unfortunate reality that leads one to conclude that the nomination and election of Droupadi Murmu are more of an electoral tactic of the BJP – and that it is unlikely to succeed. To bring about a positive change in the condition of dalits and adivasis, far more needs to be done, including creating employment opportunities, enabling skills among youth, providing land to these communities, filling the reserved posts in the government at State and Central levels and strict enforcement of the laws for their protection, among other measures.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/27/ ... l-welfare/

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India: Resist Neoliberal Offensive of New Labor Codes
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 26, 2022
Narender Thakur, C Saratchand

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Indian workers during a two-day general strike in March 2022. One of the key demands of the strike was the scrapping of the four labor codes. Photo: Centre of Indian Trade Unions

Four labor codes are set to be operationalized by the government soon. These laws will benefit big corporates at the expense of workers and make organizing more difficult


The four labor codes expected to be operationalized soon harken the deepening of the neoliberal project in India. The codes will attenuate workers’ rights and reinforce the power of capital, especially the corporate-financial oligarchy. Inequality among working people will rise as a result—though not as much as the enormous expansion in the share of income of the corporate-financial giants.

According to a recent report, in 2021, the profits of around 3,000 top-listed Bombay Stock Exchange companies were Rs. 9.3 lakh crores—an over 70% growth relative to 2020. Over this period, real wages grew at merely 5%. In other words, the growth rate of labor productivity was high enough to reduce the share of wages in income.

India’s experience during the Covid-19 pandemic has a bearing on the four labor codes. The flawed policy response of the central government to the pandemic was that India got a stringent yet ineffective lockdown. As a result, India was afflicted by unprecedented economic and public health setbacks. There were millions of excess deaths as the neoliberal government was “unable” to take appropriate public health measures. In the political economy, unemployment, underemployment and precarity spiked. Then as the conflict in Ukraine shifted into hostilities, the deleterious macroeconomic prognosis for all economies, including India, increased. Now the world confronts stagflation, and, as expected, through policy measures such as the four labor codes, capital is shifting the “burden of adjustment” onto the working people.

According to ILO estimates, India lost the most working hours in 2020 at 14% compared to 9% for the world. (Figure 1). In 2021, India lost 5% of working hours, which, too, was higher than the world average of 4% (Figure 2).

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The Indian economy is yet to recover from the job shock dealt by flawed policies adopted by the government during the pandemic. Yet the Center is not only in the thrall of international finance but utilizing the “policy space” created by the pandemic to push more neoliberal projects.

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Gauge the extent of the job- hock from ILO estimates of the decline in the weekly hours worked of employed persons. This metric was 2,18,84,558 (thousand) in 2019 and declined to 2,13,32,152 (thousand) in 2021. The 2021 figure marks only a partial recovery from the 2020 figure of 1,91,02,452 (thousand) (see Figures 3-5).

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All over the world, the weekly hours worked were 13,76,39,909 (thousand) in 2019, which declined to 12,70,30,552 (thousand) in 2020 and only partially recovered to 13,46,90,819 (thousand) in 2021. The decline in weekly working hours is more significant in India compared with the world. Considering this context, it is incumbent on the Union government to prioritize tackling the unemployment crisis. On the contrary, acting in concert with the “requirements” of the neoliberal project, the government has intensified the assault on workers and trade unions.

The 2022 Global Rights Index report of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) says the rights of trade unions and workers are poorly framed, structured and implemented. It says Egypt, India, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Malawi have deployed repressive laws to codify the repression of workers’ rights. The rights to strike, collectively bargain and organize unions, etc., are being circumscribed to reinforce the power of capital over workers. It reports that 87% of countries violated the right to strike. Belarus, Egypt, India and the Philippines prosecuted union leaders after they organized strikes. In Sudan and Myanmar, strikes opposing military rule were brutally repressed. In thirteen countries, trade unionists were murdered in 2022: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ecuador, Eswatini, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iraq, Italy, Lesotho, Myanmar, the Philippines and South Africa.

The Asia-Pacific region (including India) is the second-worst region for worker rights. India’s average worker rights rating rose from 4.17 to 4.22, which puts it somewhere between systematic violations and no guarantees. Extreme police brutality to repress strike actions marked 2022. This tendency was notable in Bangladesh and India, where striking workers were killed, and in Pakistan, where the State used violence against workers. Egregious human rights abuses continued unabated in Myanmar. In the Philippines, trade unionists and workers fear violent attacks and arbitrary arrests.

Countries that violate the right of workers to stage strikes increased from 63% in 2014 to 87% in 2022. India was one of the 69 countries that violated workers’ right to liberty by detaining or arresting working people. From 25% in 2014, the proportion of countries that arrested and detained workers grew to 47% in 2022. In other words, India has one of the worst records as far as the rights of workers are concerned.

Amid job losses and the falling share of wages in income, the Union government has sought to enforce the four labor codes, which will worsen work conditions for several reasons. The codes hike the intensity and duration of labor workers are expected to put in, which has destructive consequences for work conditions and occupational safety. It will heighten unemployment and underemployment (by pushing labor productivity up further). Arguably, average real wages will fall as a consequence.

Ostensibly, the four labor codes consolidate 29 labor laws into the Industrial Relations (IR) Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security (CSS), 2020, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSHWC) Code, 2020 and the Code on Wages (CW) Bill, 2019. However, these codes shift the balance of bargaining power in favor of employers, to the detriment of employees. This move is a “logical” culmination of neoliberal policies that precede it. The codes permit unprecedented deployment of contractual workers, “labor market flexibility” (hire-and-fire), hurdles in organizing trade unions, and encourage a lax attitude towards labor law violations by employers, for example, by reducing the number of labor inspectors.

The IR Code allows firms with up to 300 workers to hire-and-fire workers without prior government permission. Previously, unregulated hire-and-fire was permissible only for firms with up to 100 workers. More than 90% of workers are employed in factories or firms with less than 300 workers. Such “labor market flexibility” will increase unemployment and remove any bargaining power workers still have.

If hire-and-fire were less “involved”—if the procedures are “simplified”—the result would be instability in the share of wages in the economy. It would further destabilize demand, output and, therefore, investment. If employment is unstable, wages would be more volatile, and the more price instability there is, the calculations of expected profit and loss become less reliable. These, in turn, would curtail investment. The outcome would be a reduction in investment in innovation.

Given the neoliberal trajectory and the global slowdown, it is unrealistic to expect individual economies such as India to export sufficiently to compensate for the stagnation caused by “labor market flexibility”.

Another setback to labor rights comes from the IR Code curtailing the right to strike. It says unions must give a 14-day notice of strike, which would have a limited validity of 60 days. Strikes are barred for a seven-day period marked for conciliation proceedings and for up to 60 days after the proceedings of a tribunal.

Similarly, the CSS has not universalized social security benefits for workers in the informal sector. Instead, it restricts the ability of labor officers to determine the quantum of provident fund and state insurance due to employees from employers. It restricts the reopening of old cases, which means many short-changed workers would have no recourse. It also inhibits labor inspectors who investigate legal processes in firms. Instead, it emphasizes employer self-certification of labor law compliance.

The OSHWC Code allows firms to employ women in work that may compromise their safety. It makes maternity leave a difficult process. A woman can avail of maternity leave only if she has been in her current job for at least 80 days preceding delivery. Private employers can evade paid maternity leave easily by “disengaging” pregnant women employees before the 80-day mark.

The threshold limit for applying the OSHWC has been increased, curtailing employees’ rights. It now applies to firms that employ 20 (previously 10) workers or more and have power connections. This threshold limit has been raised for firms without power connections from 20 to 40 or more workers. Employers below these thresholds engage the overwhelming majority of workers in India, but the OSHWC allows them to use oppressive practices against employees. Moreover, this code does not provide a judicial mechanism to deal with labor disputes, which further disadvantages workers.

The Wage Code 2020 has three principal “loopholes” that shifts the balance of bargaining power towards employers: (i) it scraps the principal liability of the employers (in lead firms) to pay wages if contractors fail to honor this responsibility. This will adversely impact a large magnitude of India’s workers who are employed by contractors. (ii) it provides legal sanction to the arbitrary deduction of wages by employers in case of losses ostensibly on account of employee performance. This is an open invitation to firms to cut wages, which will hurt demand, output, employment and investment. (iii) reduce worker bonuses via expanding the list of firms and establishments exempt from such provisions. The first two provisions invite us to draw the conclusion that only employers will gain if a firm does “well”, but if it does “badly”, then workers will bear the brunt of “adjustment”.

The Wage Code does not rigorously define minimum wage rates. The task of determining minimum wage rates is with the Union government. However, given the degree of “policy capture” by the corporate-financial oligarchy, this is inadequate in India. The code does not address the concrete challenges concerning wages in India. It does not widen the coverage of minimum wage legislation to workers in the informal sector and does not have adequate legal measures to implement and regulate wage determination in all economic sectors.

The four labor codes are designed to increase the exploitation of workers by reducing their share of wages in income. If they come into force, these codes will diminish workers’ rights, and they seem to have an inbuilt mechanism to legitimize such an outcome. This is its differentiated impact on different segments of workers. Proponents of neoliberalism possibly view this differentiated impact as a blunting effect on worker resistance.

The public posturing over the labor codes is couched in terms of improving the “ease of doing business”. However, this apparent rationale is illogical from a macroeconomic point of view. A fall in the share of wages in income will promote stagnation. Besides, many state governments will likely deploy these codes in ways that will disempower workers even more. Trade unions and democratic movements must mount an effective resistance to the expected operationalization of these codes. Their resistance will be meaningful if it champions demands for a universal employment guarantee and addresses the concerns of all segments of workers, including engagement with the struggles of peasants and workers in the informal sector. The successful struggle against the three farm laws demonstrated that people can make the neoliberal project retreat.

The Union government apprehends worker resistance, and that is why, once again, the four labor codes have been delayed. However, the hegemonic tendencies of the neoliberal project are undermining the Constitution at its foundation. Unions cannot defend workers’ rights unless they actively engage in defending democratic rights in every political economy domain, including culture.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/ ... bor-codes/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 23, 2022 2:43 pm

India’s Prabhat Patnaik: Fascism Is Rooted in the Crisis of Neoliberalism (Interview)
AUGUST 21, 2022

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Children playing in a slum in Allahabad, India, October 3, 2011. Photo: AP.

Renowned Indian economist and political analyst Prabhat Patnaik spoke with Bengali newspaper Ganashakti about the present state of India’s economy and politics, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule.

After 75 years of independence, wealth inequality and unemployment are increasing rapidly, while employment and the guarantee of an income for the majority of the population are decreasing every day. Does this mean that India is no longer a welfare state?

If we consider the definition of “welfare state” properly, India was never a “welfare state.” Even if a “welfare state” works for the welfare of a particular group instead of working for universal welfare, it must try to maintain everyone above a certain minimum level of guarantees. This was never the case in India. When the universal public distribution scheme [not the targeted rationing scheme of today] existed to guarantee food security in the country, there were very few government-funded ration shops in rural areas. That is, the scheme, despite its name, was not universal. In the Indian Constitution, all the norms of the “welfare state system” are under the Directive Principles of State Policy, which are not enforceable by any court and hence are not mandatory for the state to follow.

It is true that the declared aim of the constitution, from the beginning, was to develop India as a welfare state. Nevertheless, that aim has now been openly abandoned. Otherwise, the “trickle-down theory” would never have been presented, which actually means that the state will not provide assistance and will instead depend on a “spontaneous” process. This abandonment is part of the vision of neoliberalism. This gets reflected in many spheres. For example, the state has withdrawn itself from universal public distribution of food; it is converting education into a consumer commodity which is making it impossible for most people to access it; it is weakening the public healthcare system. There are many more such examples.

The high unemployment rate—the highest after independence—in a country where there is no general system of assistance for the unemployed; the rapid rise of extreme inequality—higher than that of any time during the previous century according to Picketty and Chancel; the huge decline in the nourishment of the population, which had experienced significant advances after independence from Britain—all of these trends are proof of the general decline during the neoliberal period.

Three decades have passed since the introduction of neoliberalism. What has been the main impact of this policy? At this moment, can we say that this policy has been a total failure?

The neoliberal period in India may be divided into two parts—one that saw high rates of economic growth; and the other in which the economic crisis of neoliberalism began. The latter period is occurring globally. The dividing line between these two phases was the second United Progressive Alliance government [2009–2014]; after the housing bubble burst in the United States. The crisis started a bit later in the context of India.

In fact, even when there was a high rate of growth during the earlier period of neoliberalism, total poverty grew as well. The daily caloric intake of 2,200 in rural India, which is the basic definition of “poverty”—the number of people who cannot achieve this grew from 58% in 1993–1994 to 68% in 2011–2012. In the urban area, this figure was 2,100 calories, and the number of people who could not reach this increased from 57% to 65%.

However, since the start of the crisis and stagnation of neoliberalism, the state of the working class has worsened. The National Sample Survey [NSS] 2017–18 showed such a grave situation that the Modi government did not release the report, and kept it hidden, and even decided to dissolve the NSS, despite the fact that it was the renowned statistician PC Mahalanobish who introduced that system. That report got leaked, however, and it revealed that the real purchasing power per capita of rural India decreased by 9% from 2011–12 to 2017–18. This figure is an average, the reduction with regards to the working class must be even worse. The situation has worsened even further after the pandemic and the current worldwide inflation.

Even if capitalism can overcome the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the long-term structural crisis of neoliberalism, which was already visible before 2019–20, will still remain. There is no possibility of overcoming this crisis from within neoliberalism. The way that neoliberalism tries to combat the crisis is by giving more concessions to the capitalists in the hope that they will invest more, which will increase economic activity and generate employment. However, in reality this just deepens the crisis. During times of crisis, when the market does not expand, capitalists do not invest in anything. Therefore, as long as neoliberalism lasts, the socioeconomic situation of the people will continue to worsen. The sooner the country gets out of this system, the better.

If you are asked to select the sector of the Indian economy that is going through the most severe crisis, which one would you select?

The biggest problem of neoliberalism is that its attack on small producers and labor-intensive farming is particularly vicious. Since the neoliberal system is directed by the elite bourgeoisie associated with international finance capital, it withdraws support for labor-intensive farming that depends on the cultivators. In fact, the Modi government was on the verge of eliminating the minimum support price for crops, which is the last mode of support that still remains. It was forced to suspend this in the face of large-scale popular resistance.

As the government goes on reducing support for the agroeconomy sector, it stops being profitable. The government is also allowing corporations to invade this sector, incentivizing the process of primordial accumulation of capital. This is the reason behind the ongoing crisis in the agricultural sector. The hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides, unprecedented since independence, is a manifestation of this crisis. Mass migration of farmers from villages to cities in search of employment that does not exist and the consequent growth of excess workers is another manifestation of this crisis. Since the number of stand-by workers is rising, there are more employment-seekers in comparison to the amount of existing jobs. Considering the census of 1991 and 2001, the number of farmers—who are called “cultivators” in the census—decreased by 15 million.

The poverty of farmers even reduces the bargaining power of sectors of organized labor, and this increases the total poverty of the population. This is the central theme and the most significant characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. In a country like India, the key to the overall stability of the economy is the continued survival of cultivator-dependent farming, which is also closely related to the situation of farm laborers. Neoliberalism has put this very survival into question.

The Indian corporate sector more or less supports the ideology of Hindu religious fundamentalism despite being aware of its dangers. Why is this happening? Is the Indian big bourgeoisie changing its cultural-ideological principles?

No, the cultural and ideological principles of the Indian big bourgeoisie are not changing as such. This is a result of the crisis of neoliberalism, when international finance capital and the local big bourgeoisie are afraid of possible challenges coming from below. While economic growth during the first phase of neoliberalism was high, the “trickle-down theory” could be sold to the working masses—this was how neoliberalism tried to avoid or delay resistance from the working class, although the conditions of the working population continued to worsen. Nevertheless, this was a support system of neoliberalism. However, with the arrival of the crisis, this support system vanished. When there is no growth at all, nothing can “trickle down” anymore. In this situation neoliberalism has to find a new support system. Neo-fascism is that system. This led to the neoliberalism–neofascism alliance; in India this is the corporate–Hindutva alliance. This alliance is trying to help neoliberal capitalism survive. This alliance is changing the narrative, creating hatred against some minority groups so that working people do not focus on the material conditions of their lives. This is helping neoliberalism in two ways: it is keeping the working class divided, and it is diverting the attention of the people from the issue of survival to that of religion. The corporate–Hindutva alliance is a weapon of fascism.

