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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 14, 2021 2:26 pm

CP of India, Dismantling Public Sector and Subverting Welfare State
2/11/21 4:15 PM
India, Communist Party of India En Asia Communist and workers' parties
D Raja, General Secretary, CPI

Politics and economics can never be separated. It is political economy which decides and reveals the nature and character of the state of any Nation. The Constitution of our country defines Indian state as a secular state and as a welfare state. The BJP-RSS combine has been aggressively making efforts to subvert the secular state into a theocratic fascist state. The present regime headed by Modi has been subverting the welfare state by dismantling public sector after the dismantling of the Planning Commission.

The distinguishing feature of Modi's governance since 2014 has been the steep decline of economy and the weakening of its foundation beyond measure. This process has been exacerbated by suicidal policy of privatization of economy and dismantling of very resilient and profit-making public enterprises, both strategic and non-strategic, which have a sterling record of immensely contributing to the emergence of self-reliant India. Paradoxically the prime minister who talks of Atmanirbhar Bharat is doing exactly the opposite in striking at its very root by privatising the public sector enterprises and pursuing neo- liberal policies which would make India critically dependent on international finance capital.

The announcement of the finance minister that the government will work with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for execution of the bank privatisation plan announced in the Union Budget 2021 constitutes yet another resolve of the government to hand over the public sector banks to private hands. This would take India to pre-bank nationalization era and deepen inequality, poverty and concentration of wealth and means of production in a few hands. Such measures to strengthen private and corporate sectors at the cost of public sector are disastrous. The adverse consequences of such policies on economy and society are already felt acutely. Such fatal economic policies are contrary to the Constitutional vision of India which aims at progressive reduction of inequality and poverty and realization, in practice, of justice and equality.

Dr B R Ambedkar while participating in the discussion in the Constituent Assembly on Objectives Resolutions on 17th December 1946 presciently said: “I do not understand how it could be possible for any future government which believes in doing justice socially, economically and politically, unless its economy is a socialistic economy”. The constitutional vision of social and economic justice for citizens of India has been gravely jeopardized by providing more space to market forces, private sector and corporates. The aggressive privatisation process of Modi regime affecting railways, banks, public sector enterprises which include navaratna companies is seriously compromising the social and economic justice enshrined in the Constitution.

The Directive Principles of State Policy is clear that “the ownership and control of the material resources are so distributed as best to subserve the common good and that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment”. One economist has commented that “what is particularly worrying in India’s case is that economic inequality is being added to a society that is already fractured along the lines of caste, religion, region and gender.”

Privatisation is direct attack on the policy of reservation. It deprives the access to the employment and education in the public sector for the SC/STs, OBCs and also differently-abled persons. There is no law to provide reservation in private sector. This is an attempt to put an end to all affirmative actions and to put an end to social justice. The economic process based on privatisation is generating crises aggravating the existing fault lines and structured forms of inequality such as caste, patriarchy and gender.

Dr Manmohan Singh who in the context of the financial crisis of 2008 originating in the USA had said that India could withstand it because of resilience of public sector enterprises and public sector banks. So if our country was kept relatively immune from a financial crisis of global proportions then it is entirely due to the public sector enterprises and public sector banks. By privatising the public sector enterprises and banks the Modi regime is making India more vulnerable to multiple crises of national and global dimensions. It would make India susceptible to manipulation by those who have monopoly over international finance. It aggravates crises at multiple levels of economy, society and polity and makes India an easy target for control by the global powers. India will lose its economic leverage and vast masses of people would slip into more poverty and deprivation at a faster pace.

Internationally renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz is on record in saying that the regulatory mechanisms controlling public sector banks of India had the salutary effects of keeping the country free from several crises which overwhelmed some of the developed countries. The Modi regime is deliberately ignoring such sane observations and going ahead with policy measures which has crippled Indian economy and is bound to result in devastating consequences for the people and the society as a whole.

The world over it has been deeply realised by the policy makers that during the COVID pandemic it is the organisations in public sector including public sector hospitals and health sector which came to the rescue of the people at a highly affordable cost. Even in a country like Britain its Prime Minister Boris Johnson was on record in saying that his life was saved because of the public sector National Health Service. The COVID crisis has underlined the point that it is the public sector which can rise to the challenge and save people and society from the dangers threatening their life, livelihood, safety and security. Such renewed emphasis on public sector at the global level to save humanity should awaken the Modi regime.

Our own public sector has played a key role in nation building. Instead of strengthening public sector the Modi regime is committing the egregious blunder of dismantling it. It will prove fatal for the country as a whole.

The working people both rural and urban must put up a strong resistance to the continuance of Modi regime and save Indian State to continue as a welfare state ensuring economic and social justice. The political parties which have the ideological political commitment to save the Constitution and the Nation must come together and build popular movements across the country.

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 09, 2021 2:05 pm

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How India’s Farmers’ Protests Could Upend the Political Landscape
March 7, 2021

By Vijay Prashad – Mar 4, 2021

For the past three months, Indian farmers and agricultural workers have been in the middle of a difficult struggle against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tens of thousands of them have gathered around the capital city of New Delhi; they say that they will not disband unless the government repeals three laws that negatively impact their ability to remain economically viable. The government has shown no sign that it will withdraw these laws, which provide immense advantages to the large corporate houses that are close to Prime Minister Modi. The government’s attempt to crack down on the farmers and agricultural workers has altered the mood in the country: those who grow the food for the country are hard to depict as “terrorists” and as “anti-national.”

Modi’s party — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — currently holds power in several of the states that border Delhi. It is from these states — Haryana and Uttar Pradesh — that many of the farmers have gathered, although they have also come from far afield, from Bihar and Maharashtra (they have also come from Punjab, which is governed by the Congress Party). Even if there are some shifts in the political calculations in these states, particularly Uttar Pradesh (population 200 million), these will not be tested at the ballot box for some years to come: Punjab and Uttar Pradesh do not go to the polls until 2022, and Haryana will elect its legislative assembly in 2024 when the Indian parliament will face a general election. Modi is safe for the next three years, an eternity in contemporary political life.

Little wonder that he has not felt the need to make any concession to the farmers and that he has turned to the full arsenal of intimidation and violence to fragment the unity of the farmers. This intimidation includes a general attack on those branches of the media that have favorably reported the protest (Newsclick, a news portal, faces a bewildering investigation because—as is widely acknowledged—it had amplified the views of the protesting farmers).

State Elections

Over the next few months, assembly elections will take place in one union territory (Puducherry) and four states in India: Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. To put this into perspective, the populations in these four states total 225 million, by itself the fifth-largest country in the world behind Indonesia. That the democratic fate of so many people will be decided by May 2 and that these elections get so little attention outside India tells one a great deal about the Eurocentrism of our global media (certainly the result of the national election in Germany—with a population of 83 million—will be far more consequential than these five regional elections in India, but nonetheless the lack of any interest should not be shrugged at).

The prime minister’s extreme right party, the BJP, is in power in only one of these states, Assam (population 31 million). It is likely that the BJP will retain hold of that state, although there is tension around the highly unpopular Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) pushed by the BJP in 2019. In a triangular contest, the BJP and its allies will face on the one side a grand alliance of the center-right Congress Party and its Left and regional allies; and on the other side, newly formed anti-CAA parties (the Assam Jatiya Parishad and the Raijor Dal). Fragmentation of the anti-BJP vote could very well be decisive for its re-election, a point made by the Congress Party, which has sought unsuccessfully to bring in the new parties.

West Bengal (population 91 million), like Assam, will face a triangular contest between the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), the BJP, and a bloc of the Communists and the Congress. On February 28, 2021, more than a million people gathered at Kolkata’s Brigade Ground for a massive show of strength led by the Left and its allies against both the BJP and the TMC. The Left Front had been in power in West Bengal from 1977 to 2011, when it was ousted by the TMC. Since then, the TMC has gone in and out of alliance with the BJP in Delhi, and it has promoted corruption, cronyism and social despair. The power of BJP money and the projection of Prime Minister Modi as a charismatic figure have drawn key TMC leaders into the BJP. This is the first time that the Left and the Congress are going to the polls together. A recent ABP/C-Voter poll found that the TMC looks to be on track to hold the state government.