Georgy Dimitrov stated at the 7th Congress of the Communist International that fascism arises during the crisis of capitalism. The Great Depression of the ‘30s is an excellent example of that. The present crisis of neoliberalism is creating a similar context that is facilitating the rise of neofascism. It should also be noted that just like in the 1930s, this rise of neofascism is a worldwide phenomenon, it is not confined solely to India.

However, there are differences between the 1930s and today. In the 1930s, fascism saved capitalism from crisis, as governments increased spending for the manufacturing of weapons as they geared up for war, and this increased spending was covered by taking loans from financial institutions, that is, through accumulating fiscal deficit. At present, governments will not take loans to raise spending. This is out of the question, because a large fiscal deficit is not acceptable to finance capital. Moreover, finance capital is international but the state has remained national. The state has to give concessions so that finance capital does not leave the country en masse. Similarly, under neoliberalism, it is impossible for the state to collect more funds for the treasury by raising taxes on large capitalists who accumulate huge quantities of surplus value. What the state tries to do instead is raise taxes on the working class in order to cover necessary government spending, but that does not really increase the size of the state’s total collection through taxes. This is because the working people are forced to spend all their earnings for the most basic necessities. Therefore, even the old-style fascist state would not be able to help capitalism overcome its current crisis. This is the difference between neofascism and 20th-century fascism, and this is the weakness of neofascism.

Do you think the corporate–Hindutva alliance can lead India into fascism? If so, what might be the probable characteristics of “Indian” fascism?

Since today’s context is different from that of the 1930s, today’s fascism will not be a carbon copy of 1930s’ fascism. However, all the general characteristics of fascism are already in India. For example, oppressive authoritarian rule based on fear; alliance between a fascist party and big business; targeting a minority group and generating hatred against them; persecution of political opposition by state repression as well as using fascist criminals; and above all, widespread violence and repression against intellectuals and social movements that raise their voice against the authoritarian rule—and all of this is being done because the fascist state is afraid of losing political power. Nevertheless, present-day fascism or neofascism is forced to function within a democratic system. Therefore, neofascism is destroying democracy but keeping its façade intact, and is always pretending to be democratic. This means that today’s fascism is in disguise. Hence, we cannot say that the corporate–Hindutva alliance can lead India into fascism; this alliance is fascism in disguise. It will depend on the evolving situation whether fascism will get rid of this disguise and operate more openly.

If one of the characteristics of Indian fascism is keeping the democratic façade intact, although this is not unique to Indian fascism, another of its principal characteristics is using religious identity to define “others.” These “others” are religious minorities in India. In other countries, race, nationality, and other similar identities are used for identifying “Others.” In India, religion is being used as the basis of fundamentalism.

Fascism must be defeated. Only leftists are capable of promoting the revival of real democracy and the means of economic relief for the working masses, which is the only way to defeat fascism and overcome neoliberalism. Leftists have to build a broad popular movement—a platform of the union of all anti-fascist forces. It was the left that defeated fascism in the previous century, it has to carry out this historical task this time as well.

(Ganashakti)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/indias-prabh ... interview/

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Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.

When people want housing in India, they build it: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2022)
By Vijay Prashad (Posted Aug 19, 2022)

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on August 18, 2022 (more by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research) |

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.

Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, ‘whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle’. The CPI(M) formed committees in thirty wards of Jakkaloddi, a part of Warangal, and began to prepare people for the coming fight. The epicentre of the struggle was land that the government had taken in the late 1970s from an old aristocrat, Moinuddin Khadri, using the Land Ceiling Act of 1975. Rather than distributing this land to the landless, however, the government evicted farmers from part of it and then gave the land to leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party in 1989.


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Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on 18 June 2022.



On 25 May 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organise the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3am on 20 June, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Four hundred people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: ‘This site is for the construction of a court complex’.

Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for sixty days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On 26 June, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total.

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Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.

The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.

Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.

Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.

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Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.

The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin–some 3.6 million residents–held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This–along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero(Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.

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Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.

These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu(‘inspiration songs’):

We will not move an inch
till we get land for our homes,
a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
We shall fight those who stop us.
On this land, the red flags we raised
stand ready for battle.

Birds nest in the branches.
Insects have homes in leaves.
We, who are born human,
thirst for a roof of our own,
for a patch of land for a home.

Drifting from place to place
in make-shift huts,
the shame of no address to our names.
Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
with the pain of no place to call our own.

Well-healed bosses
steal thousands of acres
in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
For a little patch for which I ask,
the sticks beat me to the edge of death.

You, who have come to ask for our vote:
We demand food and shelter.
We are ready for battle till we get them.
We dare you to stop us.


We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.

Warmly,

Vijay

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 10, 2022 2:48 pm

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Questions posed by a movement
Originally published: The Research Unit for Political Economy (R.U.P.E.) on October 4, 2022 by RUPE (more by The Research Unit for Political Economy (R.U.P.E.)) (Posted Oct 08, 2022)

Over a year ago, we wrote about a protest movement going on in the village of Silger, in Sukma district in the south of Chhattisgarh, against the setting up of a police camp in their village.[1] (We will not repeat here the details given in that article.) As we write this, the movement has completed more than 16 months; and it is still continuing. When we consider the life conditions of the participants, this fact is particularly notable:

These are all poor Adivasi villagers who take time off from their daily-wage labour or farming, students who come when school permits, or women who bring their children because they have nowhere else to leave them. On down days the numbers may be a few dozen, on special days the number swells to thousands.[2]

Moreover, the struggle at Silger “has sparked off similar struggles elsewhere across the districts of Bijapur, Sukma and Dantewada as well as northern Bastar/Kanker in Chhattisgarh, protesting against the security camps that have colonised the landscape….”[3] People perceive a link between the setting up of these camps and the drive by the corporate sector to capture the natural resources of the region. This is significant.

Meanwhile, over the last year, Adivasis in the northern part of Chhattisgarh have come out in opposition to coal mining in the Hansdeo Arand forest region – a region of great biodiversity which contains “the largest un-fragmented forests in Central India, consisting of pristine Sal (Shorea robusta) and teak forests.”[4] The opposition has taken the form of a broad popular protest movement, involving various sections of the people, with padyatras across the region and protests in cities. While proposals for mining the Hansdeo Arand forest have faced opposition for over a decade, a sustained and broad movement has only now emerged.

In contrast with the remarkable kisan protest in Delhi, which too was sustained over a year, the protests at Silger and Hansdeo Arand have received meagre press coverage nationally. These regions are less accessible to the national press. Several well-known democratic activists who have come Silger have been detained and prevented from visiting the village.

However, these movements are at least equally worthy of attention and solidarity. Background material and reports on these movements could be found in articles by Nandini Sundar,[5] Ashutosh Bharadwaj,[6] Malini Subramaniam and Pushpa Rokde,[7] Alok Prakash Putul,[8] and others, as well as on the Twitter accounts of Alok Shukla and Bela Bhatia. A fact-finding team from Delhi which visited the region also recently released a report titled “The Siege of Silger”, linking the Silger movement to the broader context.

This situation is not unique to Chhattisgarh; indeed, in various parts of India, particularly central and eastern India, there are movements by Adivasis and other peasants against corporate projects, the associated forcible acquisition of land, and the destruction of the local environment. The examples are too numerous to cite. While the movement against police camps has its own specificity, it is linked with the movements against land grabs for industrial, mining, and real estate projects because the police camps ultimately serve to crush opposition to those land grabs.

For an alternative pattern of development
Objectively viewed, these movements are not only against something (such as corporate land-grab, environmental destruction, militarisation). In the very assertion by ordinary rural folk of their rights over their resources, these movements are also implicitly for something else, a completely different pattern of development. When the affected people articulate in their own language the alternative type of development they do want, that articulation is suppressed in a myriad ways.

At the same time, the thinking of the general public is shaped by the dominant ideology. Political power is not only the ability to wield a baton or fire a gun, but also to shape the way most people think. This shaping process is carried out daily by a whole intellectual-cultural army, ranging from journalists and media barons to university professors and politicians. As Marx said, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”[9]

Hence it is all the more necessary to assert the alternative.

There is a link between the extent of people’s sovereignty over the land and their ability to determine the course of development itself. It is critical to understand the interlinkages between different aspects of economic and cultural development. These tie together questions of composition of production, choice of technology, employment, distribution, the environment, social life and political power.

Let us look at these interlinkages in the present corporate-led ‘development’ process.

1. In the given situation of widespread poverty, only a narrow section of society has sufficient income to be considered ‘consumers’ at all by private corporations. (A recent study estimates this section at less than 15 per cent of the population, with an alternative estimate as low as 2 per cent.[10]) Private corporations find it profitable to produce for this section, not for the whole population.

2. The goods that this section consumes are produced with more advanced technology. Thus this technology employs fewer workers per rupee of investment or per rupee of output. In the reigning system of production, a small share of the ‘value added’ in production goes to the workers as wages; the remaining, much larger, share goes to the capitalists.

3. The goods that are produced tend to be more resource-intensive (in production as well as transportation). As this requires new projects for extracting those resources, it leads to further displacement of peasants and destruction of the environment. Environmental destruction further impoverishes those whose sustenance depends on that environment. Social economic bonds of the community helped it to survive many a calamity in the past. After displacement, the villagers are turned into mere social driftwood, easy prey, willing to work at any wage — if they are lucky enough to get work. In these ways, the ‘development’ process reproduces and intensifies the poverty and inequality with which it started.[11]

Now let us compare this with what is being destroyed:

1. The rulers treat the people who are being displaced in Chhattisgarh and other places as merely inhabitants of the region, persons parked on the land, standing in the way of ‘development’.

But these people are not only inhabitants but producers, predominantly peasant producers. In the main, they produce goods for their own subsistence, and small quantities for exchange; some also labour for wages. Both the quantity and the market value of the goods they produce is low. Hence productivity in this region, whether measured in terms of ‘value added per worker’ or ‘value added per hectare of land’, is low.

2. The corporations which are displacing the local people will generate a much higher value added per worker or per hectare of land than does the production by the people who are to be displaced. At the same time, the corporations will generate much less employment than was earlier generated by the low-productivity activity on that land. As we noted earlier, the benefit of the additional value-added is received largely by the capitalists who own the corporation, though a relatively small number of organised sector workers, blue collar and white collar, do get jobs. Over time, with automation, even this small number will fall. (Since the rulers are aware that this steady destruction of employment by both displacement and automation will create an explosive political situation, they have been planning to pacify the population with some sort of ‘Universal Basic Income’ scheme, but the amount will be a pittance.)

3. The goods the existing producers make are for their own consumption or are largely consumed by others locally. The goods which the corporations produce are for distant, higher income markets, whether domestic or foreign. The existing economic system privileges distant markets over the local ones, wealthier consumers over working people, luxury goods over basic needs, reflecting precisely the fact that the working people do not have control over the process of development.

4. An important feature of the process described above is that it does not involve a stepping up of the productivity of the existing producers in their present activity. Rather, they are ousted as producers, or their output is lowered even further, further suppressing their subsistence level, and the new activity is carried on by a different, smaller, set of workers. There is no way the existing producers can be absorbed in the new activity, apart from a handful working in peripheral roles as contract workers.

All this, however, is not to idealise or romanticise the existing subsistence production, from which the producers often are unable to draw even a subsistence. Often they are forced to hunt for work on any terms, far from their homes; such additional forms of employment too do not by themselves yield sufficient income for subsistence, so the various members of the family have to stitch together a quilt of varied insecure, low-paid employments.

The question then ought to be: in what ways can the activity of the existing producers be made more productive, without displacing them, reducing total employment or destroying the environment?

What people themselves say
Subsistence producers themselves have concrete views on this question, drawn from their own life-experiences and labour. Some glimpses of this can be found in the Chhattisgarh Human Development Report (CHDR) of 2005, an unusual document. It was prepared by soliciting reports from the people of over 19,000 villages across the 16 districts of the state. In these reports, people have materially spelled out the extent of their dependence on common property resources such as forests and pasture lands, and the harm being done to their productive activity by corporate pollution of water and land, felling of forests, encroachments, and displacement by corporate projects. Moreover, they have spelled out certain steps that need to be taken to protect and secure natural resources, and to increase their agricultural productivity and related non-agricultural production.

The CHDR brings out how the forests, and more generally the commons, are a major source of subsistence. Villagers report that they gather food items such as fruits, roots and shoots directly available from trees, and animal products such as honey and meat; raw material for the production of soap, oil and liquor; ‘nistaar’ items such as fuel wood, fodder and timber; medicinal plants and herbs such as safed musli, brahmi and ashwagandha; minor forest produce for the market such as tendu patta, sal seeds, and wax; and minor minerals and water. Chhattisgarh accounts for about 20 percent of the total production of tendu patta in the country. Other produce gathered for the market include mahua flowers and seeds, harra, bahera, mehul leaves, tamarind, lac, gum and katha. These are mainly used to make brews, toys, disposable (and biodegradable) leaf plates, etc. Tamarind and katha are used in food items.

The district report from Korba states: “There are at least 23 Minor Forest Produce (MFP) and another 32 types of roots and herbs that people collect from the forests. After agriculture, forests are the largest source of income. More than 60 percent of the villagers regard forest produce and labour in forest related work as their main sources of income. The absence of irrigation means that people are unable to sow a kharif crop. This increases dependence on forest produce for additional income. Almost 70 percent of the annual income comes from MFPs like aavla, bahera, harra, dhavala, kusum, mahua leaf and medicinal plants.” The exact percentages here are not the point; the point is that for the local people, even in a district with substantial mining activity and consequently the highest ‘per capita income’ in the state, forests are crucial to their subsistence.

Forest dependent communities are legally entitled to access forests for grazing, limited by the carrying capacity of forests. They are permitted to collect (free of cost) dry and fallen fuel wood and fodder. In the rural areas of Chhattisgarh, the report claims that non-commercial fuel wood and animal waste continue to be the main source of energy for cooking and household activities. Women, who are the main collectors of this resource, often have to traverse a large area for the purpose. Most villages have common grazing and pasture lands for animals. In the plains, paddy straw is used as fodder for cattle. In the forested belts, animals depend on the forest for fodder too.

However, the subsistence of these subsistence farmers is under many-sided attack from the overall process of maldevelopment. This maldevelopment has accelerated under neoliberal rule. Grazing and pasture lands (generally common lands and forests) are getting degraded, shrinking, or being encroached on, pollution from mining is covering agricultural fields with dust and polluting water sources, and finally, there is large-scale displacement for different projects of the private corporate sector or the Government.

A large number of Village Reports prepared by the people state that protecting or securing natural resources should be the first priority, with the participation of the people in different forms. They suggest that the Government take help from them in order to stop illegal felling of forest trees. Village after village expresses the need for irrigation; the low water level is the most common concern after the issue of tree felling. Villagers suggest ways to increase irrigation, identifying sources of water as well as ways to store and harvest water. They are eager to extend their help and labour for such activities. Stop dams, check dams, small canals find mention in the Reports as possible water conservation mechanisms. In order to effectively utilise these structures, support for lift irrigation schemes would be required.

The people are aware of the multiple advantages of water harvesting, which can be used for domestic purposes, for fisheries and for ground water recharging. Many reports identify sites which can be used for water conservation, by constructing check dams and for watershed development. They also identify small rivers and tanks that can be utilised without depletion of water sources.

Village Reports call for the better utilisation of ‘wasteland’ and barren lands as common

property resources, managed by the local people and made more productive. They say fallow, open access and common lands can be used in various ways that can benefit the village community as a whole. They ask for training and help in order to increase the productivity of the land.

Nor is their vision restricted to agriculture or gathering of produce. Reports from every district also ask for assistance for small industries and home industries based on forest produce and other renewable natural resources, rather than industries based on the extraction of minerals. These would allow the addition of value locally, rather than the sale of the raw material to others to process elsewhere. Many of these goods may also be consumed locally.

In the context of different types of industrial development, one should note that large corporations’ activities require large undivided plots of land. By contrast, small and micro industries’ land requirements may be more easily spread out over multiple, non-contiguous plots, avoiding displacement of existing agricultural production.

Moreover, many small and micro industries are non-polluting or less polluting than large industries. Such industries would provide employment to local people, particularly during the slack agricultural season. By improving local incomes, these activities would also enhance local demand for goods. (By contrast, take Korba, the district with the highest per capita income in Chhattisgarh: once the income from mining and quarrying is subtracted, the district income halves. But the mining activities are carried out by corporations, without involving the rural people. While the income of these corporations is included in the calculation of district income, it does not go to the pockets of people in the district. It should also be remembered that once the minerals are exhausted, the mines leave no continuing economic activity, only an environmental liability.)

In brief, these reports give glimpses of a pattern of development based on maximising employment while at the same time increasing the productivity of that employment; developing local capabilities, meeting the needs of local consumption and expanding local demand; protecting the social fabric of the communities of the region; protecting the environment, and to the extent possible reversing some of its degradation, while drawing on it for subsistence; and increasing incomes in a widely-dispersed way, reaching those at the very bottom.[12] Of course these are just glimpses; any such pattern, in order to be viable, cannot be a “small-is-beautiful” local model; it would have to be part of a much larger, socialised venture nationwide, which would include large industry and a national democratic plan.

However, as long as the ordinary people do not exercise sovereignty over the sources of wealth and the means of production, such a pattern of development is ruled out. It was none other than the BJP government of the newly-established state of Chhattisgarh that published the Chhattisgarh Human Development Report quoted above, in 2005, with a foreword by chief minister Raman Singh. This was the very year that the Salwa Judum, a State-sponsored vigilante movement against ‘left extremism’, was launched in Chhattisgarh. It was also the year the state government started a spree of signing Memorandums of Understanding with corporate firms interested capturing in the region’s natural wealth.

The Salwa Judum was succeeded by the official Operation Green Hunt, followed by similar campaigns with different names, up to the present. Through successive changes of power at the state and the Centre, the BJP and the Congress between them have intensified the capture and extraction of the state’s mineral wealth, the destruction of the economy of the existing peasant producers there, and the militarisation of the entire region for this purpose.

The existing model of development is organically linked to the political power of those who benefit from it. The same applies to any alternative model of development.

Notes:
[1] “Two Dharnas”, July 30, 2021, https://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/two-dharnas/

[2] Nandini Sundar, “A Year into Silger’s Peaceful Protest, Demands for Justice Remain Unmet”, The Wire, May 17, 2022. https://thewire.in/rights/bastar-silger ... t-one-year

[3] Ibid.

[4] Report of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; cited in Rishika Singh, “Explained: The battle over mining in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo forest”, Indian Express, May 29, 2022.

[5] “In Bastar’s ‘Shaheen Bagh’, a Youth-Led Movement Quietly Perseveres”, The Wire, July 7, 2021, and “A Year into Silger’s Peaceful Protest, Demands for Justice Remain Unmet”, The Wire, May 17, 2022.

[6] “One Year of Protests: The Emergence of a Civil Society in Chhattisgarh”, May 17, 2022.

[7] “Silger protest taps into wider anger in Bastar over security camps coming up in the name of roads”, Scroll.in, June 18, 2021.

[8] “Indian tribes fight to save forest homes from mining”, https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/ ... al-mining/

[9] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.

[10] Shuomitro Chatterjee, Arvind Subramanian, “India’s Inward (Re)turn: Is It Warranted? Will It Work?”, Ashoka University, Policy Paper No. 1, October 2020.

[11] Many of these points have been made by Amit Bhaduri in several writings, e.g. “Predatory Growth”, Economic and Political Weekly, April 19, 2008.

[12] Some of these questions were very much part of the discussion among economists and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, Amit Bhaduri has once again drawn attention to these questions in a number of articles and papers; some of these are collected in Malignant Growth, Aakar Books, 2016. However, he does so from a different political framework.

https://mronline.org/2022/10/08/questio ... -movement/

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India’s job situation has improved? Not so fast!

September’s unemployment rate fell to 6.43% from August’s 8.3%. However, behind this statistic lies the fact that the share of the working-age population that is actually working is still less than in pre-pandemic times

October 09, 2022 by Subodh Varma

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The latest data on unemployment has been met with optimism, and near-celebration, especially in the mainstream media, which is straining at the leash to portray some good news about the economy under the Narendra Modi government. September’s unemployment rate fell to 6.43% from August’s 8.3%, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)—both in rural and urban areas.

While undoubtedly this is good news because the people, especially the youth, have been suffering tremendously from sustained unemployment over the past several years, if you look more carefully, there is little to show that this is the beginning of the long-forgotten ‘Achhe Din’ [The Good Days: a promise made by Narendra Mod during his 2014 election campaign]. Let’s unpack the numbers.

Labor participation rate falling
The number of people who are working (the employed) or seeking work (the unemployed) put together makes up the labor participation rate when taken as a share of the total working-age population. Usually, labor participation rates increase unless there is some economic crisis. That’s because it is likely that economies will create more jobs, giving more opportunities to people as time passes. After all, that is what a good government will do.

But see the chart below, drawn from CMIE, which compares the labor participation rate over the past three years—pre-pandemic (October 2019) and current (September 2022). Overall, the rate has dropped from nearly 43% to just more than 39%.

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In urban areas, it dropped from nearly 41% to nearly 37% while in rural areas, it is down from 44% to just short of 41%.

Comparing October 2019 with now is a better way of evaluating the jobs situation because during the two pandemic years (2020 and 2021), the jobs crisis had intensified severely—joblessness had increased and labor participation had dropped. Therefore, comparing today to those years is not fair or sensible.

Remember that labor participation rate is made up of both employed people as well as the unemployed who are seeking jobs. It is possible that the unemployment rate may fall and yet the labor participation rate may still fall—it can happen if people get frustrated and simply stop looking for jobs. They will go from ‘unemployed’ to just ‘out of the labor market’. Therefore, just measuring the unemployment rate doesn’t give a full picture.

What does it mean for the labor participation rate to be lower now than three years ago? It means that there are limited job opportunities—maybe, even lesser than before. The number of employed persons in October 2019 was estimated at 404.1 million while in September 2022 the number stood at 404.2 million. That means, no significant jobs have been added in the past three years.

In urban areas, the situation is worse. In October 2019, there were 128.8 million employed persons in cities and towns. This number declined to about 126 million in September this year that’s an absolute drop of about 2.8 million persons. Despite the fact that the working-age population is constantly growing every year, the number of working people has actually dropped!

In rural areas, the number of employed persons was 275.4 million in October 2019 which became 278.2 million in September 2022. That’s an increase of about 2.8 million. In three years, this is all the growth that has taken place in employment in rural areas.

Low wage, insecure jobs haunt the employed
Another dimension of the jobs crisis is that those who are being counted as ‘employed’ are mostly working at low wages, doing irregular work and with no job security. As pointed out earlier in Newsclick, wages or salaries range mostly between Rs 10,000 [USD 120.7] and Rs 15,000 [USD 182]. Earlier studies have shown that a very large share of persons earn less than Rs 10,000. Real wages have, in fact, declined because of raging inflation.

How is this connected to unemployment? First, large-scale unemployment causes depression of wages because there are always people willing to work for ever lower wages. Desperation drives this acceptance of low wages and onerous work conditions. Secondly, lack of regular jobs forces people to do casual work who often juggle several ‘jobs’, which yield small earnings. It also forces people into ‘self-employment’, which often means retail trade (selling daily consumption items like vegetables, etc.), which is low paying and uncertain. Thirdly, low wages discourage many from taking up jobs altogether, resulting in the low labor participation rates mentioned earlier.

All this destroys the well-being and life of common people, although going by the data on company profits, the corporate sector seems to be enjoying a golden period of profits derived from low wage bills and high inflation.

The Center appears to be content with making some periodic noises about this or that program/project generating some airy-fairy number of jobs. But in reality, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has spectacularly failed in keeping its most popular promise of creating jobs.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/10/09/ ... t-so-fast/
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 12, 2023 4:51 pm

As real wages fall, Indian government remains blind to plight of rural labor

According to the calculations done by the government’s own economists, real wages – that is, wages adjusted to inflation – of rural laborers are either stagnating or showing a marginal fall over the past over two years

February 12, 2023 by Subodh Varma

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Photo: Pixahive

In the recently presented Economic Survey for 2022-23, tucked away in the verbiage and data, there is a nugget of information that should shock the conscience of all Indians, whether ruling BJP supporters or not. According to the calculations done by the government’s own economists, real wages – that is, wages adjusted to inflation – of rural laborers are either stagnating or showing a marginal fall over the past over two years. An earlier survey had noted that there are about 365 million workers in rural India, out of which some 61.5% are employed in agriculture, 20% in industry and 18.5% in services.

These are huge numbers. If one includes their families, then the numbers will triple or quadruple. With such a massive section of population facing falling (or stagnant) wages, which are in any case meager, there is no surprise that the Indian economy is not experiencing any demand, leading to perpetual inertia – and pernicious poverty.

Agri-labor the worst hit
Among the agricultural workforce, there are cultivators (or farmers) who may own land in marginal to big holdings. And then there are the landless laborers whose number was estimated at about 14 crore in the last Census completed 11 years ago. Going by past trends, this number would have increased by now.

These numbers are often augmented by the hundreds of thousands of marginal and small farmers who are forced to take up labor work in others’ fields because their own small holdings are not giving sufficient returns. Work is seasonal and often permeated with social oppression as most of these laborers belong to Scheduled Castes or Tribes, or Other Backward Classes.

But only looking at the most direct economic equation, their wages are pitiably small, as shown in the chart below. For men, the daily wage rate was Rs. 364 [USD 4.4] while for women it was Rs. 271 [USD 3.28] in October 2022. That’s about Rs.11,000 per month [USD 133] for men and about Rs. 8,000 [USD 97] for women. Compared with May 2020, these wage rates would appear to show an increase of about 17% for men and 12% for women. But this increase is illusory.

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As the orange lines show (in the graph), real wages which are calculated by deducting the price rise in that period, have in fact fallen. For men, real wages fell marginally from Rs. 207 to Rs.204 per day while for women, the fall was from Rs.160 to Rs. 152 per day.

Remember that these earnings are seasonal – only during certain times of the year is work available in the fields. In all, perhaps 3-4 months’ worth of work can be done in a year by an agricultural laborer. So, at other times, they have to look for non-farm work.

Non-farm work is equally low paying
Non-farm work can span a bewildering range of occupations with one individual taking up 3-4 of these simultaneously on a part-time basis. One unpublished survey done by a trade union in the State of Andhra Pradesh found 61 types of work in one village only. Some of the more common works include construction, retail trade, repair jobs, menial labor, domestic work, etc.

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As the chart above shows, nominal wages for men increased from Rs. 381 [USD 4.62] to Rs. 408 per day [USD 4.94] between May 2020 and October 2022. For women, daily wage rates increased from Rs. 226 [USD 2.74] to Rs. 269 [USD 3.26] per day over the same period.

After adjusting for price rise, the picture becomes dire. For men, the daily wage rate fell from Rs.252 to Rs.229 while for women it increased negligibly from Rs.150 to Rs.151.

So, the great boon that non-farm work was supposed to bring to the millions that are thronging agricultural work has evidently failed to deliver. Either way, the laborer in rural areas is destined to suffer from grinding poverty because income is barely sufficient to keep their family alive.

Govt policies aggravating situation
Withdrawal or cutbacks in welfare programs, such as free healthcare or free education, and nutrition, mean that these families have to neglect these basic needs for their families because the earnings are just not enough to pay for private doctors or schools. In case there is a serious sickness in the family – as must have happened during these pandemic years that the survey was covering – the family has to undertake catastrophic spending after borrowing from relatives, friends or usurious money lenders. Small wonder that the last survey of agricultural households done by the National Statistical Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics, found that just over 50% of agricultural households were indebted.

The rural job guarantee scheme (MGNREGS) provides a lifeline to these laborers, and indeed to others too. According to latest available data, 81.9 million individuals had already worked under the scheme till date. This is lower than the peaks touched during the pandemic when most of the economy was shut down or restricted. But this year’s numbers are higher than the last pre-pandemic year of 2019-20, which saw 78.8 million persons working. Clearly, demand for work is high as landless laborers and small and marginal farmers as well as other rural labor keep turning to this scheme to supplement their income.

Raging unemployment is not helping either. But look at the wages offered in MGNREGS: in the current year, average daily wage rate is about Rs.218, last year it was Rs.209, the year before that, Rs.201. Adjusted to inflation, the wage rate for the current year would be about Rs.122 per day! That’s more than Rs. 100 less than the real wage for non-farm work in October 2022. Despite these onerous wages, kept low under pressure from the big landowners, crores are taking up the work just to survive, especially during off-season periods.

No law for minimum wages

It is tragic that in this Amrit Kaal [the Indian government’s slogan of a golden age], when 75 years of Independence are being celebrated, there is still no comprehensive law to regulate and determine working conditions, including wages of agricultural workers. This has been a constant demand of various agricultural workers’ unions for years but successive governments have paid no heed.

The current government, which is grappling with a slowing economy and an economic crisis, could kickstart the economy by transferring resources into the hands of the poorest people. This would inject much needed demand in the economy and that, in turn, would spur investment in productive capacities, growth in jobs and overall economic growth.

But this is anathema for the present dispensation, wedded as it is to ‘fiscal prudence’ and the chimerical role of free market and ‘trickle down’ in boosting the economy – an idea that has been discredited by experience, time and again, across the world.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/02/12/ ... ral-labor/

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Modi-Adani (Photo: deshabhimani.com)

“Crony capitalism” as an economic strategy
By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted Feb 11, 2023)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on February 12, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

GAUTAM Adani’s calling Hindenburg’s allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance. Just before this episode, the BBC documentary on Modi had been labelled a product of the colonial mindset by the government and hence also construed to be an attack on the Indian nation. Adani would not have dared to equate himself with the nation, exactly the way Modi had done, unless he was certain that Modi would concur with such equating. Both Modi and Adani in short see their respective selves, and each other, as the embodiments of the nation. The Modi-Adani alliance which is the core of the Corporate-Hindutva alliance, is the nation in their perception. The fortune of the nation, it follows, requires Modi to remain politically supreme and Adani to flourish in the economic realm. The nation cannot afford otherwise!

Indeed Modi’s ideology lies precisely in this total inversion of reason. The Modi-Adani duo, it follows, can never be accused of acting immorally or unethically, since whatever they do is ipso facto in the nation’s interest, and the nation’s interest is always supreme except in the eyes of “anti-nationals” or of the “nation’s enemies”; so the accusation of immorality or unethical behaviour can never be laid at their door. Adani’s invoking nationalism was debunked by Hindenburg on the grounds that fraud does not disappear if the fraudster shrouds himself in a nationalist cloak; this would be true if the nation’s interest was somehow independently and objectively defined, but if the nation’s interest is simply taken to be identical with the interest of the Modi-Adani duo, then this accusation loses validity. Adani’s defence was based precisely on assuming this identity.

The Modi government’s economic policy has often been termed, rightly, as being utterly callous towards the people, and utterly devoted to serving the interest of “cronies”. The fact that nationalised financial institutions like the State Bank of India and the Life Insurance Corporation of India have been blatantly used to promote the project of building up a private empire, has often been a target of attack. The fact that tax breaks have been provided to big capital and such breaks have been offset by curtailing welfare expenditure for the poor, a patently class-biased policy which even bourgeois governments would feel chary of pursuing in an open manner, has been seen, quite rightly, as an illustration of “cronyism”. But it is “cronyism” with a difference; it is “cronyism” buttressed by an ideology that it helps build the “nation” (though of course in accordance with a majoritarian view of the “nation”). It is, in short, “cronyism” sanctified by the idea of building up a (Hindu) “nation”.

With the Modi government therefore “crony capitalism” is not what it is normally supposed to mean, namely a perverse and illicit attempt to build up the fortunes of a few chosen and favourite capitalists, which everyone agrees is wrong but which is practised nonetheless either because there is no accountability or because it is thought to have been sufficiently camouflaged. “Crony capitalism” under the Modi dispensation by contrast is elevated to the status of an economic strategy and is pursued confidently as being in the “national interest”.

Some have wondered whether the South Korean strategy of promoting chaebols constitutes a parallel to the Modi government’s promotion of the Adanis and the Ambanis (as historian Adam Tooze has done in The Wire). There is however a basic difference. In the case of South Korea, as in the case of post-war Japan, there was a whole paraphernalia of State institutions that liaised with the monopoly groups, both to guide the latter’s decision-making and also to facilitate the latter’s empire-building. It was in short an institutional arrangement; in the Indian case there is no arrangement in place, just a close nexus between the supremo and the business tycoon which implicitly opens all doors for the latter.