Regional parties such as the TMC are a familiar feature in India’s larger states. Here linguistic sub-nationalism provides the foundation for the local elites to drive their own agenda through such entities. In Tamil Nadu (population 68 million), the history of anti-Brahmin agitation led to the creation of a non-Brahmin party, which then fissured into several parties, two of which (AIADMK and DMK) remain the dominant forces in the state’s politics. The AIADMK, currently in power, is gripped most tightly by the regional elites and has an intimate relationship with the BJP even if there are some social divergences. The DMK, on the other hand, has been smart with its alliances, although it is dogged with accusations of nepotism. As in earlier elections, the DMK has made an alliance with the Left, which has deep pockets of support among the working class and the peasantry; anti-privatization fights, led by the Left, will help the alliance gain the support of workers in densely populated urban areas. Opinion polls suggest that the DMK-Left alliance will prevail in Tamil Nadu.

Kerala Flies the Red Flag

Since 1980, the electorate of Kerala (population 35 million) has not re-elected its state government, with power oscillating between the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front. This year, the Left Democratic Front (LDF), which has been in office since 2016, looks set to break the pattern and return to power. There is widespread agreement that the LDF government — led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan — has fulfilled the promises of the communists’ 2016 manifesto; there is overwhelming clarity that the LDF administration has been efficient and rational. The LDF government confronted a series of cascading crises with calm competence: the aftereffects of Cyclone Ockhi in 2017, the Nipah virus outbreak of 2018, the floods of 2018 and 2019, and then the COVID-19 pandemic (Health Minister K.K. Shailaja was called the “Coronavirus Slayer” by the Guardian). Despite what seemed like a never-ending cycle of crises, the government pushed hard to strengthen public education and public health care, and to provide housing and food to the public.

No anti-incumbency was visible in the local body elections in 2020, when the young—largely female—candidates of the LDF triumphed. The LDF opened its 2021 campaign with a march to deepen development (Vikasana Munnetta Yatra) that began at the north and south ends of Kerala’s length. Development is the key theme—the promises that the LDF government has met include a major push to build basic infrastructure through the pro-people budgets of Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac. The LDF record is strong, which is why it has entered the election campaign with the slogan “Urappaanu LDF” or “LDF for Sure.”

The return of the Left to government in Kerala would be significant, but it is not a bellwether of the Left’s overall strength in India. Nonetheless, the cycle of farmer agitations and the linkage with the main trade union federations suggests the possibility of the future growth of the progressive forces.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 10, 2021 12:30 pm

‘World Is Changing’: Sea of Women Farmers Throng Borders of Delhi to Celebrate International Women’s Day
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 8, 2021
Ravi Kaushal, Sagrika Kissu

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Most women farmers, who had gathered at Tikri and Singhu borders of the national capital, told NewsClick that the farmers’ protest has been a life changing experience for them, as through these protests they became aware about their legitimate rights.

Scarves of all colours and Kisan Ekta flags could be seen fluttering in the sea of women farmers pouring in at the various borders of the national capital to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8.

The Samyukta Kisan Morcha- a collective of farmers’ unions protesting against farm laws and the proposed Electricity (Amendment ) Bill – had given a call for celebrating the day to honour women farmers and their contribution to the movement at all protest sites at the entry gates of the national capital. Special arrangements could be seen placed to ferry women farmers from remote parts of Haryana and Punjab.

Singing songs in Haryanvi, Sheela Butana, along with a group of 50 women farmers, came from Butana village in Sonepat district to the Singhu border. On being asked about the meaning about their songs, she said the women are cursing the shameless government who has turned deaf even when 300 farmers have lost their lives in the struggle.

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“The song expresses the sorrow of families who lost their sole breadwinners in this struggle. What will happen to their families? We are calling it shameless because no sensitive government would have avoided our demands. This insensitivity, I think, is age old and has now become a part of their thinking. I still have pearl millets rotting at home because the private traders hardly paid Rs 700 per quintal whereas the minimum support price is Rs 2,150 per quintal. The government has fixed the quota of 7.5 quintals per acre arbitrarily. However, the movement has now given us hope that we will fight and finally become victorious,” Butana said.

On being asked if the ongoing movement has given them a sense of equality, she said, “There is no doubt that the movement provided equal opportunities (to women) but the real battle remains to be fought in families and farms where we are still less valued in comparison with men although our hard labour remains same.”

Sunita Rani, an activist of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) who has been organising anganwadi and industrial workers, told NewsClick that the preparations for the day had begun two weeks ago. “As per my estimates, over 1,200 women workers came with us to participate in the struggle. We campaigned across villages and requested them to be part of the celebration. In return, the women from 25 villages came on tractors and through private vehicles. Interestingly, the men who had objected earlier, too, readily agreed,” she said.

Jagmati Sangwan, All India Democratic Women Association leader, who received a rapturous ovation by the audience, said that the day has given the women participants an opportunity to raise their voice for just rights, which are their “entitlements”.

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“The fact of the matter is women have only 13% entitlements whereas they contribute 70% to farming. It has simply deprived us from nearly all welfare schemes, be it compensation for damage of crops or any relief if she dies by suicide due to agrarian distress. The situation has compelled us to come up with the term “compound loss” which women are suffering at every front,” she said.

She further added that the Centre led by PM Narendra Modi should keep aside its ego to listen to the government. “If there is any wisdom left in the government, it should call an emergency Parliament session to discuss the agrarian distress. We call agriculture as the backbone of our economy. If the backbone is in pain, the whole body would ache,” Sangwan pointed out.

Commenting on the disparities in salaries of women in comparison with men, she said that the current aim is about establishing the identity of women as farmers and getting their just entitlements, adding, “The movement recognised it. I think other avenues for struggle in other sectors would also open with the success of the current agitation.”

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A number of the women farmers who visited the protest site for the first time were also curious to see the border site where the police authorities had fixed nails and put concertina wires to prevent any movement of people and vehicles. One such visitor who came from Samrala in Ludhiana said that it was her special wish to visit the border. She explained the meaning of the Punjabi couplet on the placard she was carrying as, “When rulers lose their wisdom after getting intoxicated with power, people overthrow them.”

Meanwhile, a woman protester speaking from the main stage kept appealing, “My dear sisters, the struggle is not just limited to these farm laws alone. Please reject all Manuwadi theories which have so far limited your identity to child bearing mothers.”

Tikri Border

The highlight of the protest site at Tikri border on March 8 was that the stage was managed by the women farmers dotted with women guards and women speakers who had come from different parts of Punjab and Haryana.

While addressing the crowd, women speakers announced their resolve to “struggle for the right to equality in society and strive to fight against oppression and discrimination women have been subjected to”.

Gurmehar Kaur, 50, has spent most of her life in the fields of Punjab’s Barnala district. Having been born in an agricultural family, Kaur used to spend long hours in the fields with her father. For her, the process of sowing, cultivating and tending to the land came handy. “It was a gift given to me by father and I never stopped working in the fields,” she told NewsClick.

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However, Kaur travelled nearly a hundred kilometres to join another thousand women in the outskirts of the national capital, leaving behind her fields. Two months ago, the apex court’s suggestion that the women, elderly farmers and children should return home came as a huge disappointment for her.

“I was shocked. It made me think that the court is oblivious to the fact that women are equal partners. We take care of family and fields, both. So when men are not ask to leave, how can they ask the women to leave?,” she questioned.

Balwinder Kaur, 80, has come all the way from Punjab’s Sangrur district. Walking towards a bunch of young female farmers, she said, whenever someone talks about farming, a male farmer crosses their mind. “But the reality is different. Female farmers have contributed equally and even more than men. Then why female farmers are invisibilised and unheard is my concern. I have come here to shatter that notion,” she added.

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According to Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2018-19, released by the National Statistical Office (NSO), in rural areas, 71.1% of female workers are engaged in the agricultural sector, which is much higher than the male workers (53.2%).

BKU leader, Paramjeet Pithoo, who has been at the borders since the protest started, said that years of discrimination has resulted in women being denied ownership of land. “Because of the patriarchal setup and gender discrimination, women didn’t get access to even basic facilities like loans and irrigation. We want this to end,” she added.

As per the India Human Development Survey (2018), 83% of agricultural land in India is inherited by male members of the family.

Most women farmers told NewsClick that the farmers’ protest has been a life changing experience for them as through these protests they became aware about their legitimate rights.