This is also the difference between the Indian case and the case of Nazi Germany where too there had been a close nexus between the leaders of the ruling party and business houses. But in Nazi Germany prior to the war (during the war, of course, production across different units had to be co-ordinated and had to meet specific targets, for which there was a degree of “planning”), different Nazi leaders were aligned to different business houses amongst whom there was rivalry. Some business houses lost out when the particular leaders with whom they were closely associated lost influence, a phenomenon captured in Luchino Visconti’s film The Damned. This was a very different scenario therefore from the Indian one where there is one indisputably top leader having a close nexus with one particular business house which in turn registers sensational growth. Thus, while the close nexus between the political leadership and big corporate capital is a common feature of all fascist and fascistic governments, because of which Mussolini is supposed to have defined fascism as the “merger of State and corporate power”, within this broad picture the Indian case represents a sui generis phenomenon.

Capitalism however is not sufficiently subject to manipulation to be fully dominated even by an alliance between a couple of top business and political magnates. If capitalism within a country could be cordoned off completely, then it is arguable that within this cordoned off domain the writ of that politician-tycoon alliance could run unhindered by the spontaneity of capitalism. But such cordoning off, always difficult, becomes impossible when we are dealing with a globalised system. The business tycoon remains loath to remain confined to the domestic economy, for then he runs the risk of losing out to other tycoons in the competitive race, and hence being swallowed by them. And the moment the tycoon, cossetted at home by proximity to the political leader, ventures to step on to the international arena, the details of his business activities become susceptible to close supervision by other tycoons. International competition now takes over, and any transgression of capitalist business ethics is not only drawn attention to but also becomes open to penalisation. This happens not because of any respect for such ethics, but because of rivalry between different business magnates. This is exactly what has happened to the Adanis.

This business house itself may be saved by the extension of support from the State, though even such support becomes difficult when the affairs of the business house are subject to the glare of international “opinion”; the difficulty is greatly enhanced when a country’s economy requires substantial amounts of foreign financial inflows to manage its balance of payments: such inflows will dry up if foreign financial investors get scared by the demonstration of incompetence on the part of the regulatory authorities of the country that allowed even fraudulent means of amassing wealth to go unpunished.

But even if this business house survives, the Modi government’s cockiness would be gone. Not instituting an inquiry into the affairs of the Adani empire would be impossible, for it would be an act lacking any credibility in global financial circles; likewise an inquiry that finds the Adanis to be pure and lily-white will carry no credibility in global financial circles. Hence the Adanis will have to face some punitive action no matter how light. When the crony faces punitive action, the “boss” will find it difficult to continue the same relationship with that particular crony; and it would be difficult for the government even to advance the claim any longer that the “nation” is being well-served by the Modi-Adani alliance, and, by implication, by the Corporate-Hindutva alliance.

This entire episode has been a particular manifestation of the contradiction between the globalisation of capital and any notion of the nation-State, including what purports to be, though implicitly, a “Hindu” nation-State. The contradiction arises not because globalisation is a rectifying process that brooks no wrong-doing; it arises because under globalisation competition between capitals occurs at a level where no single nation-State can snuff it out

https://mronline.org/2023/02/11/crony-c ... -strategy/
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 22, 2023 2:26 pm

Indian farmers’ Long March triumphs as State government accepts demands

Thousands of farmers took part in a long march in the Indian State of Maharashtra forcing the government to accept their demands, including an increase in subsidies and loan waivers. The march was led by the left-wing All India Kisan Sabha

March 21, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Farmers in the Indian State of Maharasthra who held a long march. Photo: Mohit Sauda

Thousands of Indian farmers, who had been marching in the State of Maharashtra, concluded their protest on Saturday, March 18 after the government accepted their demands. They had begun their march on March 12. The farmers, who were heading from Nashik to the State’s capital Mumbai, were led by the All India Kisan Sabha, a left-wing farmers’ organization.

The farmers were supported by different civil society groups, students, and a number of prominent activists. Coming from far off places, they had brought with them food, utensils and tents, prepared for a longer protest.

The farmers had a 17-point charter of demands—the most important of which was remunerative crop prices, especially for onions. Other demands included a complete loan waiver to the peasantry, the waiving of pending electricity bills and 12-hour daily supply of power, and compensation by the government and insurance companies for the damage sustained by peasants due to unseasonal rains and other natural calamities.

On the first day of the protest, the farmers marched into the city of Nashik and threw away vegetables they had cultivated, including onions, as a sign of protest against the policies of the government.

Shortly after the 250-km march began, the State government [in which the Bharatiya Janata Party which is in power in the Center is a partner] promised it would accept the demands. However, the farmers were not convinced as the government had gone back on similar promises before. Hence they halted their march but declared that they would not return until concrete steps were taken regarding their implementation. Following this, the chief minister of the State, Eknath Shinde spoke in the State’s legislature on the issue and details were also provided to farmers on the implementation of their demands. He announced an increase in the subsidy provided for onion farmers. Another key demand that was accepted was the inclusion of tribal farmers in loan waiver schemes.

Speaking at a public meeting announcing victory, farmers’ leader J P Gavit said, “The government accepted all the demands, and a committee has been formed for some governance-related questions. The committee is set to present its report within a specific timeframe regarding how to fulfill the demands.” He added that the authorities, who were earlier trying to derail the movement, were forced to talk to the farmers because of the sheer strength of the Kisan (Farmers) Long March.

One protesting farmer—Pundalik Ambo Jadhav—died during the protest.

Farmers’ leader Jitendra Chopde, elated after the victory, said that farmers had faith in AIKS, adding, “We are leaving after winning; if the government betrays us, we will return with bigger numbers after six months.”

The farmers were not alone in raising their demands. According to BL Karad, National Vice-President of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, the government has also taken some positive steps on labor issues. “They have promised an increase of INR 1,500 [US$ 18,.15] in the honorarium of ASHA [Accredited Social Health Activists who are essential for last mile delivery of health schemes and services]. The contract workers will also get their salaries directly in their bank accounts,” the union leader, who also participated in the discussions with the government, said.

Maharashtra was also the venue of the historic Farmers’ Long March of 2018 when tens of thousands marched from Nashik to Mumbai. Talking about that march, Jagdish, a young farmer, told NewsClick, “At that time, farmers’ issues had become secondary in the State and the country. We brought farmers’ struggles to the center of power. After that, the country saw a successful farmers’ movement for over a year. We again started a movement and forced the government to accept our demands.

Farmers and workers across the country are set to hold a major mobilization on April 5 to push for a variety of demands. Speaking about upcoming protest, Jagdish said, “Hundreds of thousands of farmers and laborers will gather in Delhi on April 5; just like we made the BJP government of Maharashtra bow down, they will also do a similar thing with the Narendra Modi government in Delhi.” Trade union leader Karad agreed, “Around 10,000-15,000 farmers, laborers, and farm laborers from Maharashtra will participate [on April 5]. We are preparing for that. Tickets are being booked, and village-level and block-level meetings are being held.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/03/21/ ... s-demands/
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 06, 2023 2:02 pm

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Unchecked by consequences, a new authoritarianism is unfolding in India
Originally published: The Wire on April 3, 2023 by Angana P. Chatterji (more by The Wire) | (Posted Apr 05, 2023)

The Narendra Modi-led government’s drive to remake India as a Hindu nationalist state has instigated states of emergency since the 2019 national elections. Long-standing techniques in militarised governance habitual to the administration of India-administered Kashmir are being regularised across India as this new authoritarianism unfolds, unchecked by international attention or consequences.

The targeting of independent media, massive corporate and economic corruption, increasing collapse of law and order, impunity laws, vengeful circulation of nationalist propaganda and hate speech, and political, gendered and sexualised violence are aggressively persistent. Human rights defenders, journalists, scholars, students, allies and their principled articulations are being criminalised as anti-national. The repression of caste-oppressed groups, foremost of Adivasis and Dalits, and the minoritisation of non-Hindu communities, is rampant. Calls to genocidal violence via the extermination of Muslims and dog whistles to foment vigilantism among Hindu nationalists, reverberate.

The normalisation of arbitrary governance saturates the everyday with precarity for hundreds of millions in India today, prompting widespread foreboding and social and spiritual breakdowns. Turbulent markers of religion, ethnos and identity are weaponised to depict dominant Hindus as the national race and “authentic citizens.” Fault lines between minority and majority erupt across the body politic, engineering difference as conflict and posing the minority/“Other” as parasitic, dangerous.

Uttar Pradesh and Yogi Adityanath

Uttar Pradesh has a population of approximately 200 million people, including 38 million Muslims. The incumbent head of state, Yogi Adityanath/Ajay Mohan Bisht, became chief minister in 2017 and was reelected in 2022. In a video that surfaced in 2014, Adityanath reportedly stated:

If [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, we’ll kill 100 Muslims.

Adityanath has supported various campaigns to weaken and override the rights of Muslims. This has emboldened Hindu nationalism, including far-right organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which in 2017 reportedly operated 8,000 shakhas or branches in UP. In 2018, RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat stated that the organisation was positioned to mobilise an army within three days. The Adityanath government began a process to withdraw 131 criminal cases against alleged perpetrators in the Hindu-led mass violence against Muslims in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, and in 40 of 41 Muzaffarnagar cases, including in four gang-rape cases, the accused were acquitted. In January 2019, the prime accused and 16 others out on bail in the 2015 lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq were seen cheering at the front of an Adityanath rally.

Extrajudicial killing and torture

An unnerving 23,612 events of riots/organised violence were reported in UP during 2017-2019, while 6,126 such events were reported in 2020, and 5,302 in 2021. In December 2018, four United Nations Special Rapporteurs wrote to the Government of India regarding extrajudicial killings by police officers in UP between March 2017, when the Bharatiya Janata Party government took power, and June 2018. Extrajudicial killings and custodial torture from March 19, 2017 to September 28, 2021 include “encounter” cases where police reportedly shot individuals in street protests and enacted custodial deaths, victimising individuals on the basis of their religion and caste. Women experienced violence, including in police custody. There is no reporting on LGBTIQA-identified persons. UP officials with alleged direct responsibility for extrajudicial killings and/or torture of civilians that took place between March 2017 and September 2021 include police personnel in the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police, district level Superintendent of Police and Constable.

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Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

In UP, 166 people were reportedly killed and more than 4,453 injured in encounters between March 2017 and October 2022. As of August 2020, about 37 percent of the victims were Muslims. Between November 24, 2020, and August 31, 2021, at least 189 people were arrested in UP for violating the anti-miscegenation “love jihad” law. UP reportedly witnessed 451 custodial deaths in 2020 and 501 in 2021. In May 2022, a 22-year old man detained by UP police in Lucknow on speculation of cattle slaughtering was reportedly tortured with electric shocks and violated with a stick.

The extrajudicial killing and custodial torture of Bahraichi, a Dalit man, reportedly took place in July 2021. His family reportedly had a land dispute with a powerful landlord, Mahendra, who filed a police complaint against Bahraichi and other family members for abducting Mahendra’s daughter. When Bahraichi went to the police station to file a case, he was arrested. Bahraichi was allegedly tortured in police custody, leading to his death. In their version of events, the police reportedly noted that Bahraichi had slipped and fallen while in custody and died. The Wire, having seen the photographs of Bahraichi’s injuries, disputed that the injuries were from falling.

In September 2017, UP Police increased “award money” for arresting criminals at different police ranks, and authorised police chiefs to “announce rewards of up to Rs. 1 lakh for a team that carries out an encounter.” In March 2018, Adityanath reportedly gave special awards to police officers with high “encounter” killing numbers. In October 2021, Adityanath highlighted encounter deaths and injuries as an achievement of his government at a police parade in Lucknow.

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Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Prejudicial citizenship

Extrajudicial killings reportedly took place during the December 2019 protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. This prejudicial law is akin to the Nuremberg Laws instituted in 1935 in Nazi Germany, and privilege Hindus in defining citizenship, particularly targeting Muslims. Police attacked civilians in various states across India, including with lethal force.

In UP, reportedly 23 persons died, 21 of them due to bullet wounds. Three police personnelwere alleged as the direct accused—a Station House Officer, the City in-Charge, and a Constable. Criminalising peaceful assembly, police opened fire with live bullets, and 700+ persons were detained. The UP government sought to blame the violence on Muslims. Approximately 3,000 persons of predominantly Muslim descent were reportedly arrested under false charges across UP and 350 First Information Reports were allegedly filed against 5,000 “named individuals” and 100,000 unnamed persons.

The extrajudicial killing of Mohammad Suleman (Muslim descent, age 20) reportedly took place in December 2019. His family reported that he was picked up by police while returning from a mosque, taken to Mohallah Shekhan, and shot to death on December 20. The police filing reportedly stated that Suleiman had taken an officer’s pistol and shot at a Constable, who shot back and killed Suleiman. In July 2020, the Special Investigation Team looking into Suleiman’s case found innocent the six police officers accused in his killing, alleging Suleiman had taken part in protests.

Leadership and abetment

Extrajudicial killings documented here violate the right to life as established in international human rights law and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The instances of torture to individuals in custody noted in this article amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international law, carried out by government officials acting under the authority of law.

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Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Indian law does not hold the executive branch of government accountable through command responsibility. Alleged perpetrators, including the elected head of UP government, may be held accountable for abetment or negligence. Similarly, the highest ranking officials at the UP Home Department carry responsibility in overseeing the UP Police. Chapter V of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, addresses the crime of abetment. An individual who encourages or provokes another person to committing an act, or aids by unlawful omission its enactment, may be defined as an abettor.

Adityanath, the highest executive functionary in UP, is routinely also its Home Minister. The UP police is under the command of the Chief Minister, as the “law and order” portfolio is a state responsibility per the Indian Constitution. Police leadership includes the Principal Secretary, Additional Chief Secretary, and the Director General of Police. Any statement made by a Chief Minister which encourages the police to violate the law therefore may amount to an abetment of the crime. Punishment for abetment of an offence is customarily stringent and a Chief Minister may, therefore, be charged with abetment provided that the main offence is established.

Descent into the abyss
In 2022, Prime Minister Modi attended Adityanath’s swearing-in ceremony. In December 2022, Adityanath reportedly asserted that opposition parties, the Congress and Aam Aadmi, “should be hanged” as they were impediments to India’s progress. In February 2023, Adityanath reportedly claimed that:

India is a Hindu Rashtra [nation], because every citizen of India is a Hindu.

Absolute nationalism targets those marginalised across India, particularly its Muslim inhabitants. Making aggression ordinary presents violence as inevitable and, in the context of India’s emergence as a global player, crisis and militarisation as propitious to national enterprise. The use of hate and arbitrary power and calculated killings by Hindu nationalists reveal an ominous disregard for democracy, a forewarning of what is to come.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/05/uncheck ... -in-india/

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Massive rally of farmers and workers in Indian capital New Delhi

The rally was jointly organized by three of India’s biggest organizations representing workers, farmers, and agricultural laborers

April 05, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Thousands of workers and peasants convened in New Delhi to protest the central government and its policies. Photo: CITU

On Wednesday, April 5, thousands of farmers and workers from across India came to the capital New Delhi to protest the central government and its anti-farmer and anti-labor policies. The rally, organized under the banner ‘Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Rally’ was held at the Ramlila Maidan grounds.

Protesters demanded relief from inflation, a legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price (MSP) on main crops, minimum wage for all workers at Rs 26,000 (USD 317) per month, debt relief, pension for all farmers above the age of 60, repeal of the four anti-labor codes, and withdrawal of the Electricity Amendment Bill 2020, among other demands. Protesters accused the Narendra Modi-led government of creating a crisis of livelihood for all sections of the working class.


The rally was jointly organized by three of India’s biggest organizations representing workers, farmers, and agricultural laborers—All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), and All India Agriculture Workers Union (AIAWU), respectively. In the run-up to the rally, an extensive campaign highlighting the demands of the people was carried out in several parts of North India and garnered widespread support. Workers and farm union leaders held joint conventions in over 400 districts to plan the campaign and mobilize the rally in large numbers.

Unions have highlighted several issues plaguing Indian farmers such as stagnant wages, price rises, unemployment, job insecurity, and low returns for farm produce. According to the joint statement, 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last eight years. The unions also have raised the alarms over the unprecedented increase in the number of suicides by daily wagers—112,000 in just three years from 2019-2021.

Since the historic farmers’ movement in India in 2020-21, farmers across the country have been joining the struggle for their demands against the diktats of the government.

Last month, on March 12, nearly 10,000 farmers in the State of Maharashtra embarked on a nearly 200 km long-march from Nashik to State capital Mumbai. They were demanding the government to address the problems being faced by farmers and workers in the State. Six days after the movement began, and after the farmers had covered a distance of over 100 km, the government agreed to most of their demands in negotiations.

Maharashtra was also the venue of the historic farmers’ Long March in 2018, when tens of thousands marched from Nashik to Mumbai. Talking about that march, Jagdish, a young farmer, told NewsClick, “At that time, farmers’ issues had become secondary in the State and the country. We brought farmers’ struggles to the center of power. After that, the country saw a successful farmers’ movement for over a year. We again started a movement and forced the government to accept our demands.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/04/05/ ... new-delhi/
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 22, 2023 1:52 pm

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The current state of India’s economy
By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted Apr 22, 2023)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on April 23, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

GOVERNMENT officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies of the world in 2020-21 because of its draconian lockdown; and the current growth-rate is exaggerated by the low base caused by that drop from which it is being counted.

If we compare 2021-22 GDP with that of 2019-20 which precedes the lockdown then it is only 1.5 percent higher; and since the 2022-23 GDP is estimated both by the IMF and the Reserve Bank of India to be 6.8 percent higher over the previous year, this would mean that the 2022-23 GDP will be only 8.4 percent higher than in 2019-20. Hence the annual compound growth rate over the three years from 2019-20 and 2022-23, even ignoring the absolute drop in between,is only 2.7 percent! Further, even this meagre recovery from the drop is not being sustained: the 2023-24 growth rate is expected to be below that of 2022-23.

Almost all agencies have downgraded their growth rate forecasts for 2023-24; and almost all of them put this growth below the growth rate for 2022-23. The IMF for instance expects the Indian economy to grow at 5.9 percent in 2023-24 which is considerably lower than its figure of 6.8 percent for 2022-23. It is this expected slowing down that is relevant, not the absolute figures which are neither conceptually not statistically very meaningful: indeed a former chief economic advisor to the union government had suggested that the entire set of growth rate figures, even focussing on the GDP that is itself a flawed concept, had been significantly exaggerated. Such a slowing down is now generally expected; and the fact that, even after an utterly stunted recovery from the lockdown, there is general expectation of a further deceleration of the growth rate, is of great significance.

Indeed the expected growth rate will be even lower because of a new development, viz. the recently announced OPEC+ cut in oil output by one million barrels per day, which would become effective from May 1 and which comes over and above the two million barrels per day cut announced in October last year. This would affect India’s growth rate in at least two distinct ways: one, it would make inflation control in the US that much more difficult, forcing a further increase in US interest rates, which would lead to a depreciation of the rupee vis-à-vis the dollar, accentuating inflation in India; to prevent financial outflows from India and the ensuing depreciation of the rupee, the interest rate in India too would have to be raised which would have the effect of lowering the growth-rate. Two, even leaving aside the effect mediated through the US, a rise in oil price would have a directly growth-lowering effect: the expenditure stream on national output gets reduced because of a reduction in net exports (arising from a rise in the import bill owing to the oil price-rise).

But even leaving aside the latest oil price hike, the growth rate is still expected to slow down; in fact, according to the RBI’s estimate even the growth rate of 4th quarter GDP in 2022-23 is going to be less than that of the 3rd quarter, 4.2 percent compared to 4.4 percent. The question is: why is India’s meagre recovery from the pandemic-linked drop in output petering out?

The basic reason has to do with the nature of a neo-liberal economy. Private consumption in such an economy keeps getting reduced as a proportion of output because of the increase in income inequality that occurs; this means that private consumption, other than what may occur independently of income, cannot provide a stimulus for income growth. Private investment on the other hand depends on the expected growth in the size of the market for which the actual growth rate of the economy provides an indicator; this means that private investment too cannot provide an independent stimulus for growth. Government expenditure too is limited as a proportion of income because fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP is limited; it cannot therefore provide an independent stimulus for growth unless the government can raise the tax-GDP ratio by taxing the rich, which global finance dislikes. It follows therefore that the stimulus for growth under neo-liberalism comes from only two sources: net exports, and asset-price bubbles which can give rise to an increase in consumption independently of income.

But in a world economy where there is general stagnation and even a tendency towards recession (engineered everywhere as an antidote to inflation), exports, far from increasing, will themselves experience slowing growth. And asset price bubbles are not very effective in generating additional consumption demand within our economy; they enrich at best a thin stratum of persons whose consumption demand largely leaks out abroad. It follows therefore that there is no reason to expect an increase in the growth rate of the Indian economy; on the contrary the tendency will be for a decline in growth rate because of slowing investment growth and slackening consumption demand owing to growing income inequality.

Even the IMF attributes the expected slowdown in India’s economic growth to sluggish private expenditure, both on consumption and investment, and the general stagnation in the world economy which is slowing down export growth. Government expenditure growth, itself lacklustre, cannot offset the slowdown caused by these factors.

Even within its overall limitations however there is a way that the government could stimulate the economy; and that is by changing the composition of government expenditure. To appreciate this point, consider two different ways that the government can spend the same amount, say Rs 100; it can spend it by providing transfers to working people, or alternatively it can spend the amount on modern infrastructure projects, as the 2023-24 union budget plans to do.If a hundred rupees is handed to the working people, then more or less all of it will be spent; and it will be spent on goods and services which are produced mainly in the small-scale sector where the profit-margins (and hence savings per unit of income generated) are generally lower. On the other hand if the same amount is spent on modern infrastructure projects, then at every stage, both at the beginning and at every round of expenditure that is subsequently generated, the amount spent will be less; there will always be larger leakages into savings and imports. This means that the “multiplier” effects of spending on modern infrastructure will be less than those of spending on transfers to the working people.

It follows that even when the total government expenditure cannot be increased, how exactly it is spent can still make a difference to aggregate demand, and hence to the growth rate of the economy. And public expenditure that takes the form of transfers to the working people or that augments the welfare of the working people, has a larger multiplier effect than public expenditure incurred for any other purpose.

Two clarificatory comments are needed here. First, this argument will not be valid if the economy is constrained on the supply side, if for instance there is a shortage of infrastructure that is holding up the growth rate; but that is not the case in India at present. Our economy is constrained on the demand side, as even the IMF concedes. Second, it may be thought that any transfers to the poor or working people will create a larger demand for foodgrains, of which there are stocks held by the government that will be run down; such transfers therefore will have no multiplier effects. But the weight of this argument is much less at present than earlier because in the context of the pandemic the government has been pushed into providing foodgrains to several poor households, so that the extent of grain deprivation now is not as large as usual. At the margin therefore any transfers to the working poor would create demand for goods and services whose output can be expanded, and this would have substantial multiplier effects as claimed above.

Larger multiplier effect entails the creation of larger employment. It follows therefore that even within the constraints imposed by a neo-liberal regime on government expenditure as a proportion of GDP, by ruling out both greater taxes on the rich and a larger fiscal deficit, there is still some elbow room for the government through changing the direction of government expenditure. Such a change would not only expand income and hence reverse the decline in the growth-rate, but would also generate larger employment which is a desideratum in itself, and also provide relief to the working people currently groaning under the weight of the economic crisis. The Modi government however has concern only for crony capitalists, not for the working people.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/22/the-cur ... s-economy/

******

Indian workers and farmers unite against Modi government’s ‘Corporate-Sectarian Nexus’

On April 5, 100,000 workers, farmers, and agricultural workers held a unity rally in Delhi in rejection of the pro-corporate, anti-poor policies and sectarian politics of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party

April 17, 2023 by Tanupriya Singh

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(Photo: @cpimspeak/Twitter)

“When big corporations have been given free rein to loot, and the government itself is standing on the backs of these corporations, what can the people do? They have no other path but that of struggle.”

This was one out of the nearly 100,000 voices that rose in the Indian capital of Delhi on April 5 as workers, farmers, and daily wage agricultural workers from across the country came together for the landmark Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Rally (Workers-Farmers Rally).

The demonstration was organized by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU), and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in rejection of the neoliberal assault on the lives and livelihoods of the Indian working class, overseen by a ruling party which they accuse of fueling sectarian and caste-based violence, while stamping out all forms of dissent.

While workers and farmers have been organizing around specific demands, including historic struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic, their unity in recent years marks a significant development:.

“Every movement has consolidated, and within the sectoral struggles– such as protests by scheme workers, the farmers’ struggle, struggles against privatization– the consciousness level has increased to a level that workers understand that it is no more an isolated struggle,” CITU National Secretary AR Sindhu told Peoples Dispatch.

“The oppressed are coming together as the oppressed around issues of material deprivation.” said Professor Prabhat Patnaik, an eminent economist and academic, ahead of the rally.

Speaking ahead of the first Mazdoor Kisan Rally organized by the AIKS, AIAWU, and CITU in September 2018, he had explained how the agrarian crisis was driving peasants to migrate to cities in search of jobs, only to find there weren’t any: “They join this enormous mass of the unemployed, under-employed, intermittently or casually employed which actually brings down the wages and hours of those who are already employed.”

“The distress of the peasants spills over into the distress of the working class…their economic fates get linked.”

Sudden job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic—in the absence of social safety nets—saw migrant workers in cities die on railway tracks and roads while trying to reach their villages in a severely distressed countryside—where over 100,000 farmers are believed to have died by suicide in the past eight years.

‘The future lies in struggle’
Financial distress, particularly high levels of indebtedness, has been a leading cause of farmer suicides in India. A survey conducted by the National Statistical Office found that over half of the country’s agricultural households were in debt in 2018.

Despite the scale of this crisis, the Indian government ignored calls for a complete loan waiver, a demand that was reiterated at the April 5 rally. On the other hand, it has granted major concessions to the corporate sector, including writing off around Rs. 10.7 lakh crores (approximately US$130 billion) in loans in the past seven years, according to the unions.

Meanwhile, farmers’ financial distress has worsened due to produce price crashes and crop failures despite high costs of cultivation.

After the historic farmers’ protests in 2020-21, while the Modi government was ultimately forced to withdraw the three farm laws that would have opened up the agricultural sector to greater interference by corporations, as well as deregulation and contractualization, other major demands, namely a Minimum Support Price (the rate at which the government procures food grains from farmers) mandated by law, remain unfulfilled.

Speaking to Newsclick, a farmer from the state of Andhra Pradesh stressed the necessity for adequate MSP: “This year I invested Rs. 50,000 (US$ 610) in my crops and in return, got only Rs. 20,000 [or US$ 244, a mere 40% of the cost incurred].” The MSP guarantee is essential not just for farmers, but for the food security of the country as a whole.

At a time when agricultural households are drowning in debt, with little hope for finding employment in urban areas, the Modi government has limited the scope of a key lifeline—the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Not only has the scheme’s funding been slashed and people denied work, the government has also imposed exclusionary mandatory digitization measures that have led to workers losing out on already meager wages.

Among the demands at the April 5 rally were the expansion of the scheme to include 200 work days as opposed to the existing 100, minimum daily wage to be increased to Rs. 600 (US$7.3), all pending wages (which as per union estimates amount to a shocking Rs. 1,498 crores in the past months) be paid, and job guarantees for all. AIKS, CITU, and AIAWU have also demanded pensions for all poor and middle peasants and agricultural workers over the age of 60.

Not only has employment growth slowed down dramatically, existing jobs are being hollowed out by the government through four labor codes that were forced through parliament in 2020.

While they are yet to come into effect, these codes have been widely condemned for trampling on workers’ rights, including those related to unionization and strikes, while making it easier for employers to cut wages and hire and fire workers at will. The codes also exclude informal workers from coverage under the minimum wage legislation as well as social security benefits. The April 5 rally once again raised a call for the scrapping of these codes.

Women have been at the forefront of many of these struggles, including women working as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and or in Anganwadis (rural child-care centers). Despite being critical to the implementation of government schemes for maternal and child care, community health, nutrition, and the pandemic response, the labor of these women is still not recognized as work, which means that they have been denied even a living wage.

While real wages have remained stagnant over the past eight years, the prices of food have risen significantly. Data from March shows that inflation rates for milk and cereal touched 9.3% and 15.2%, respectively. AIKS, CITU, and AIAWU have demanded a monthly minimum wage of Rs. 26,000 (US$317) and a pension of Rs. 10,000 (US$122) for all workers, including scheme workers.

They also amplified the growing demand for universalization of the Public Distribution System (PDS), through which the government provides subsidized rations, and for its extension to include 14 essential items. While 75% of rural and 50% of urban population must be covered under PDS, the use of outdated census data from 2011 to determine eligibility has meant that many food insecure households have been excluded.

“Rights including the right to food and right to education have been made statutorily binding in the neoliberal period itself. However, when it comes to actually implementing these rights, through the rationing system for food for instance, there have been drastic cuts in budgets and Aadhaar-linking, all of which have worked to exclude people from these entitlements,” Sindhu said.

Other demands being jointly raised by CITU and others include the provision of universal and quality healthcare, education, and housing.

Meanwhile, workers have also fiercely resisted the handing over of resources and key parts of the public sector to private corporations. Describing the ‘slow killing of public sector undertakings’, a member of the BSNL (a publicly-owned telecommunications company) Employees Union said, “The Modi government ousted 80,000 employees from our company. It did not allocate any 4G and 5G spectrum to us, we got killed in the competition.”

“There is now a new threat to us in the form of the National Monetisation Pipeline. They want to sell out our towers, optic fiber network and properties. We will not let that happen.”

Rejecting the ‘Corporate Sectarian Nexus’
“Neoliberal policies have created a conjuncture, a situation where sectarian, authoritarian forces have been on the rise,” Patnaik had said in 2018. “There have been lynch mobs going around the country with impunity, terrorizing people belonging to minority groups…[Meanwhile] until recently large scale arrests have not taken place, but even that restraint is now gone.”

He was speaking a day after leading civil rights activists, journalists, and professors from different parts of the country were arrested in what is known as the Bhima Koregaon or Elgar Parishad case. In the years since, these activists have lived, and died, under inhumane conditions in prison, without charges being framed or a trial being held.

Student leaders have been imprisoned under draconian charges, while Hindu extremist ‘cow vigilantes’ have mass public gatherings held in their honor as their names mysteriously disappear from police reports.

With another general election scheduled for 2024, platforms such as CITU, AIKS, and AIAWU are consciously organizing farmers and workers to mount a united struggle—“There is a sectarian-corporate nexus,” Sindhu said. “These struggles to save the constitution or to ‘save democracy’ cannot be separated from the struggle against neoliberalism. They have to be fought together.”

With the campaign season looming, farmers and workers’ organizations are gearing up for major grassroots mobilizations. The Sankyukt Kisan Morcha, which led the 2020-21 farmers protest, is organizing events in the months of May and June. In the days leading up to August 8, which marks ‘Quit India Day’ (a commemoration of a major phase of the Indian anti-colonial struggle), the AIAWU will be organizing agitations and other collective efforts.

Meanwhile, the country’s central trade unions are also set to hold a three-day strike between August 9 and 11.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/04/17/ ... ian-nexus/
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The Condition of the Indian Working Class
MAY 1, 2023
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Dossier no. 64

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Birender Kumar Yadav, Walking on the Roof of Hell, 2016. Khadau (wooden sandals).


The artwork in the dossier is by Birender Kumar Yadav, a multi-disciplinary Indian artist from Dhanbad, a city of iron ore and coal built on the backs of mineworkers and indigenous people. Much of Yadav’s work, informed by his early experiences as the son of a blacksmith who worked in a coal mine, draws attention to the issues of class hierarchies and the plight of the working class.

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Birender Kumar Yadav, Erased Faces, 2015. Brickmakers’ thumbprints stamped onto their portraits on archival prints.


Two facts shattered the appearance of calm in contemporary India. First, COVID-19 exposed the decades-long evisceration of India’s health system and the utter incompetence of a central government that was keener to ask the public to bang pots than to offer scientifically based, calm leadership. Second, Indian farmers and peasants held a year-long protest during the pandemic against three bills put forward by the central government that threatened the existence of farming in India. Their protest, which received support from the working class and from large sections of the middle class, was able to prevail against a government that does not have the habit of retreat.