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“Aandolan ne hume mehsoos karvaya hai ki hamari izzat hai aur hamare bhi haq hai, jinke baare mei humei phele khabar nahi thi (The movement has made us aware that we should be treated with dignity and we also have rights, about which we did not know earlier),” said Ranjeet, 50, who had come from Patiala to join the protest.

Manju, 41, who had come from Jind, Haryana said that she wasn’t even aware that there is a day exclusively meant for women. “This is my first time. When I learnt that there is something called Women’s Day. I was so elated. I couldn’t keep myself from joining,” adding that she is against farm laws which serve “corporate interests”.

Manju is joined by hundred other women from Haryana – Jind, Rohtak who arrived at the protest site in tractors and trolleys to present their issues. “The world is changing,” Manju said, looking in utter disbelief at nearly one lakh women protesting and added, “Earlier, women could never step out of their homes, but now, they are here fighting for their rights. And once they are united, nobody can stop them.”

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She is joined by her sister Kamlesh, who also appeared awestruck by the sea of women surrounding her. “This is women’s power. It makes me believe that I can do anything. I will make sure that my daughter is educated so that she can speak on the stage like other women,” Kamlesh said, pointing towards the stage where a woman was addressing the crowd and shouting “Mahila Ekta Zindabad (Women’s Unity Long Live)”.

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:27 pm

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Understanding India’s Migrant Workers’ Crisis Through the Prism of Commodity Fetishism
April 10, 2021 Yanis Iqbal capitalism, COVID-19, Fetishism, India, migrants, poverty
By Yanis Iqbal – Apr 8, 2021

As the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic intensifies in India, migrant workers are returning back to their villages. Imposition of new restrictions to contain the virus – like the announcement of a night curfew in Delhi – has instilled fears in workers that they will be rendered jobless and get stuck in the industrial centres where they are precariously employed. Migrant workers in several states have been seen waiting to board buses and trains bound for their homes in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, as their source of income dries up because of Covid-related curbs. The Lokmanya Tilak Terminus in Mumbai, from where trains to UP and Bihar depart, saw a surge in the number of passengers, as was the case in the automobile manufacturing hub of Pimpri-Chinchwad on the outskirts of Pune.

In 2020, the period from March to May witnessed millions of Indians returning to their villages, many of them making the journey on foot, as businesses abruptly shut because of the nationwide lockdown, leaving them without money and shelter. Walkers struggled with exhaustion and hunger, with many dying alongside the roadways (in early May, sixteen workers in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district found refuge at night on railways lines and were crushed to death by a freight train). India did not see such an exodus since 1947-1948, when the British partitioned South Asia into India and Pakistan, leading to the relocation of 13 million people. Although official figures were not announced for the exodus, that number is expected to dwarf those from the 1940s. It is this bitter experience that has prompted workers to go home even before any comprehensive restrictions on travel are imposed.

The case of Indian migrant workers is representative of how capitalism works on the ideological plane. These workers are extremely poor, earning less than $6 a day, which is much below the minimum wage. They live without a social safety net, continuously facing dislocation. To make matters worse, these laborers are victims of intersectional discrimination: 16% of migrants are members of Scheduled Castes and 8% belong to the Scheduled Tribes and the sum of these two is equivalent to their percentage of the total population. These workers had moved, over the last decades, from their home villages to seek work elsewhere in the country. They form the backbone of the economy, contributing around 10% to India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Until the pandemic, they lived a life of invisibility – their exploitation concealed from the gaze of others through what Arundhati Roy calls the “erasure of the poor from the imagination”. With the arrival of a poorly planned lockdown, the workers were thrust forward on the terrain of visibility, drawing widespread attention to the ugly underside of India’s post-1990s neoliberal “miracle”.

We need to look at the migrant workers’ experience of invisibility-visibility through the prism of commodity fetishism. In a section of “Das Kapital” entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, Karl Marx writes: “A commodity is…a mysterious thing…because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.”

Two main points can be deduced from the textual extract. First, in commodity production, the basic relation between people assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relationship between things. This reification of social relations or the compartmentalization of human individuality into a collection of discrete things disguises our social relation to the laboring activities of others in the relationships between things. The exchange relation, which is a relation between the amounts of social labour embodied in the commodities in question, appears to be a relation that exists between the commodities themselves, without reference to the producers. Second, Marx writes that “the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom.” To put it differently, our sensuous experience of the commodity as use-value has nothing to do with its value. That is why commodities are both perceptible and imperceptible by us.

It is important to note that commodity fetishism or the displacement of social relations between people into material relations between people and social relations between things is not an illusion. Marx writes: “Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things [emphasis mine].” Here is the explanation of the passage.

The form in which the capitalist mode of production manifests itself cannot be reduced to an opposition between the real underlying essence and the illusory appearances. Rather, it is a process in which is the capitalist mode of production is both presented and concealed in one movement; the result is not pure illusion – it is a necessary feature of that mode of production. The fetished appearance that the mode of production takes on results from mechanisms that are the necessary conditions for the functioning of the system.

Commodity fetishism arises from the fact that commodity-producing labour is not directly social. Commodities are produced by individuals working independently of one another. Although the total of these individual labors is the total social labour devoted to producing the total social product, these producers do not come into contact with one another until they exchange their products. Hence, the social character of their labour only appears in exchange, and they exchange their labour for that of others only by exchanging products. In a nutshell, commodity fetishism has an objective basis in reality because the economic relationships among commodity producers are necessarily mediated by the exchange of their products on the market.

Commodity fetishism is extremely important to analyze because it forms the ideological foundations of capitalism. Since in a commodity producing society the social relationships among the producers, the fact that they are all members of a society in which they produce for other members of that society, take on the form of a “social relation between the products of labour”, the value of the commodity, which is an expression of the portion of social labour embodied in the commodity, appears to be an inherent and natural property of the commodity, its price.

Michael A. Lebowitz expounds on the wider effects of the price-form on the constitution of capitalist hegemony: “Price is the form in which that chain of human activity and human relationships appears to us. This knowledge comes in monetary units. We know the prices of the things we need. We know the price we have ourselves received. And, now we must take that knowledge and make individual rational decisions…as consumers, as capitalists – we’re all the same, maximizers on the basis of the knowledge we have, maximizers on the basis of money.” In other words, the price-form entails a wide-ranging transformation in how we view others: for the capitalist, the worker exists only as labour-power, for the worker, the capitalist only as capital; for the consumer, the producer is commodities, and for the producer the consumer is money.

Commodity fetishism – and the price-form by extension – played a singular role in erasing Indian migrant workers from the imagination insofar that the social character of their private labour was completely concealed, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them transparently. With the onset of the pandemic, the structurally-inscribed logic of effacement was disrupted as factories, construction industry, roadside restaurants/tea shops and street vending temporarily shut down. Driven out by their employers, millions of impoverished workers – existentially dried out by what Marx calls capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” – began a long march back to home, carrying with themselves the obscenity of the ruling class’ hunger for profit. These workers are again being tossed about by the capitalist system as the dirty dregs of society.


Featured image: Migrant workers in New Delhi start to make the long journey home after the lockdown was announced in March, 2020. © Bhuvan Bagga/AFP/Getty.

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Thu May 06, 2021 1:12 pm

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Turning a Profit from Death
May 5, 2021
By Tithi Bhattacharya – May 3, 2021

ON MODI’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA

Let us be clear from the outset: what is happening in India right now is mass murder. And it is organized by a man who has practice in such matters.

Two images bookend the current crisis and contain in them a trajectory of the crisis. The first is the image of the Indian police hosing down migrant workers with bleach last spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, and the grimmer, more recent one of cremation fires burning all over the country. The road between the 2 markers was expected, but the violence lies in the fact that it could have been avoided.

When the infection rate fell after the first lockdown, the Modi regime declared victory over the virus. Lacing his propaganda with Hindu mythology, in March the prime minister told the nation that while the Mahabharat [mythic battle of Hindu epics] war had been won in 18 days, he would win the corona battle in 21.

Policy was shaped around these wild superstitions. The government’s coronavirus task force stopped meeting and the Health Minister declared that India was “in the endgame of the pandemic.” The government boasted that it had sold 55 million doses of vaccine to 62 different countries.

It was an example of a perfect marriage between Hindutva and capitalism. Hindutva assured the government that the virus was over, while capitalist greed monetized a global pandemic.

VACCINE CAPITALISM
The lifesaving vaccine is available for free in almost all countries of the global North, in India it is not. The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker, is currently the chief manufacturer of the vaccine in the country. In January they sold the first 100 million doses of the vaccine to the Indian government at a “special price” of 200 rupees ($2.74) per dose, after which they raised the price. On the private market the vaccine is being sold for 1,000 rupees ($13.68) per dose.

SII is a private company headed by one of the richest men on the planet, Cyrus Poonawala whose net worth is about $13 billion. Poonawala made his fortune as a horse breeder and racer. These superior gambling instincts guided his son, Adar Poonawala, to look at a devastating global pandemic last year and decide that it was his moment to make a killing. In his interview with international media, Poonawala emphasized that he was going to “take the risk and become a front-runner.”

The usual suspects jumped on this bandwagon of turning public health emergencies into private profit. The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation invested $150 million, while the vampiric firms of Goldman Sachs, Citi and Avendus Capital became SII’s chief advisors. Like all elites from the global south trained well in neoliberal speak, Poonawalla declared his lofty anticolonial goal to be the supply of “A majority of the vaccine, at least initially… to our countrymen before it goes abroad.”

In reality, nearly 80 percent of SII’s went abroad for a steep profit, till the Indian government finally forced a ban on exports as the death count began to rise.

The lineaments of this capitalist macabre soon revealed themselves. Cyrus Poonawalla’s wealth rose 85% in 5 months. And as the smoke from funeral pyres began to darken Indian skies, in late March, Adar Poonawalla signed a deal to rent a London mansion for a record $70,000 a week.

NEOLIBERAL DEATH-MAKING
The Modi regime is directly responsible for the current bloodshed. But the road here was paved by all who came before them, those who, since the 1980s, eagerly complied with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and destroyed India’s life-making institutions and infrastructure. We apparently needed more cars, more dams, at the expense of food and healthcare.

The Indian economy was formally liberalized in 1991 under a Congress government. The story that followed will be distressingly familiar.

Reducing the fiscal deficit, the holy grail of neoliberalism, in reality opened up “a revenue deficit,” as the rich were relieved of taxation and the state, while increasing military expenditure, slashed public sector investment and social spending. I want to emphasize that not just the Congress or the BJP but every ruling coalition, at the state and federal level, followed this trajectory, including the Stalinists in power in my home state of West Bengal, whose most celebrated effort was to dispossess peasants from their land in order to build a car factory. More than 50 million Indians were dispossessed to make way for development projects like large dams in the first 50 years of independence to power capitalism’s productivist imperative. Research shows that over 50 percent of the dispossessed were adivasis or indigenous people living in hills and forested land where most of the dams and mines were built.

“While absent from any life-making work, such as healthcare or education, the state has been all too present in death-making, from the Gazafication of Kashmir to erecting detention camps for Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis.”

The healthcare sector told a similar story of predation. According to the BMJ, today, India has just 0.8 doctors and 0.7 hospital beds per 1000 population and is the third largest military spender in the world, after the US and China. But not everyone was left without healthcare. The private healthcare industry exploded under neoliberalism, with the country ranking among the top 20countries for its private healthcare spending, while being amongst the lowest for spending on public health.

Austerity, as Ruthie Gilmore teaches us, is the “organized abandonment” of life and life-making paired with “organized violence.” The closing of schools and hospitals and the expansion of prisons and defense budgets hold a mirror to each other.

Austerity, however, merely amplifies what is a key organizing principle of capitalism, the lowering of the value of human life. While capitalism strives to lower the value of labor power in order to increase surplus value, what this means concretely for the working class is, following Rosemary Hennessy’s concept of abjection, what we might call the manufacture of abjection. This mechanism goes beyond the economic effort of lowering wages. Indeed, wages are mostly effectively lowered when capital can successfully lower the parameters of social reproduction of life and labor power. Social oppressions such as race, gender, and caste are some of the key drivers for lowering social reproduction.

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We should be reminded of a dark passage in Capital where Marx describes how, during his time in Britain, women were “still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation.” Michael Goldfield recently made a similar point about the role of slavery and racism in the US, showing how “both planters and northern industry benefitted from cheap labor whose lower limit was determined by racism” producing across time “a callous disregard for human dignity and the sanctity of human life.” To paraphrase Gilmore, where life is not precious, life is not precious.

We are seeing this murderous logic – of capitalism devaluing life through austerity – playing out in India on such a scale that even the rich and powerful are not safe. A former ambassador died while waiting in the parking lot of a Delhi hospital. There are no hospital beds. There are no ambulances. In Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, the grills used to burn bodies have been operating so relentlessly that the iron on some of them melted. Almost all the mortuary staff in crematoriums and burning ghats are from Dalit or Bahujan communities, whose average monthly pay is around $134. They are working round the clock, without any PPE, providing last rites, grief counselling and consolation to families who in life would have probably advocated for their continued ritual segregation from elite society. Bezwada Wilson, an organizer for the rights and welfare of sanitation workers, told VICE World News, “No one knows how many cremation workers have tested positive for this deadly disease and no one knows how many have died as a result. It is because government officials don’t see the cremation workers and sanitation workers as human.”

But as the country gasps for oxygen, the stock of Linde India, a supplier of medical oxygen, has doubled. Adar Poonawalla has honorably done a Ted Cruz, fled India and sought refuge in his modest London mansion, as have the ultrarich in their private jets.

Meanwhile the rest of India burns, as BJP leaders continue to peddle cow dung and cow urine as medical solutions to covid 19. As of Saturday, only 1.9 percent of India’s population has been fully vaccinated and over 400,000 new daily infections are confirmed by tests, the actual figure is surely far higher.

CAPITALIST STATE AGAINST THE PEOPLE
Narendra Modi, more than any Prime Minister since the 1980s, has brutally wielded the might of the Indian state to shape a polity safe for capital, Hindutva has been the ideological battering ram for this project. While absent from any life-making work, such as healthcare or education, the state has been all too present in death-making, from the Gazafication of Kashmir to erecting detention camps for Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. Indeed, it’s not the state that is currently keeping the neoliberalism-ravaged health care system operational, but ordinary people. Teams of volunteers have set up mutual aid networks across the devasted landscape and are trying to reduce harm in ingenious and deeply loving ways. Gurudwaras and mosques are working tirelessly to provide food. The fascist Shiv Sena’s chief Uddhav Thackeray was forced to thank the Muslims of Ichalkaranji town of Maharashtra for donating Zakat money to fund a 10-bed ICU at a local hospital. People have set up COVID helplines to reach the sick and the suffering and are setting up car pools to act as ambulances, while politicians in Maharashtra and Gujarat have been seen hoarding essential drugs and oxygen to sell at a hiked price on the market.

“The dead demand that mystical veils of inscrutability be ripped from history, for beneath them lie the banally obvious explanation for this carnage: capitalism.”

This murderous division of labor between the state and the people needs to be reversed and the state forced to act on their behalf. A number of steps can be taken immediately to stem the tide.

1.- First, the government needs to invoke the Essential Commodities Act to stop the hoarding of essential drugs, oxygen, and so forth by predatory businesses.

2.- Second, the state should commandeer spaces to set up field hospitals and open up hotels for the unhoused.

3.- Third, the government needs to invest money in vaccine production immediately and take steps to make vaccines free and universal. The differential pricing of these drugs, instituted by corporations like SII, needs to be scrapped and vaccines made free for all, and with distribution according to vulnerability, and not wallet size or ability to push to the front.

4.- Fourth, while Anthony Fauci has recommended a hard lockdown, in a country like India this step is neither humane nor effective without a stimulus payment from the state to families allowing them to be off work. Where there can and should be a hard lockdown is on religious and social gatherings, one of which in recent past, hailed by the government as safe, was undoubtedly been a superspreader.

5.- Fifth, public funds raised to deal with Covid-19 should be made immediately available in an open and transparent way. During the first wave last year the Modi government set up a Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM-CARES) to deal with the crisis. More than 70% its funds have been donated by public sector units, but PM-CARES is set up to be unaccountable to government audits and hence the public. In reality no one knows how these funds are being spent.