Theories that emanate from the government and from think tanks that have grown to eclipse the democratic role of public universities could not explain either the impact of the virus or the political resilience of the farmers and peasants. The façade of their fine theories cracked open to display a history of naked avarice. Phrases such as ‘labour market liberalisation’ and ‘trade liberalisation’ did not produce an efficient, modern society. Instead, decades of cuts to the public health system, the use of underpaid ‘volunteers’ to provide care during the pandemic, and the promotion of unscientific ideas by elected officials resulted in a massive COVID-19 death toll. Meanwhile, these phrases – out of the textbooks of neoliberal theory – provided the intellectual cover to hand over the control of agricultural commodity markets to large corporations, many with intimate ties to the ruling party.

The cracks in this façade shone a light on the anti-social impact of the neoliberal era in India, which began in 1991. This light burned bright, refusing to be dimmed by media conglomerates and holy men, who began to praise the government for preventing even more deaths. But that light did shine through, and it made an impact on mass consciousness, even if it did not result in immediate electoral gains for the opposition parties.

In June 2021, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published our assessment of the farmer’s protest in dossier no. 41, The Farmer’s Revolt in India. That dossier provided an understanding of how neoliberal policy has undermined Indian farmers and landless peasants, increasing inequality and misery in the countryside. This dossier, The Condition of the Indian Working Class, offers a broad analysis of the living and working conditions of India’s large and diverse working class.

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Birender Kumar Yadav, Government Work Is God’s Work, 2017. LED light installation projected onto the entrance of the Mumbai Art Room.


The Lockdown
On 24 March 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced – without notice – a ‘total lockdown’ for the country’s population of 1.4 billion. Small and medium-size businesses, which employ most of India’s workforce, pulled down their shutters. Due to the lockdown, at least 120 million workers, or 45 percent of India’s non-agricultural workforce, lost their jobs. Employers were under no moral or legal obligation to pay their workers, many of whom did not even receive their back wages. Some workers only had a few days’ worth of food in hand while others found themselves with no money or food at all, and many were expelled from the shantytowns where they lived. Faced with public pressure and the possibility that hundreds of millions of people would starve because of this unplanned lockdown, the government announced a meagre support package on 26 March that totalled less than 1 percent of India’s gross domestic product.

The lockdown demonstrated the fragility of the Indian working class: only a small push was needed to throw vast sections of the workforce into homelessness and hunger. Workers in cities, almost all of them migrants from far-away towns and villages, had neither any significant support from the government nor the security of community and family networks.1

Tens of millions of desperate migrant workers defied the curfew and walked thousands of kilometres to their home villages. For them, the villages represented shelter, security, and some form of dignity. Some flocked to railways and bus stations in search of transportation while others took to the national highways on foot. Millions of other workers, including those whose villages were too far to brave such a journey, remained in the cities and depended on the kindness of strangers. Trade unions, left political parties, employees on salaries (mainly bank workers and internet technology workers), sensitive individuals, and others hurriedly formed groups to provide food and water to the workers and help them to return their villages. The reaction from the state was characteristic: the police stopped workers at state borders; sprayed industrial bleach at them through water cannons, allegedly to sanitise them; confiscated their bicycles; and beat them as they violated the curfew. No corporations stepped forward to bear responsibility for the workers’ welfare, their attitude as callous as that of the government.

Trapped in cities, hundreds of millions of workers had to face the pandemic in the worst possible conditions. The majority of the urban working class – nearly half of urban India and ­– lives in slums, where the air is fetid and the surroundings squalid. Light barely penetrates the narrowly packed brick boxes and sheds, a few inches separating each dwelling from the other. Families are packed tightly into narrow rooms, where privacy and breathing space are alien. Migrant workers pile on top of each other in single rooms with their meagre belongings. In most of these slums, which do not have proper drainage systems, the surroundings becoming toilets. The social catastrophe is hard to describe: workers fall into collapsed septic tanks, drowning in filth; gas cylinders, the main form of cooking energy, explode because their production is effectively unregulated; neighbourhoods turn into swamps during the heavy monsoon rains, with dysentery, dengue, malaria, and typhoid given free rein. The pandemic was just one more burden for the workers. Confined to claustrophobic slums, where social distancing is impossible, they watched as the virus swept through their communities. Out of sight, out of mind: that was the attitude of the Indian government and elite.

The scale of the terror invoked by COVID-19 could not be concealed. Corpses of the working class and the poor were seen floating down the Ganges River and piling up in crematoria and graveyards across the country. The government began to bury the numbers, underestimating infections and casualties despite the clear evidence and first-hand knowledge in working-class areas of high rates of infection and death. A government that had overseen the evisceration of the public health system and that had turned over the pharmaceutical industry to the private sector certainly seemed more invested in the health of the ‘market’ and of the billionaires than in the health of the workers.

Two Indian pharmaceutical companies had a duopoly in the country’s COVID-19 vaccines. Even as the pandemic spiralled out of control, the government procrastinated bringing in the more than capable public-sector companies to increase the production of vaccines. Given that one of the vaccines was developed by government research institutes, the public sector could easily have been tasked with ramping up the production and delivery of vaccines. What was clearly in the public’s best interest was not in the best interest of capital. Rather than intervene in the worst public health crisis seen in the country’s history, the Indian government stood by as private firms made enormous profits and neglected to vaccinate India’s working class. One of these two pharmaceutical companies made a profit of up to 2,000 percent per a single dose while the other made a profit of up to 4,000 percent.2 From March 2020 to March 2022, the profits of India’s big businesses doubled, as did the wealth of the country’s billionaires.3

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Detail of: Birender Kumar Yadav, Debris of Fate, 2015. Indian ink on debris.


Workers in the Era Before Liberalisation
In 1944, four years before the British imperialists were ejected from India, a group of Indian capitalists drafted a text called the Bombay Plan. These capitalists acknowledged that in an independent India, the industrial sector would need to be protected from international competition and given resources to flourish. This protectionist theory is called the ‘infant industry’ thesis. Drawing from the Bombay Plan, the new Indian state developed an industrial policy (1948), set up a planning commission (1950), produced the first Five-Year Plan (1951–1956), crafted the Industrial Policy Resolution (1956), and passed the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (1969). The new Indian government’s policy – drafted alongside private-sector industrialists – was to carve out some areas for the private sector and to ensure that no private-sector conglomerates could dominate any one sector. However, there was no democratisation of the Indian economy through land reforms or through the provision of workers’ rights, allowing the bourgeoisie to benefit greatly in the early years of independent India. In 1960, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru conceded that his government’s policies had intensified social inequality:

Large numbers of people have not shared in [the increase in the nation’s wealth] and [they] live without the primary necessities of life. On the other side you see a smaller group of really affluent people. They have established an affluent society for themselves anyhow, though India as a whole may be far from it… I think the new wealth is flowing in a particular direction and not spreading out properly.4

Unlike in socialist countries, the public sector in India was built for a limited purpose – to facilitate the growth and accumulation of the private sector. The raison d’être of the Indian public sector was not to maximise profits, but to provide a sustainable ecosystem for private industry – hence the investments in infrastructure and inputs like heavy machinery and steel, which in the absence of the public sector would have had to be imported from Western countries at very high costs.

Strong workers’ movements fought to build key trade unions that intervened to ensure that legislation regarding work hours, wages, benefits, and collective bargaining would be implemented, strengthened, and expanded to include more and more of the workforce. There are three reasons why public-sector workers were able to make these gains: first, because the capital-intensive nature of the public sector and subsequent concentration of workers in large factories allowed strikes to inflict rapid damage on profits; second, because the largely undereducated and underfed population meant that the reserve army of labour to undercut the skilled public-sector workers was not always available; and third, because of the tradition of struggle and the trade union culture that developed in these factories, the public-sector workers developed high levels of class consciousness. However, the restriction of the public sector to capital-intensive industry and the proportionally small number of its workers in the labour force ensured that only a small segment of the Indian working class could access these rights. Nevertheless, the rights of public-sector workers set a benchmark for the rest of the working class, which fought, alongside the highly class-conscious public-sector workers, to extend labour legislation to cover all workers.

This is significant given that in India, 83 percent of the workforce is in the informal sector, consisting of a multitude of small, unincorporated enterprises alongside household and precarious work. Even in the formal sector, a significant percentage of employment is informal in nature (such as subcontracted work), bringing the total of informally employed workers to more than 90 percent of the labour force.5 For these workers, laws and rights are a fantasy: most of them do not even earn the minimum wage, despite the fact that it is set just above hunger levels. Due to the lack of protections, these workers are forced into irregular and seasonal contracts, including daily wage contracts, which deprive them of reliable sources of income. The informal and unregulated nature of work has meant that – even before liberalisation – unionisation has long been alien to these workers. Only in states where the Left is or has been in power – such as Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal – have workers been able to attain legislation that has improved their working conditions and allowed them to unionise. In these states, workers have had a higher share of income.

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Birender Kumar Yadav, An Axe on One’s Own Foot, 2015. Iron and wood.


Labour Market Reform Since 1991
In 1991, the Indian government made an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to liberalise the economy in exchange for short-term financial assistance. This included the government’s commitment to ‘reform’ the labour market and further open up the partly protected Indian economy to foreign capital. The era of the Bombay Plan was over.

India was attractive to foreign capital not only because of the size of its internal market, but also because of its large pool of workers who were being paid criminally low wages. Over the years since independence, workers remained underpaid and underfed, but there was a significant change: a large section of them had become literate. This technically skilled and more ambitious workforce emerged by the 1980s and continued to expand due to the government’s investment in vocational and technical training, the fight for increased educational opportunities for children, and the agrarian transformation that produced new aspirations among the children of farmers and peasants. However, there was no expansion of employment to accommodate them. It was this large army of underpaid, underfed labour, accustomed to working in what are likely some of the worst working conditions in the world, but now with new aspirations and literacy, that awaited the exploitation of international capital on the eve of liberalisation.

The corporate sector pushed a full-spectrum media campaign against workers, making the argument that they were entitled and lazy and that there needed to be ‘flexibility’ in this new age of globalisation. Many academic and policy institutions jumped on the bandwagon to make the case for ‘labour market flexibility’. The general orientation of this argument is that labour must work at the whim of capital, which should not be ‘captive’ to regulations about employment and wages and must be allowed to pay wages according the simple principle of supply and demand, uninfluenced by any responsibility to maintain workers’ living standards. Such a scenario – despite the social costs to workers – would bring in foreign investment, they argued, which would allegedly raise the general technological level of industry and further increase labour productivity, thereby increasing both growth rates and wage levels in the long term.

Two impediments lay before this golden road to growth: public-sector trade unions, which continued to resist the doctrine of ‘flexibility’, and the existence of labour laws. One important illustration of the resistance of trade unions is the fight at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, led by workers and joined by the public, who, together, have staved off multiple privatisation attempts over the course of a decade.6 Faced with challenges from the unions, the government moved towards a comprehensive solution not to fight the unions factory by factory, but to change the law in its favour, assisted, since 1991, by a judiciary aligned with the neoliberal agenda. In the early years of liberalisation, the Supreme Court ruled that contract workers at Air India could become permanent workers in certain cases. But in 2001, the court reversed this judgement following an appeal from the Steel Authority of India and other public-sector firms, thereby nullifying the gains that workers had made through decades of struggle. This assault on contract workers came alongside other industrial disputes, such as a concerted attempt to ban strikes. Then, on 6 August 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Tamil Nadu state government’s dismissal of 170,000 employees on the grounds that they had been on an ‘illegal strike’. Only if the workers offered an unconditional apology, the Supreme Court said, would the government have to rehire them. Crucially, the Supreme Court concluded that ‘there is no question of [government employees] having any fundamental, legal, or equitable right to go on strike’, further stating that trade unions do not have ‘a guaranteed right to an effective collective bargaining or to strike’ and that ‘[n]o political party or organisation can claim that it is entitled to paralyse the industry and commerce in the entire state and is entitled to prevent the citizens not in sympathy with its viewpoints from exercising their fundamental rights or from performing their duties for their own benefit or for the benefit of the state or the nation’.7 This judgement not only went against Indian laws: it also violated a range of International Labour Organisation conventions that the Indian government had signed over the years.

Over the course of the past few decades, there has been a change in the higher judiciary’s approach towards disputes between workers and management as well as the working class’s right to collectively protest and go on strike – a change that favours market principles and the sanctity of the contract. The judiciary’s views have allowed capital to open up a ruthless campaign against workers, but this has not stopped them from fighting back, as is evident from workers’ struggles, from the Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar (Haryana) and the Volvo Buses factory in Hoskote (Karnataka) to the anganwadi (crèche) workers of Gujarat and the ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers of Punjab. Workers’ attempts to form unions have nonetheless been treated as criminal actions. As Maruti Suzuki’s Management Executive Officer S. Y. Siddiqui put it in June 2011, ‘The problem at Manesar is not one of industrial relations. It is an issue of crime and militancy’. Furthermore, the firm, he said, would not ‘tolerate any external affiliation of the union’, warning the unionised workers that any attempt to find political allies amongst the national labour federations to help their fledgling struggle would be met with retaliation from the company.8 In the face of continued worker struggles, the government has turned to using anti-terror legislation to arrest workers and subdue their right to strike. For instance, in 2017, when contract workers for Reliance Energy unionised and went on strike for a few hours demanding compensation for the death of a worker, five of them were arrested on terrorism charges.9 Furthermore, violence against union organisers along the Gurgaon-Manesar-Dharuhera-Rewari stretch (in northern India) is mirrored in the Coimbatore-Chennai belt (in southern India). The immanent violence in both of these zones led to industrial actions that resulted in workers’ deaths, such as the 2012 murder of Awanish Kumar Dev at the Maruti Suzuki plant and the 2009 murder of Roy George of Pricol Limited in Coimbatore (in the state of Tamil Nadu). In 2009, after the uprisings in Coimbatore, Jayant Davar, the president of the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India, put it bluntly: ‘We can’t be a capitalist country that has socialist labour laws’.10

Proponents of ‘labour flexibility’ argued that this approach would attract foreign capital and increase labour productivity and economic growth. Decades after its implementation, however, the data contradicts the theory. Instead, growth has slumped and so has employment – especially full-time, formal employment – as the workforce has increasingly shifted to a model of short-term contracts with minimal regulatory oversight and benefits. Due to deteriorating working conditions, the share of profits and wages has diverged significantly: from 1999–2000 to 2018, the share of profits increased from 17 percent to 48 percent while the share of wages decreased from 33 percent to 26 percent.11 Profits are now the national interest, and struggling workers are terrorists.

Divisive labour practices have decimated trade unions in private-sector industry and have created difficulties for the unions of the public-sector industry. This has led to hierarchies of exploitation between formal and contract workers, which most acutely impact the most exploited sectors and cause an atmosphere of resentment between workers on the shop floor. Struggles that largely focus on bargaining over wages are unlikely to rally united mobilisations, except in extraordinary circumstances.

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Birender Kumar Yadav, Donkey Worker, 2015. Thumbprints of migrant workers on paper.


Working-Class Desperation
Employment generated by the neoliberal dispensation is work for the desperate. The promise of large-scale industrial investment and the creation of high-quality industrial jobs did not materialise in a significant way, and both economic and industrial growth have remained at low levels not only because of the lack of investment, but also because of the suppressed demand of the Indian population. This demand was reduced because of the desperately low wages of much of the population as well as neoliberal restraints on public spending, particularly in the agrarian sector.

Since 1991, there have been two periods of significant economic growth in India, but neither of them are due to ‘labour market reforms’ or neoliberal policies in general. The first, from 2003 to 2008, was generated by the spillover from the credit-fuelled demand of US consumers, and the second, from 2009 to 2011, was generated by credit-fuelled spending by Indian corporations as they borrowed vast sums of soon-to-be defaulted loans from Indian public-sector banks to build infrastructure, such as power plants and roadways. These bubbles are not sustainable, since US consumer demand has flattened and since Indian firms are not willing to increase investment in the face of depressed demand, which is reflected in the vastly unutilised capacity of the country’s industry. Private conglomerates continue to borrow from public-sector banks, but they do so to fund acquisitions rather than create employment.