6.- Finally, the international Left, especially in the global North, has a vital role to play: we need to pressure our own ruling classes to stop hoarding vaccines. Vaccine imperialism may work for the rich countries in the short term, but it allows the virus to mutate in the parts of the globe without the vaccine and eventually return to strike the hoarders. Internationalism in this case is not just a political principle, it is a public health necessity.

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In Bhopal, Javed, an auto-rickshaw driver, has converted his auto into a makeshift ambulance, ferrying patients to hospitals for free. Courtesy: ScoopWhoop Media

My 13-year-old niece and nearly 80-year-old mother in Delhi are terrified to pick up the phone lest they hear of more losses.

I feel the need to marshal more than language to convey the scale of the crisis. How to convey the feel of air saturated with the ashes of cremated bodies? How to translate into words the sound of the wailing mother who just lost her child? But we must use our words, more loudly now than ever. The dead demand that mystical veils of inscrutability be ripped from history, for beneath them lie the banally obvious explanation for this carnage: capitalism.

As we strive towards stabilizing life in India, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we can no longer afford to stabilize the system.


Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). She recently coauthored the popular book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), which has been translated into over 25 languages. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Salon, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and Spectre.

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Fri May 07, 2021 1:50 pm

In Kerala, the Present Is Dominated by the Future: The Eighteenth Newsletter (2021)

MAY 6, 2021
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E. Meera (Kerala), Red Dawn, 2021.



Dear friends,

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

Kerala, a state in the Indian union with a population of 35 million, has re-elected the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to lead the government for another five years. Since 1980, the people of Kerala have voted out the incumbent, seeking to alternate between the Left and the Right. This year, the people decided to stay with the Left and give the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, Pinarayi Vijayan, a second term in office as the Chief Minister. Health Minister K. K. Shailaja, popularly known as Shailaja Teacher, won her re-election with a record-breaking tally of over 60,000 votes, far exceeding her closest contender.

It is clear that the people voted the Left government back in for three reasons:

The efficient and rational way in which the LDF government has managed cascading crises of Cyclone Ockhi (2017), floods (2018 and 2019), and viruses (2018 Nipah and 2020-21 Coronavirus).
Despite these crises, the government continued to advance the needs of the people, building affordable homes, high-quality public schools, and necessary public infrastructure.
The government and Left parties fought to defend India’s secular and federal structure against the growing, suffocating neo-fascism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader Narendra Modi, who is India’s Prime Minister.
If in other parts of the world the present is dominated by the past, in Kerala, the present is dominated by the future and by what is possible.



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Niharika Ram (Kerala), Plucking the Saffron, 2021.



On Sunday, Chief Minister Vijayan opened his press conference not with the election results, but with a COVID-19 update. It is only after he told the people of Kerala about the current status of the pandemic in the state that he greeted the ‘people’s victory’. This victory, he said, ‘makes us humbler. It demands that we should be more committed’. From the cyclone of 2017 to the coronavirus pandemic, the Chief Minister met the public through calm and rational press conferences during each of the crises, offering science-based assessments of the problems and hope for people who felt despair at the circumstances imposed upon them.

Jeo Baby – the Malayalam film director who made the smash hit The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) – made a humorous and loving parody of the press conference; last year he overdubbed his voice in a Facebook video, telling his four-year-old-son to brush his teeth before he drinks his morning tea! The press conference on 2 May – after the election results emerged – continued that tradition of rational calm.



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Nipin Narayanan (Kerala), Flag in the Storm, 2016.



In comparison, the approach taken by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been stark, obvious to the population of Kerala. On 28 January, Modi addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he announced that India had prevailed over COVID-19. Braggadocio was the mood. ‘It would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country,’ Modi said. ‘In a country which is home to 18 percent of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively’. That same day, Modi’s Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan said, ‘India has flattened its COVID-19 graph’. Certainly, that day, the newly confirmed cases numbered 18,855. Careful observers warned that these numbers seemed deflated, and that the virus – as well as new variants of it – could very quickly reassert itself given the lack of precautions taken in society.

A few days before Modi and Vardhan made these comments, Modi’s party member and Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Trivendra Singh Rawat allowed 7 million people to conduct the Kumbh Mela in April. The Kumbh Mela is a gathering of pious people to celebrate the rotation of Jupitar (Brihaspati), which is supposed to take place every twelve years. In the midst of a pandemic, this year’s gatherings were allowed a year in advance. Government officials warned in early April that the Kumbh and other such gatherings could inflame the transmission of the virus. The Ministry of Health said this was ‘incorrect and fake’. The Mela proceeded and so did Modi’s mass campaign rallies for the Assembly elections.



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Gopika Babu (Kerala), Armed with Red, 2021.



Modi’s comment at the World Economic Forum was both callous and ridiculous. On the last day of April, over 400,000 daily cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in India. The entire health system has been overwhelmed. India’ governmental spending on health is extraordinarily low, about 1.3% of GDP in 2018. In late 2020, the Indian government admitted that it has 0.8 medical doctors for every 1,000 Indians, and it has 1.7 nurses for every 1,000 Indians. No country of India’s size and wealth has such a low medical staff.

It gets worse. India has only 5.3 beds for every 10,000 people, while China – for example – has 43.1 beds for the same number. India has only 2.3 critical care beds for 100,000 people (compared to 3.6 in China) and it has only 48,000 ventilators (China had 70,000 ventilators in Wuhan alone).

The weakness of medical infrastructure is wholly due to privatisation, where private sector hospitals run their system on the principle of maximum capacity and have no ability to handle peak loads. The theory of optimisation does not permit the system to tackle surges, since in normal times it would mean that the hospitals would have surplus capacity. No private sector is going to voluntarily develop any surplus beds or surplus ventilators. This is what inevitably causes the crisis in a pandemic. Low government spending on healthcare means low expenditure on medical infrastructure and low wages for medical workers. This is a poor way to run a modern society, both in ordinary times and in extraordinary times.




Xavier Chittilappilly, Communist Party of India (Marxist), sings The Internationale in Malayalam; he won his seat from Wadakkanchery, Kerala.



Modi’s party – the BJP – lost decisively in this Assembly election in Kerala (not winning a single seat), its alliance lost in Tamil Nadu (population 68 million), and it lost in West Bengal (population 91 million). The mandate in these states is one against the catastrophe created by market-driven medical systems and by a callous, incompetent government. It should be said, however, that these are not the core areas of Modi’s support base. Those are mainly in northern and eastern India and will not be tested in the polls for at least a year. However, the continuation of the farmers’ revolt, which began in November 2020, will likely shift the balance of forces in many of these northern and eastern Indian states, from Haryana to Gujarat.

Nothing better reflects the cruel incompetence of the government than the situation of the vaccines. India produces 60% of the world’s vaccines. Yet – as pointed out by Tejal Kanitkar, professor of the National Institute of Advanced Studies – at the current rate, India will not complete its vaccination drive before November 2022. This is a confounding situation. Kanitkar makes three policy suggestions that are sensible and should be endorsed immediately:

Large scale procurement of vaccines by the Indian government at regulated prices.
A transparent allocation scheme, across India’s 28 states and 8 union territories, in discussion with public health experts and state governments to determine the need and rate of supply, in order to ensure equity across the country.
Local government-driven strategies to increase uptake of vaccines amongst the working masses to ensure equitable access across economic classes.
This is a programme that makes sense not only for India, but for most of the world.



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Junaina Muhammed, Captain and Teacher, 2021.



The mood in Kerala is jubilant, with sensitive people across India looking towards the way the Left government is handling the pandemic and is advancing the agenda of the people. A young poet, Jeevesh M., captured the spirit of the victory:

Hey flower,
Why are you so red?

The roots have gone deep,
Touching the base.
That’s all.

A few days before the election, Kerala’s Health Minister K. K. Shailaja was asked about the state of the pandemic. Her words close out this newsletter:

I think there are two major lessons from this pandemic. One, that the country needs proper planning and decentralised implementation mechanisms to improve our health system. And two, there can be no delay in enhancing public investment in healthcare. We spend just one percent of our GDP on the health sector; it should be increased to at least ten per cent. Countries like Cuba invest much more in healthcare. Cuba’s family doctors system influenced me when we started the Family Health Centres here in Kerala. Healthcare should be universal, with some regulations at the tertiary health care facilities. There should be more investment in health at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. There should be decentralised planning with regulations. Cuba has achieved a lot because of their centralised planning and decentralised implementation. Their system of healthcare is people-centric and patient-centric. Their egalitarian concept and decentralisation can be emulated here.