These large conglomerates, which are able to borrow astronomical amounts of capital from public-sector banks, employ – at their peak – no more than 2 percent of India’s workforce and no more than 5 percent of the non-agricultural workforce.12 Rather, the majority of India’s workers are hired by small enterprises, which face an entirely different reality. In these firms, which are often strapped for credit, the wage bill takes up the majority of the operational costs, there is little ‘value addition’ during the production process, the profit margins are slim, and there is relatively little access to capital. These small, scattered enterprises have limited market power, which means that they cannot mobilise the political power needed to access public resources at scale. The only way for these small enterprises to accumulate profits and capital, then, is to squeeze workers. In these sectors – almost completely unregulated – workers are overworked and underpaid, with few rights as compared to those in the formal sector. During market swings, these firms perish, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their reliance on cheap labour limits the likeliness, or even the possibility, that they will improve working conditions, which is why their workers require direct state support during an emergency such as the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the informal sector is mostly made up of a wide array of service workers who are either employed by small businesses or are ‘self-employed’. A large number of these small businesses, such as shops and restaurants, each employ a handful of workers, many of them hired daily and paid in cash or in kind. Another large section of workers in the informal sector sell their labour directly to consumers. This includes auto drivers, domestic workers, electricians, load carriers, manual scavengers, mechanics, plumbers, rickshaw pullers, ragpickers, road sweepers, and security guards. Most of them have neither an employer nor a stable occupation, and many of them hold multiple jobs. For many of these workers, there is a continuum between rural and urban spaces, as they travel to their villages during the sowing and harvest seasons either to work on their family farms or to hire themselves out as agricultural workers. These are the footloose workers of modern India.13

The development of road networks made possible the perpetual circulation of desperate workers, creating a massive reserve army of labour for the informal sector in both urban and rural areas. The expansion of mobile networks and the availability of more affordable mobile phones allow these informal workers to be in constant contact with labour recruiters (known as ‘jobbers’) and with their families and friends who alert them about the possibilities of employment on a daily or seasonal basis. These workers come from the most disenfranchised and oppressed castes of rural India. Some of them chase agricultural seasons across the country while others seek out construction projects in far-off cities. These migrant workers live in temporary dwellings at the edge of the fields or construction sites, often tents made of old sarees and plastic sheets that have no kitchens or toilets – only the open air. Children play in the rubble or are slung onto the backs of their mothers as they carry heavy loads up ladders or into the fields. The food that the migrants grow is not eaten by them, and the homes that they build are not for them. They work, and having worked, move on to new temporary worksites to work some more.

Migration puts distance between families, particularly across generational lines, draining the youngest and most able-bodied sections of communities to far-flung places in search of work that offers no security for their futures. It is not uncommon to see older men and women who were once casual workers now reduced to begging or to early deaths as they face large out-of-pocket expenses in the predominantly private healthcare sector, which push 55 million Indian every year into poverty.14 Furthermore, the Indian pension system is abysmal, dispensing meagre, and often irregularly paid, sums far below the cost of living (as low as Rs. 200 per month for many).15

As road networks developed across the country, regional disparities in industrialisation widened. Much of the industrial production concentrated in peninsular India and in mining regions, attracting private capital to areas where the needed infrastructure had already been developed. Migrant workers travel vast distances to these sites, alienated culturally and linguistically in their new, temporary homes. This alienation also means that they are often unable to mobilise community support for their struggles, from condemning cases of extreme abuse to demanding higher wages and better working and living conditions. As the journalist Siddhartha Deb writes, ‘It is an arrangement that suits employers everywhere well, ensuring that the workers will be too insecure and uprooted to ever mount organised protests against their conditions and wages. They are from distant regions, of no interest to local politicians seeking votes, and they are alienated from the local people by differences in language and culture’.16 A powder keg of conflicting regional, linguistic chauvinism is being filled up for future detonation.

Small businesses and industrial firms face significant challenges, from the disadvantage compared to the economies of scale enjoyed by large conglomerate to the enormous challenges posed both by the Indian government’s demonetisation scheme, which, overnight, withdrew 86 percent of the cash in circulation in the economy in 2016, and by its implementation of the General Service Tax (GST) in 2017.17 Demonetisation was a blow to small business that depended on cash transactions for sales, purchases, and wage payments. The new GST regime, meanwhile, placed a heavy regulatory burden on small firms as it significantly raised their overhead costs by increasing the cost of compliance, while for large firms it improved the ease of doing business across states. These two processes wiped out many small firms, which resulted in a loss of employment for the most vulnerable workers. Furthermore, the firms that were shuttered during the pandemic provide an opening for large conglomerates to expand.

The data on Indian workers is unreliable. The official unemployment rate stands at 8 percent, although some estimates place the actual rate far higher. Work participation rates remain low, at approximately 40 percent, and the income of the median Indian worker is Rs. 10,000, which is below the minimum wage.18 With 410 million workers in a population of 1.4 billion people, every Indian worker needs to earn enough wages to provide for 3.5 people, which means that they must do so on less than the minimum wage.19

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Birender Kumar Yadav, May Day, 2022. Iron, wood, and charcoal on paper.


The Workers’ Revolt
Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. The capitalist buys the worker’s labour power, seeking to make it as efficient and productive as possible, and retains the gains from this productivity, sloughing off the worker to their slums at night to figure out a way to summon the energy to come back the next day. This pressure for the worker to be more productive and to donate the gains of their productivity to the capitalist is the essence of the class struggle. When the worker wants a larger share of the output, the capitalist does not listen. It is the power to strike that provides workers with a voice to enter the class struggle in a conscious way.

Since the late 1990s, Indian trade unions have joined together to call for a general strike against liberalisation almost every year, with roughly 200 million workers participating as of 2022.20 How did so many workers – most of them in the informal sector – join this strike?

As a result of the fights led by informal workers (mainly women workers in the care sector), trade unions have begun to take up the issues of informal workers as issues of the entire trade union movement over the course of the past two decades. Fights for permanency of tenure, proper wage contracts, dignity for women workers, and so on produced a strong unity between all the different sections of workers, whose militancy is now channelled through the organised power of trade union structures. Similarly, women workers do not see issues that pertain to them as women’s issues, but as issues that all workers must fight for and win, as is also the case with issues that impact workers along lines of race, caste, and other social distinctions. Furthermore, unions have been taking up issues impacting social life and community welfare, arguing for the right to water, sewage connections, and education for children as well as against intolerance of all kinds. These community struggles are an integral part of the lives of workers and peasants.

At the same time, the ideas of the right wing – notably manifested in Hindutva (the core ideology of Hindu supremacists) – have begun to take root in Indian society, including in sections of the working class. The right wing has found fertile ground in the socioeconomic conditions generated by neoliberal capitalism, such as the invisibility and alienation that workers experience in urban areas, the indignities of everyday life, the isolation and toxic socialisation engendered, especially, in men separated from their families, the solace offered by religious gatherings, and the search for community and identity. With the waning influence of secular and rational ideologies in the country and the general narrowness of the working-class movement, there has been no significant force to counter this. A working class high on Hindutva and the hallucinations of a Hindu state (Rama Rajya) turning its misery and humiliation on fellow workers of a different religion or caste and finding empowerment through degrading fratricide is the neofascist prescription to control workers. What delays a united, full-blown neofascist agenda across the country is the presence of regional nationalities, particularly in southern India. Nonetheless, the potential of working-class and peasant resistance to this kind of neofascist agenda was evident in the farmers’ movement, for instance, when farmers and peasants from a range of backgrounds took the fight against big capital to the streets.

The pandemic shed light on the clear incompatibility of the interests of the working class and capital. The former lie in public investment, generating employment, taxing corporations to generate funds for the welfare of the working class, and bolstering agriculture and small industries. Given the structure of the working class and the numerical weakness of organised workers, the confrontation with capital can only be successful when it goes beyond the shop floor and wage bargaining to compel the state on a deeper, and political, level. This is easier said than done, as the left wing of the trade union movement knows well. Yet, the pandemic has the potential to open a window into and expand workers’ class consciousness, countering the ideological and media apparatus of capital which only obfuscates the contradictions facing society.

In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle.

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Birender Kumar Yadav, Life Tools, 2021. Charcoal and pastel on paper.


Notes
1 For more, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock: A Virus and the World, dossier no. 28, 5 May 2020, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/.

2 R. Ramakumar, ‘State Governments Can Purchase Only 25% of Vaccines – Belying Centre’s Claim of Equitable Policy’, Scroll, 11 May 2021, https://scroll.in/article/994606/state- ... ble-policy.

3Mahesh Vyas, ‘Record Profits by Listed Companies’, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, 31 May 2022, https://www.cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.php? ... 6&msec=206.

4 Government of India, Problems of the Third Plan: A Critical Miscellany (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1961), 49–50. http://14.139.60.153/bitstream/12345678 ... -49232.pdf

5 Government of India, Periodic Labour Force Survey (New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, July 2020 – June 2021).

6 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam, dossier no. 55, 23 August 2022, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-5 ... eel-plant/

7 T. K. Rangarajan v. Government of Tamil Nadu & Others, Case no.: Appeal (civil) 5556 of 2003 (New Delhi, 6 August 2003),https://main.sci.gov.in/judgment/judis/19215.pdf

8 Vijay Prashad, No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015), 218.

9 Jyoti Punwani, ‘How 5 Reliance Workers Fighting for a Better Deal Found Themselves in Jail on Terrorism Charges’, Article 14, 29 July 2021, https://article-14.com/post/how-5-relia ... 20ec49f652

10 Peter Wonacott, ‘Deadly Labour Wars Hinder India’s Rise’, Wall Street Journal, 24 November 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125858061728954325

11 Subodh Varma, ‘Modi’s Rule Is Boosting Profits, Squeezing Wages’, NewsClick, 24 September 2018,https://www.newsclick.in/modis-rule-boo ... zing-wages

12 Government of India, Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS)– Annual Report (New Delhi: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, July 2020 – June 2021).

13 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

14 Taran Deol, ‘India’s Persistently High out-of-Pocket Health Expenditure Continues to Push People into Poverty’, Down to Earth, 22 September 2022, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/hea ... erty-85070.

15 Express News Service, ‘14 States Give Rs 500 or Less as Pension, Says Report’, The Indian Express, 29 September 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/india ... t-5378783/

16 Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 170.

17 Shruti Srivastava and Archana Chaudhary, ‘Amidst the Digital Push, GST Transition Will Be Painful for SMEs’, The Economic Times, 23 May 2017, https://ecoti.in/hR_02a.

18 Mrinalini Jha and Amit Basole, ‘Labour Incomes in India: A Comparison of PLFS and CMIE-CPHS Data’ (CSE Working Paper no. 46, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, February 2022), https://cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in ... ncomes.pdf

19 Mahesh Vyas, ‘Employment and Unemployment Rise in December’, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, 2 January 2023, https://www.cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.php? ... ary%202020

20 Peoples Dispatch, ‘Millions Strike in India Against Modi Government’s Policies’, Peoples Dispatch, 30 March 2022, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/03/30/ ... -policies/.

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-6 ... ing-class/
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Wed May 10, 2023 1:28 pm

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India: The grim unemployment scenario
By Prabhat Patnaik (Posted May 10, 2023)

Originally published: Peoples Democracy on May 7, 2023 (more by Peoples Democracy) |

THE data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure which had shot up during the pandemic has not come down much despite the recovery that has occurred in the level of GDP from its trough.

The unemployment rate which was 4.7 per cent in 2017-18, rose to 6.3 per cent in 2018-19. It shot up during the lockdown associated with the pandemic: in December 2020 for instance, it was 9.1 per cent. Since then it has come down a little but not as much as one would have expected even from the truncated output recovery that we have experienced. It was 8.3 per cent in December 2022, came down to 7.14 per cent in January 2023, but has again climbed up to 7.8 per cent in March, the latest month for which we have CMIE data. The GDP recovery has been stunted, but the GDP estimate for 2022-23 is still supposed to be 8.4 per cent higher than in 2019-20 and 12.95 per cent than in 2018-19. Yet, despite GDP being 12.95 per cent higher, the unemployment rate at the end of 2022-23 is higher at 7.8 per cent compared to 6.3 per cent for 2018-19. Since the work-force in these four years could not have increased by more than, or even as much as, 12.95 per cent, the obvious conclusion is that employment per unit of GDP has come down between 2018-19 and 2022-23. This in turn could not have happened through any significant technical change being introduced within particular activities over such a short period.

One can infer therefore that the current higher unemployment rate compared to before the pandemic can be attributed to the two following factors: one, that the recovery has occurred primarily in sectors and activities which are not employment-intensive; that is, the petty and small-scale sectors that are employment intensive, have been left out of the ambit of the recovery. And, two, there have of late been significant lay-offs whether in response to reduced demand or in response to the imposition of “austerity”.

There is direct evidence provided by CMIE of such lay-offs. It estimates that the actual number of employees declined from 409.9 million in February to 407.6 million in March. Incidentally in 2019-20 the total number of employed persons in India was 408.9 million, which means that the absolute number of persons employed in March 2023 was lower than in 2019-20. This is a grim scenario, where, let alone additional jobs being created to absorb additions to the work-force, the existing number of jobs itself has declined in absolute terms.

It is ironical in this context to come across government spokesmen claiming an improvement in the employment situation in the country. These spokesmen present two arguments: one, that the CMIE data are untrustworthy and are at variance with what the official Periodic Labour Force Surveys suggest which is an improvement in the employment situation; and, two, the fact that the demand for employment under the MGNREGS has gone down is also indicative of such an improvement.

Both these arguments however lack substance. A major difference between PLFS and CMIE data on employment is that the former includes unpaid work in domestic economic activities within the term employment, which the latter does not. But the problem with including unpaid work in domestic activities is that when there are lay-offs or reduced employment possibilities outside, in short precisely when the family’s fortunes are taking a nosedive, and family members are being excluded from outside employment and forced to remain at home sharing whatever work is available within the household, PLFS will not show any increase in unemployment. It cannot in other words distinguish between enforced confinement to the home and gainful employment in domestic activities.

The CMIE is free of this shortcoming; and therefore, even though its exclusion of unpaid work in domestic activities means that one category of work, namely gainful employment in domestic activities, gets excluded, it has the merit of capturing in a consistent manner what exactly is happening to paid employment opportunities in the economy. And since these go down in a period of growing unemployment, the CMIE measure provides a reasonably accurate proxy for the overall unemployment scenario.

Likewise, the fact that there has been some return to towns of persons who had trudged to villages because of the enforced deprivation of both residence and incomes during the ill-thought-out lockdown associated with the pandemic, is not a matter of dispute. A reduction in the massive burden that had fallen on the MGNREGS because of the lockdown therefore should come as no surprise. But while this may mean some reduction in the unemployment rate compared to the period of the lockdown, it does not deny either a rise in this rate compared to the pre-pandemic levels, or the fact of an altogether meagre decline of this rate compared to the lockdown period.

Besides, because of the wage arrears on MGNREGS that have built up because of the central government’s unwillingness to make timely wage payments, the keenness even among the unemployed workers to seek work under this scheme has gone down somewhat. The demand for work under MGNREGS therefore has become a poor indicator of the magnitude of unemployment. In fact it is ironical that while the union government delays wage payment to MGNREGS workers, leading to their unwillingness to offer themselves for employment under this scheme, this very fact of their unwillingness is then used by the same government to claim that the unemployment situation has improved!

One normally expects unemployment figures to be correlated to the average real income figures for the working people as a whole, and even with the average real income of the self-employed workers. This is because the self-employed group is where the reserve army of labour is typically concentrated, and a decline in employment, resulting in a rise in the proportion of the reserve army, would tend to lower the average real incomes in the self-employed sector. And it is interesting that the government’s own PLFS data show that the average real income of self-employed workers in April-June quarter of 2022, for which we have data, while slightly higher than during the trough reached during the lockdown, was below its level during April-June 2019, both in rural and in urban India (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, Macroscan). This only tends to confirm the CMIE findings on unemployment.

What India’s unemployment statistics reveal is something fundamental, namely that neoliberal capitalism can never be the social arrangement that can overcome the problem of unemployment in our country. The votaries of “economic liberalisation” had sold the people of India a dummy: since a certain degree of diffusion of economic activity had occurred from metropolitan capitalist economies to a few small countries of east and south-east Asia resulting in a significant using up of their comparatively small labour reserves, they argued that this strategy could be successfully replicated everywhere, that if only things were “left to the market” and the government withdrew from its interventionist role, except in favour of big capital, then India too would be on the road to “full employment” and prosperity.