I am a Leftist. I have no say over the health policy of this country at present. But had the Left been in power at the Centre now, we would have nationalised healthcare and education. The government should have control over healthcare so that everyone – poor or rich – gets equitable treatment.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... elections/

That, my friends, is your dollop of hope for the day. Borrowing from another writer who I have posted today, 'Fight for it".
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sun May 16, 2021 2:09 pm

Why Is the Ruling Establishment Simply Incapable of Responding Any Other Way to the Pandemic?

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On the morning of 27th April I got a phone call from the youngest son of a trade union veteran of Kanpur, that everyone in his large household has been down with COVID-19 (henceforth Covid)-like symptoms. Though the condition of others was stable, his father’s oxygen levels were going down, and they had not been able to find either oxygen, or more importantly, a bed for him in any hospital. I called up the coordinator of a community help group being run for the Covid-affected in my academic campus. He reminded me that his father-in-law, who used to stay with him, had passed away on that very date a year back. That year-old story was repeating itself, of course in a much more grotesque form, with no oxygen, no hospital admission, and a sense of complete loss and helplessness. In the interim a whole long year has passed, when instead of looking at cricket scores we have become used to looking at Covid numbers the first thing in the morning.

What we are seeing, even in the alternative media, is primarily about those who have any sort of access (or think that it is their right to have access) to the ‘system’, in terms of testing, doctor’s attention, medicine, oxygen, ambulance, beds, so on and so forth. The actual reality is far grimmer when we look at those who never enjoyed that access. The neighbouring locality of Nankari, with a population of around 50,000, is separated from our elite and idyllic college campus by just a high security wall. In Nankari – where all those who serve us, from our household workers to contract workers of all kinds, those cleaning, manning security, running the mess, stay in their thousands – there is not access to a single ‘qualified’ doctor. There are only jholawala doctors.

Friends tell that these days there are queues of hundreds, all with similar symptoms, before the doors of these jholawala doctors. In fact some of them have closed their practice, as they are not able to access even regular medicines, and yet people are reaching out to them in hordes at their homes; since the jholawalas live in the same locality anyway, they cannot abandon their patients. As one old associate, who also stays in Nankari, observed about the present health crisis, “only these jholawalas have saved the country”!

In Nankari it is not as if there has been a sudden exodus of qualified doctors. With all its population and its mix of working class and middle class residents, for the 27 years that I have lived in the campus, to the best of my knowledge there never was any access to a qualified practitioner for most of the working classes. Even for the relatively better off there was no qualified practitioner in the locality itself. Only when there was a severe crisis would they consider going to one of the many nursing homes on GT Road and neighbouring commercial localities. So in the present circumstances, there is no testing, and of course mostly no further follow up on Covid, beyond the symptomatic treatment by these jholachaps.

Thus, as those of us who try to keep an ear to the ground are very aware, it is not as if there is a sudden medical crisis due to Covid. For the common folk, any medical contingency has always been a great and almost insurmountable crisis. Only now the crisis has also reached those who thought that they had the right contacts and enough in their pockets to take care of themselves and their dear ones.

In December last year, amid the pandemic, my father suffered a stroke in Allahabad (now renamed ‘Prayagraj’). While doing countless trips between the hospital and home, at every crossing we could hear the loudspeaker blaring that we ought to strengthen the hands of our revered Chief Minister Yogi by following all the Covid guidelines — staying indoors, wearing masks, etc. — and thereby defeating the virus. On one such crossing, one chilly morning, a beggar woman approached our rickshaw at a red light and asked us what we were doing with all those masks and so on. “Do you people have any shame and how do you think that people like us are managing on the streets?”

Thus it would be simplistic to think that this problem is of one year’s making. Indeed the deep fissure due to the pandemic demonstrates what really is required: community health workers (trained and properly paid, unlike what we have done with the present Asha workers) to monitor the health in communities and localities, regular preventive health measures, a well functioning and well equipped hierarchy of public health centres beginning from primary in the residential localities to the secondary and tertiary health facilities, connected right from the rural to the large urban centres. But we are painfully aware as we turn to May 2021, as the pandemic seems to be singeing or burning literally every household across the country, this perfectly achievable goal sounds like a far-fetched utopia.

Many have rued the fact that a whole long year has been lost. Had there been better ‘planning’ for the pandemic (tests, medicines, oxygen, beds, even personnel, etc.), we would not be in the abyss we are in. But my simple submission is that the present regime is basically not programmed to think and work in any systemic and strategic manner when it comes to the welfare of the common people, pandemic or no pandemic. Yes, of course it can strategise and plan, and even operationalise its plans, but those plans must concern something grandiose that fits in with their conception of the nation they think they are in the process of building – a majestic Ram temple at the ‘janam bhumi’, where none other than the former principal advisor to the Prime Minister has been given charge of making the temple into a grand reality before the next elections; or a spectacular new central vista in the nation’s capital so that history remembers the new rulers (thus, even amidst the pandemic, construction of the central vista has been declared an ‘essential’ service). Even if the plan concerns health, it must take the form of imposing pronouncements about how many countries India is supplying the vaccine to, and hence what a great nation we are, and the like; forget the fact that Covishield, which India is producing, has been developed by researchers at Oxford University. Also the fact that for so many critical raw materials involved in production of the vaccines we are dependent primarily on the US and Europe, and a moratorium by those nations on exports can bring even such licensed production to a grinding halt.

In spite of all the noise about ‘make in India’ and ‘atmanirbhar bharat’, and all the grandstanding of our technical prowess, we can hardly make a thing by ourselves. Perhaps the pharma industry is a partial exception, one that is being flaunted so much by our leaders. But two important points are relevant here. One, to the extent there is any indigenous pharma industry in India, it is thanks to the concerted battle in early post-independence India (some of it even before independence) to chart an independent path, with an indigenous network of public research labs and public sector units to make bulk drugs and nurture indigenous capabilities. Most importantly, a path-breaking Patent Act of the 1970s opened up possibilities for the indigenous pharma industry to develop and thrive and for India to become the ‘pharmacy of the world’. But, within a generation, all that has been systematically eroded with the signing on the dotted lines of the new global IP regime under WTO by the Congress government in the 1990s. What we have been left with is a rump of an indigenous pharma industry, pathetically dependent on international forces. For instance, the Indian pharma industry is dependent on China for 70 per cent of its needs of active pharma ingredients (API, mostly for antibiotics and vitamins) at present. Amid the rise in Covid cases now, a great worry for the pharma industry is, if China stops regular freight services to India, how would those needs be fulfilled?

One of the ideological tenets of the present establishment is that it need not really involve itself directly in the welfare of the common folk; such ‘detailing’ ought to be left to the so-called market forces. Correspondingly, the only impediment for ‘economic development’ is the lack of free play for private capital. Witness, first, the dismantling of labour rights by the passage of ‘labour codes’ during the lockdown, and then the three farm laws to unleash the ‘animal spirits’ of markets in agriculture. It does not matter what farmers want or what workers think of these codes, they are all petulant juveniles who do not know what is good for them. The other impediment for such rapid development, according to the establishment, is the historic State presence in various strategic sectors of the economy, and hence the great impatience to do away with the ‘problem’ once for all through asset selling, divestment, privatisation, etc. For all this unleashing of ‘animal spirits’, the pandemic is an opportunity.

So to expect from this regime that it make not only monetary investments but carry out painstaking institution-building in health is simply wishful thinking. That is amply borne out by the past year’s experience. We should also remember that there is a great consensus across the parliamentary political spectrum that things like education and health should be best left to private initiative, mostly the corporate sector. Amid the pandemic, even a state government that wants to sound benevolent would at best talk about health insurance. The moot point is, how would insurance help in getting an oxygen cylinder? But no one is willing to ask that question. It is a great irony that Dr. Manmohan Singh goes to the very public All India Institute of Medical Sciences for Covid treatment. Perhaps that is what we will be left with – such privileged islands of public systems to which certain well-connected sections go, while the remaining, rich and poor, are to be ‘treated’ by the market forces – the former in seven-star corporate hospitals, the latter on the street.

Market forces are indeed in charge right now, with everything being auctioned to the highest bidder, from medicine to oxygen to cremation spaces. This market utopia is not the folly of an individual or two but the consequence of what the local and global elite have systematically tried to build in this subcontinent in the past three decades. It is only now, with the fire lit by the pandemic, we can see the reality in all its starkness.

As far as the State is concerned it has only one job with regard to the common people – to discipline them to become good subjects of the market. When they complain too much, apply the National Security Act on them, as the UP government has been doing when they complain about oxygen, or for that matter anything else – CAA, farm laws, it does not really matter. Meanwhile Mr. Adar Poonawala, the CEO of the Serum Institute, has moved to his newly rented £50,000-a-week London mansion. And as Covid cases in India soar daily to new peaks, Mr. Mukesh Ambani has bought the historic Stoke Park estate, close to London, for US$79 million at April-end this year. Stoke Park, a shooting site for two James Bond films, has one of the finest golf courses in England, and tennis courts for Wimbledon players to practice on.

Given that this is our rulers’ vision of development, one should not be surprised at where we find ourselves.

Rahul Varman teaches at IIT Kanpur (rahulv[at]iitk.ac.in)

Originally published in RUPE India

https://countercurrents.org/2021/05/the ... 2LIA96jcGQ
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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Thu May 20, 2021 1:30 pm

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The structural conflict in India is the product of inequality as a continuation of colonization and a caste system that prevails in its society (Photo: PTI)

SPECIAL JOB
INDIA IN THE FACE OF NEOLIBERALISM, THE PANDEMIC AS PART OF THE TRAGEDY
May 19 , 2021 , 2:31 pm .

India, a country considered a subcontinent, has also been hit by a neoliberal wave that is hitting the world. As in excessive cases, this economic system has not generated even honorable results when it has been combined with the second wave of the global pandemic of covid-19.

In a race towards development, India has been privatized and industrialized, but a good part of its vital heritage has also been sold to the transnational market, unleashing a structural conflict that has shown many scourges with greater force and drama. One of them is inequality as a continuation of colonization and that caste system that prevails in their society, from which some publications say that the British Empire extracted wealth equivalent to almost 37 million billion euros.

Its independence from said empire brought the establishment of a "secular" republic and a constitution that sought to respect and promote good coexistence in a plural country in which 85% of the population profess Hinduism, 14% Islam, 2.5 % Christianity and 2% Sikhism. This was necessary after the partition in 1947 that led to the formation of Pakistan and created "one of the largest migrations in the history of mankind", leading to the uprooting of 35 million people and the death of between 1 and 2 million.

Being the country in the world with the largest agricultural and livestock area, followed by China and the United States, its agriculture is divided into three sections: food, commercial and plantation crops. A large part of its commercial and plantation crops are destined for export and are key both in food and in the world economy.

The commercial ones include sugar cane (used in large part for bioethanol, as fuel), tobacco, cotton and oil seeds, such as peanuts, rapeseed or mustard, while the plantation ones include tea, coffee, coconut or Rubber.

AGGRAVATION OF AGRICULTURAL PROTESTS

More than 60% of the nearly 1.4 billion people in India depend (directly or indirectly) on agriculture for their livelihood. Renowned journalist Palagummi Sainath affirms that what is happening in an agrarian-based society like India can be described as a crisis of civilizing proportions, explained by the hijacking of agriculture by corporations through the predatory commercialization of the countryside.

The symptoms are not only evident in the macroscopic tragedy that COVID-19 causes today, but for years through suicides of farmers, child malnutrition, increasing unemployment, growth of both the informal economy and indebtedness and a collapse total agriculture.

India overcame the famine through the Green Revolution of the 1960s by increasing production based on the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides. Also in a series of norms in the commercialization of those crops that achieved that the activity increased exponentially until the nineties, coming to mean a third of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), today it only represents about 15% of the economy from the country.

The intention of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, was to promote a series of reforms to the agricultural legislation that would end up giving large corporations greater control of the labor and agricultural market with far-reaching consequences on the prices of basic products, the financial structure , wages, public health and the environment. His opponents say that total power will be concentrated in the hands of a few companies and will leave most of the people in the countryside and workers in general in an unimaginable situation of helplessness.

The opposition to this eventual scenario produced agrarian mobilizations that oppose three laws passed in September 2020, the unions organized local protests and in November they started the Dilli Chalo ('Let's go to Delhi') movement in which hundreds of thousands of people marched to the nation's capital and confronted the security forces. The laws are as follows:

APMC (Agricultural Products Market Committee) Cancellation Law: It allows for the first time the trade of agricultural products outside the mandis (markets) regulated by the APMC, and enables the proliferation of private mandis throughout the country, which could control prices and then the market. Today, however, the mandis are run by committees made up of farmers, often large landowners, and merchants or "commissioners" who act as intermediaries to negotiate sales, organize storage and transport, and even finance deals.
Contract Agriculture Law: It is a legislative framework that favors an agreement between the farmer and the buyer before planting at a predetermined price. Experience shows that this practice increases indebtedness and, therefore, consolidates patterns of inequality such as the loss of land and the concentration of property.
Food Hoarding Law (freedom for companies): Seeks to eliminate arbitrary and periodic limits on stocks of agricultural products that the government imposes on merchants. The new law introduces price triggers that will be used only in exceptional circumstances. Until now, stock limits can be imposed only when the prices of perishable goods rise by more than 100% and non-perishable goods by more than 50%. These limits were violated 69 times in the last 10 years.

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Strikes and clashes brought together some 250 million Indian trade unionists (3.3% of the world population) in a historic day of strike that took place on November 26, 2020 and several months of protests (Photo: UITBB)

The unfortunate balance until last January was the death of 157 people linked to the protests due to accidents, suicides and diseases contracted as a result of their permanence in the mobilizations, according to the registry kept by Anuroop Kaur Sandhu, a teacher at the University of Delhi.

Many are the imbalances that the current system contains, but the fact that for every cup of coffee sold for 250 rupees in coffee shops, farmers receive only 1 rupee is an eloquent example of asymmetry. The wave of bankruptcies in thousands of small businesses has led thousands of kisans (medium and small agricultural producers) to suicide. Many of them indebted by local moneylenders who, coordinated with mafias, keep their land.

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The data reported by journalist Colin Todhunter from his analysis on the Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India (ADSI) report, in the last 20 years, approximately 300 thousand farmers have committed suicide and the rate in 2019 was adjusted to 28 people dependent on agriculture per day, which represented 7.4% of the national total. During 2019, the latest data recorded, some 10,281 people in the agricultural sector committed suicide, of the national total close to 140,000. The suicide rate for kisans in 2019 was lower than in 2018, which had reached 10,348.

In Tamil Nadu, one of the poorest states in India, the Kisans built a pyramid with the skulls and bones of farmers who had committed suicide after the worst drought in 140 years. This happened in 2018 in the vicinity of the parliament.

OVER-ACCUMULATION OF ELITES AND INDUCED DEPENDENCY

An elite has emerged in recent years from the state of Gujarat headed by Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, the first and second richest people in India, respectively. Adani has increased his assets by 230% (more than $ 26 billion) since 2014 and owns companies in the mining, gas, ports, airports and in the agri-food sector.

Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in India and owner of Reliance Industries, a company specializing in gasoline, retail and telecommunications; he doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. He now has $ 78.3 billion. Ambani's average increase in wealth in just over four days was more than the combined annual salary of the 195,000 people employed by Reliance Industries.

The most recent report by the NGO Oxfam notes that in India the lockdown caused the wealth of the country's billionaires to increase by approximately 35%, while 84% of households suffered income loss to varying degrees. In April 2020 alone, some 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour.

The report adds that with the rising incomes of India's top 100 billionaires since March 2020, each of the poorest 138 million people could have been given a check for Rs 94,045. The report added: "[…] it would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to earn what Ambani earned in one hour during the pandemic […] and three years to earn what Ambani earned in a second."

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India's richest man and owner of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani (Photo: Times Now News)

On the other hand, the NGO Grain points out that Indian global companies are also colonizing the retail space through internet sales. Walmart entered India in 2016 following the purchase of the internet sales startup Jet . com for a value of $ 3.3 billion, and then in 2018 India's largest online sales platform, Flipkart, was bought for $ 16 billion.