Of course a capitalist economy can never attain “full employment’, since it can never function without a reserve army of labour, but at least a substantial using up of the labour reserves under neoliberalism was promised, which deceived even many progressive people. And the argument succeeded in “rolling back” the State that had come into being in third world countries after decolonisation and that had adopted a relatively autonomous stance vis-à-vis metropolitan capital and imperialism in general.

There were two obvious fallacies with this argument: one, taking the third world as a whole, the diffusion at the margin of some activities from the metropolis could not possibly use up its vast labour reserves; it might do so in some small countries with relatively small labour reserves, but not in countries like India with huge labour reserves. Two, when neoliberal capitalism got into a crisis, as was inevitable with capitalism, there was no mechanism to bring this crisis to an end, in which case working people in countries like India that adopted a neoliberal regime would be doomed to an endless period of suffering. What we are seeing today in India is only a vindication of this proposition.

Overcoming unemployment is not a matter of applying a few “fixes” to a regime of neoliberal capitalism. It is a matter of moving to a completely different socio-economic order that not only functions without a reserve army of labour, but that also permits conscious State intervention on behalf of the working people.

https://mronline.org/2023/05/10/india-t ... -scenario/

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INDIAN EMPIRE GUIDE TO ENGLISH AMMUNITION DEPLETING FROM START TO FINISH

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The pro-war English writers supporting the arming of the Ukrainians with depleted uranium ammunition* have no brains.

The anti-war English writers opposing depleted uranium ammunition have no spines.

Has the kingdom of the English ever been so self-deluded on the page and so depleted on the battlefield?

Yes once, four hundred years ago, when King James I sent the first ambassador to the Mughal empire of India ruled by Jahangir ((lead image, left and right) to exchange gifts and threats for exclusive trading rights. The ambassador was Sir Thomas Roe (left), between September 1615 and February 1619. But Roe spent most of his years in India squatting over the toilet bowl with chronic dysentery and complaining to his friends at court in London and to his superiors at the East India Company at his lack of cash to impress the Indians and his lack of force to coerce them.

To solve these problems when Roe was upright, he plotted piracy at sea, sabotage and extortion on land against the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and French — and a protection racket against the Indians which they dismissed with a laugh. This is how the English empire began in India – with a dysenteric bang. It is still ending with a dysenteric whimper. In between, a great deal of English shit which they turned into Indian gold.

Now that King Charles III has his own Indian for prime minister in London, Rishi Sunak (right), he is also plotting to replace India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at next year’s election in New Delhi. But that’s a story for another time.

For the time being, the new king has been compelled to remove the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the queen’s crown during last week’s coronation; that’s because Modi is demanding its return.

The announcement from Buckingham Palace didn’t admit the king’s hand had been forced by the Indians. “Some minor changes and additions,” according to the king’s spokesman, “will be undertaken by the Crown Jeweller, in keeping with the longstanding tradition that the insertion of jewels is unique to the occasion, and reflects the Consort’s individual style.”

The diamond remains locked up in the Tower of London; Modi hasn’t got it back yet.

The British Broadcasting Corporation used pidgin English to add mockery to the king’s lie.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/

“The British never apologized about anything,” a young Indian tourist was reported by a US journalist in front of the Koh-i-Noor’s replica in Hyderabad last week. “They’re the ones who came and tried to, you know, quote unquote ‘civilize people.’ But civilized people don’t steal — don’t take away stuff and never return it.”

In the retelling of how the English thieving from India began, Nandini Das, a professor of English literature and culture at Oxford University, has revealed that when Roe first presented his credentials at the Indian court, he was embarrassed to discover the gifts he had brought from London were so paltry, the Indian courtiers scoffed at them.

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“The presents you have this year sent,” Roe reported back to London, “are so extremely despised by those who have seen them.” The [crimson] velvet upholstery of the coach built for Jahangir by London craftsmen was “scorned [by the welcoming official who] said it was little and poor. [The velvet] had faded to a base tawny. [The mirrors in their leather-worked cases] are rotten with mould on the outside and decayed within. The other things are so decayed, as your gilded looking glasses, unglued, unfoiled and fallen to pieces…the burning glasses and prospectives [telescopes] such as no man hath face to offer to give, much less to sell, such as I can buy for six pence a piece; your pictures not all worth one penny… they laugh at us for such as we bring.”

When Das cross-referenced Roe’s letters and diaries with the Jahangirnama, Jahangir’s memoirs, she discovered that the emperor made no mention at all of the English ambassador at court.

In Das’s history, Roe’s reaction was a combination of racist superiority towards the Indian princes; sexism which prevented Roe from learning how the women of the imperial harem exercised political power; ignorance of Indian military command, control, and war-fighting capacities; and envy at the wealth the Mughal empire displayed, the splendour of its architecture and gardens, the quality of its arts and manufactures.

Roe, like others in his entourage, adopted towards the Indians what Das calls “an assumption of effeminacy”, to which was added the idea that they were best suited to be servants to power, and not the other way round. They are “very valiant at tongue-fight, though not with their weapons”, wrote Edward Terry, Roe’s chaplain and personal adviser, in a book of reminiscences of India published in 1655. The Indian armies, he said, were “incredible multitudes” but “not well learned [in] that horrid bloody art of war as the Europeans.” According to Terry, the Indians were “ill masters, but good servants…so faithful to their trusts unto whomsoever they engage, to the English as well as to any other, that if they be at any time assaulted, they will rather die in their [master’s] defence, than forsake them at their need.”

This English judgement lasted for another 330 years until Indian independence in 1947; it lingers still in current plotting by the Foreign Office and MI6 for regime change in Delhi next year.

After his landing at Surat in 1615 Roe sublimated his vulnerabilities — which his Indian counterparts recorded in their correspondence from the beginning — with the conviction that only by display of weapons and threats of force could he, his embassy and the East India Company’s merchants get what they wanted. Tiring of court talk which failed to materialise in the monopoly trade concessions he was demanding, Roe admitted in a letter home: “I had long been fed with words, and knew as well as the heart trembled , that fear of us only preserved our residence.”

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Roe’s underlings – the crews of the English ships, the East India Company factors (traders), his aides and accompanying adventurers – drew the same conclusion; they exercised it in rape of local women, drunken fistfights in the street, drawing swords against Jahangir’s officials. Unable to speak, read, or learn court Persian or the Indian languages, untrusting of his interpreters, contemptuous of Jahangir’s family, and quarreling with the English for failing to defer to his authority, Roe wrote: “every man is for himself, and I the common enemy…My employment is nothing but vexation and trouble: little honour, less profit.”

Profit – that was the rub, a more painful rub than Roe’s bowels. In the English voyages to India before Roe’s arrival in 1615, the East India Company accounts had shown an average rate of return of 155% on purchase and sale of their cargoes. By 1617, the rate of return had dropped to 87% and was continuing to dwindle. This was for goods bought at local prices, packed and shipped back to London, and sold to rising demand. Conventional trade, in short, which drew considerable speculative investment at first. However, as the Indian prices went up, the value of English goods went down, and the costs and risks of arming the English vessels rose, the diminishing returns led the English to conclude that stealing at sword and cannon-point was the more certainly profitable line of business to follow.

Roe acknowledged this in a letter of October 6, 1617, “it is hard to prove to these people the difference of [English] merchants and [English] pirates, if all of a nation.”

Roe and his men tried fraud, but in Jahangir’s court, they couldn’t match the locals or the Persians for bribes. Instead, they tried selling fakery, but there too the Indians were more than a match for them. In one of the schemes, the English attempted to sell a waterworks construction project for Agra, using an English artist pretending to be an engineer. Jahangir’s irrigation engineers saw through him and the fraud failed; it left behind the Indian conviction that nothing the English offered to sell was genuine.

The history of the East India Company in the years to follow, the takeover by the English military, and the incorporation of India into the empire is, as William Dalrymple’s encyclopedic history has documented, the replacement of fraud by force. Dalrymple summarises the story in his title: “The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” (2019).

Think of it as the prequel of Operation Barbarossa – except that the English succeeded in their invasion of India, while the Germans were defeated at their invasion of Russia. Slow to learn their own history, and having no other means but force, the English are trying once more against both Russia and India.

Among the hapless English crooks who makes a cameo appearance in Das’s history of 1615-19, there is Gabriel Towerson. He started with fraud; tried woman-hostage taking next; then piracy on the Arabian Sea. Das records that Towerson accompanied Roe on their return journey to England in February 1619. Towerson proved to be irrepressible in pursuit of schemes for doubling his money at grand larceny. But four years later his plan to capture a corner of the nutmeg trade in the Indonesian islands ran into the Dutch, who tortured and executed him at Amboyna (Ambon). The 400th anniversary of that ending occurred on March 9 of this year; it was not memorialized in London; read more here.

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Illustration of the Amboyna Massacre, March 1623; note this Dutch use of waterboarding long before its operational refinement by the US Army and Central Intelligence Agency.

The Indians were more peaceable in warding off the English than the Dutch. According to Das, Roe attempted to sell “one or two” armed English ships to protect the sea lanes for Indian merchantmen trading between their coast and the Red Sea. This, proposed Roe, would be “full proof” of English affection for India and good intentions. Roe added the kicker: “if we spent our time, paid our men, consumed our provisions and victuals, it was fit we should have recompense.” The Indian merchants, port and court officials – especially Jahangir’s trade concessionaires – saw this for what it was, a protection racket by a weakling.

“It had been an uncharacteristically speculative move from Roe,” Das concludes, “more like something one might have expected from Towerson”. Das is making the well-known distinction between the good cops and the bad ones. She stops short of Dalrymple’s conclusion that in the imperial invasion to follow, there were no good cops.**

Das concludes that “nothing particularly significant emerged from Roe’s embassy.” She means nothing significant in mercantile or free trade terms. Instead, the English prepared to conduct their business with India according to what the English today and their allies call the rules-based order. In other words, the rules they devise and impose by force, by war.

“Overall,” Das has written. “Roe’s embassy was liable to be seen as a false start, and false starts rarely make epic beginnings.” False start, or force and fraud start? The irony in Das’s conclusion is not one which professors can afford to draw these days if they aim to keep their chairs. This is also the point of view among those now targeted in Delhi. They say Indians can’t risk the irony and must choose their chairs or fall between the stools.

(More, off topic.)

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon May 22, 2023 2:41 pm

MAY 22, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Modi at Hiroshima — optics, politics, reality

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Family photo of Prime Minister Modi (4th from left) & special invitees to G7 Leaders’ Summit, Hiroshima, Japan, May 21, 2023

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visits abroad are carefully choreographed events, given their optics domestically. Perhaps, this is even more so today as general elections loom ahead and in Hiroshima, Modi was taking the stage after the crushing defeat in the Karnataka election, which was as much political for the ruling BJP as personal for Modi himself.

But the optics were great. President Biden who is a past master in the art of flattery stooped to conquer Modi, even seeking an autograph and remarking that he envied the latter’s “popularity”.

It must be one of the paradoxes of our disjointed times that Hiroshima, a sleepy, southwestern coastal city, was handpicked as the setting for the G7 summit for its symbolism to “send out a strong message” against nuclear weapons. But it is a reminder too the United States is still the only country that ever used the atomic bomb as a weapon, when it dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima in 1945 — quite unnecessarily as historians since concluded — killing an estimated 140,000 people and turning the theory of nuclear warfare into a terrifying reality.

Hiroshima was turned on its head to censure Russia and China. Innuendos were galore at the G7 summit packed with world leaders who preach one thing and practice something entirely different. The UK PM Rishi Sunak flew into Hiroshima after supplying depleted uranium munitions to Kiev, which soon exploded in the central Ukrainian city of Khmelnytsky, leading to a significant increase in gamma radiation levels that could contaminate the earth in surrounding areas for decades.

The G7 was dripping with doublespeak. The erstwhile colonial powers waxed eloquently about “economic coercion” but craftily excluded South Africa as special invitee and instead chose Comoros. Why Comoros? Because, Comoros’ most significant international relationship is with the erstwhile colonial power France, which will guarantee its good behaviour at Hiroshima.

To be sure, the cynical spectacle at Hiroshima couldn’t have escaped Modi’s attention. His “undiplomatic” remarks at the Working session 9 of the G7 Summit — on the ludicrous reality of the UN being a mere “talking shop”; the imperative need for respect for the UN Charter, International Law and sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; the unilateral attempts to change the status quo and so on would have made western leaders present in his audience squirm with embarrassment.

Even if that was not Modi’s intention, what he stated — commas, semi-colons and full stops included — actually epitomised the US’ continued illegal occupation of one-third of the territory of Syria, which was, by the way, one of the original members of the UN since 24th October 1945. The G7 presents a pathetic spectacle, indeed.

However, it was Modi’s meeting with Ukraine’s president Zelensky that brought out his outstanding techniques of communication. Even the insipid MEA readout written in staccato English brings out the flavour of their brief conversation.

Modi made three key points: one, for him, Ukraine war is not a political or economic issue but “an issue of humanity, of human values.” Two, India supports dialogue and diplomacy “to find a way forward” and is willing to lend a hand in conflict resolution. Three, India will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine.

We don’t know how Zelensky handled this tricky conversation. Perhaps, he actually limited himself to brief Modi “on the current situation in Ukraine.” Modi’s remarks message that he stuck to India’s neutrality and neatly side-stepped the tendentious issues concerning the genesis of the Ukraine crisis or the complexities of Russia’s confrontation with the West, leave alone the core issue of NATO’s expansion into Ukraine (which Zelensky inherited) and the country’s loss of sovereignty.

Instead, Modi took to high ground and harped on the human suffering due to the war and stressed the primacy of “dialogue and diplomacy”. We may never know whether this would have caused uneasiness in Zelensky’s mind, although finger pointing wouldn’t have been Modi’s intention.

Ironically, but for a series of blunders on the part of Zelensky, the war wouldn’t have erupted or escalated to the current level of violence — his rejection of the Minsk agreements that provided for provincial autonomy to the Donbass within a federal union; his obduracy to pursue a military solution to Donbass’ alienation; his retraction from the Istanbul deal in late March last year within weeks of Russian intervention due to the back seat driving by the US and UK who had their own agenda to force regime change in Moscow.

Modi, perhaps, got carried away to stake his personal prestige in a conflict resolution in Ukraine. Clearly, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Neither will Biden accept the spectre of military defeat and Ukrainian state’s meltdown nor will Russia compromise on what it considers sees to be an existential war.

The government shouldn’t be delusional about an enchanting prospect of India leading the West and Russia the door that never really opened in the post-cold war era into a rose garden. It simply isn’t there. Neither has India the credentials nor the clout to be a peacemaker.

What is really disheartening is that a great opportunity was lost for Modi to hold the hands of Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and pool their intellectual resources — two giants who champion the Global South. But then, Washington may have queered the pitch by derailing Zelensky’s appointment with Lula. (Zelensky failed to show up.)

Modi travelled to Hiroshima with an eye on his upcoming state visit to the US (June 21-24.) Besides, there have been signals from the Biden Administration lately that a kinder look at India’s pleas for technology transfer may be possible.

Western pressures will continue on Modi government to give up its neutrality on Ukraine. The European Union has lately waded into the topic formally. (See my article EU calls out India on Russia sanctions.) But trust India to push back. The surest sign of it is Modi’s reversion to “hug diplomacy,” the appeal of EAM Jaishankar’s abrasive style to BJP’s “core constituency” in the social media notwithstanding

The heart of the matter is that the strategic ties that bind India and Russia signify a mutually beneficial partnership that is fully in conformity with international law and imbued with a “win-win” spirit and mutual trust and confidence in a volatile international climate of which Ukraine is only a symptom.

The objective reality is that the India-Russia energy cooperation, which is an eyesore for the West, may even deepen, given the mutual interest. Bloomberg reported in the weekend that oil trade apart, in April, China and India also accounted for more than two-thirds of Russia’s coal exports to Asia and that set to further increase in the coming weeks due to the emergence of El Nino, a recurring warm climate pattern that could cause droughts in the region.

According to a study in the prestigious journal Science, this year’s El Nino is expected to develop between May and July and is likely to be especially strong. Bloomberg quoted an expert opinion:

“The worst place to be right now amid these searing temperatures is South Asia… When you can’t even take care of your people’s basic needs, it’s very hard to care too much about international affairs… [South Asians] are asking themselves: would I rather risk falling afoul of the US or forgo steep discounts on energy?”

https://www.indianpunchline.com/modi-at ... s-reality/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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