Today Walmart and Amazon control nearly two-thirds of India's digital retail sector using predatory pricing, steep discounts, and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. According to Grain, when these two companies generated sales worth more than $ 3 billion in just six days during a sales crackdown on the occasion of the Diwali festival, small retailers in India made a desperate call to boycott online shopping.

In 2020 Facebook and US venture capital fund KKR pledged to invest more than $ 7 billion in Reliance Jio, the digital store of one of India's largest retail chains. Customers will soon be able to shop at Reliance Jio via the Facebook and WhatsApp chat application and will be able to eradicate millions of small merchants and neighborhood stores.

Colin Todhunter says that in the case of agriculture, something similar is happening because foreign agro-capital is pressuring India to eliminate its meager (compared to richer nations) agricultural subsidies. The public distribution system and publicly owned security reserves represent an obstacle to the needs driven by the search for the benefit of the interests of the global agribusiness that require the country to become dependent on imports (and alleviate the problem of overproduction that it has Western agricultural capital, that is, its vast stocks of cereals that it already sends to the Global South) and restructure its own agriculture to dedicate itself to those crops (fruits, vegetables) that consumers in the richest countries demand.

If so, India would have foreign exchange reserves and would buy food reserves from world traders but would not get food sovereignty.

THE PANDEMIC AS A SYMPTOM OF THE TRAGEDY

The exponential shooting of covid cases has shown the fissures of the public health system in several of its components, but the most serious lies in the vaccination program whose deficiencies have been unexpected.

The limitation that has caused the hoarding of vaccines by rich countries and the limits to domestic production established by the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have constituted threats to a more effective advance in said program, however it seems that they do not justify some errors.

The world's largest vaccine producer is India, long regarded as the "world's pharmacy" with several companies most capable of producing vaccines and which has been adept at reverse engineering a number of generic drugs. 60% of the vaccines used in the "developing" world for childhood immunization came from that country and 90% of the use of the measles vaccine by the WHO.

In addition, its tradition of successful vaccination campaigns against polio and tuberculosis for children is recognized, which may have mobilized the infrastructure available for urban and rural inoculation.

Last January, the government approved the use of the candidate vaccines Covishield (Oxford-AstraZeneca), produced in India by the Serum Institute, and Covaxin, produced by Bharat Biotech under a manufacturing license from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), but no permits were granted to other producers to increase the supply.

The vaccination program officially started on the 16th of that month with two goals:

Cover 30 million health and essential workers by the end of March.
Cover 250 million people by July.
As of April 17, only 37% of essential workers had received both doses (of each of the vaccines) and an additional 30% had received only the first.

That reduced number could have been a result of concerns about the rapid regulatory approval granted to Covaxin, which had not completed Phase III trials. The Indian government also encouraged exports, in part to increase its geopolitical positioning by meeting the Serum Institute of India's commitments to AstraZeneca and COVAX's global service.

As vaccines were administered at different age ranges, they became scarce and the rate slowed to the point where, by April 24, only 8.5% of the population had received even one dose. Another relevant piece of information is that the vaccine was allowed to be administered by private services, at a price of 250 rupees (about 2.76 euros) per dose.

It would have taken both producers three years to meet the required demand, and the United States' export ban on some essential ingredients has further affected AstraZeneca's production, limiting Bharat Biotech's capacity.

The lack of forced licenses to other producers to increase the supply was due to the fact that several manufacturing units in the public sector did not have adequate investment. On April 16, in the midst of the evident emergency, three public companies were allowed to manufacture the vaccine, leaving three other public units, with more experienced knowledge and capacity, left out.

In 2018, investment in health represented 3.5% of GDP, a figure that has not changed in decades, while per capita health spending, by purchasing power parity, was $ 275.13, around the figures for Myanmar or Sierra Leone.

At the end of 2020 it had 0.8 doctors and 1.7 nurses for every 1,000 inhabitants and 5.3 beds for every 10,000, while China, for example, had 43.1 beds for the same number of people. India only has 2.3 intensive care beds per 100,000 people (compared to 3.6 in China) and 48,000 respirators (China had 70,000 respirators in Wuhan alone).

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The Indian public health system has overcome the covid-19 pandemic (Photo: Sputnik)

Covid-19 vaccines are not available to the Indian population at the rate it is needed, and will not be available before November 2022, a new government policy will allow vaccine manufacturers to raise prices, but not produce enough quick to meet the needs (and India's public sector vaccine factories are down). There is also not enough medical oxygen, and the promises of capacity building have not been delivered.

Private sector hospitals manage their system according to the principle of maximum capacity and do not have the capacity to handle loads that exceed them, since the optimization theory does not allow the system to cope with this emergency, and in normal times it would mean that hospitals would have excess capacity.

No private sector is going to voluntarily develop a surplus of beds or fans. This is what inevitably causes the crisis during the pandemic in neoliberal economies.

There is no evidence that variant B.1.617.2, called "Indian variant", is causing more serious disease but its transmissibility is higher, which explains why the number of infections is increasing much faster. Although in recent days the registered cases have fallen below 300 thousand for the first time in almost a month, their daily death toll is still more than 4 thousand and the health collapse remains.

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said "very early new data" from the University of Oxford gives "a degree of confidence" that vaccines will work against this version of SARS-CoV-1, other scientists from Oxford have explained that "it will be susceptible to the vaccine in the same way as others."

On the other hand, climate change has exacerbated the crisis in the Indian subcontinent with extreme droughts that threaten tea plantations and Cyclone Tauktae that has left at least 24 dead and 96 missing when it swept through the west of the country , left the coast submerged and turned the streets into rivers and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee.

The executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Henrietta Fore, has declared that "although the situation in India is tragic, it is not unique", recalling that this institution has warned several times about the risks of lower our guard and leave low- and middle-income countries without equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapy. If these warnings are not heard, there are cases when the health system explodes, without being able to care for all the sick, as in Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and also, further away from India, in Argentina and Brazil.

Separately, India's chief scientific adviser, K Vijay Raghavan, warned last Wednesday that even after infection rates decline, the country should be prepared for a third wave given the high levels of circulating viruses.

***

In times of global pandemic, the neoliberal drift, continuation of a colonial system, continues to test emerging countries that will have to confront their internal contradictions in order to reformulate their role in the world. The case of India, beyond the subjects and actors, outlines a clear example of the price that is paid when the interests of capital determine the future of the majority.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... a-tragedia

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:08 pm

The Kisan [Farmers’] Commune in India: The Twenty-Fourth Newsletter (2021)

JUNE 17, 2021

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Women farmers from Punjab and Haryana protest at the Tikri border in Delhi, 24 January 2021.



Dear friends,

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

On 26 June 2021, tens of thousands of Indian farmers will gather in front of the government offices in India’s twenty-eight states. They will come to commemorate the completion of seven months of their nation-wide protest against the extreme right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This gathering will be part of a long cycle of protests that started on 26 November 2020 as part of a day-long general strike of 250 million Indian workers and peasants. Since November, tens of thousands of farmers, or kisans, have surrounded India’s capital, New Delhi, forming a Kisan [Farmers’] Commune. This Commune came to being 150 years after the Paris Commune, out of whose defeat, Marx wrote, would rise the next experiment with socialist democracy. The Kisan Commune, standing alongside Venezuela’s comunas and South Africa’s land occupations, is one such experiment.

The farmers braved the Indian winter with defiance. What provoked them was the passage of three laws in September 2020 that delivered Indian agriculture firmly into the hands of a small group of mega-corporate houses. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha [United Farmers’ Front], made up of over forty farmer and agricultural workers’ unions, has called for the protest in June. Their slogan for that protest, Kheti Bachao, Loktantra Bachao [Save Farming, Save Democracy], sums up the farmers’ struggle.



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A farmer couple spends a winter night in their trolly at the Singhu border in Delhi, 28 December 2020.



The farmers and agricultural workers knew immediately when Modi’s government passed those laws that the mega-corporate houses would take control of the mandis, the marketplace for farm produce. The laws weakened the intervention of the state and handed over price mechanisms to powerful monopoly firms that have a close relationship to Modi and his party. The survival of agrarian life is at stake. This is not an exaggeration. The farmers know the impact of neoliberal policy: since 1991, when India adopted such policies in all aspects of economic life including for agrarian India, over 300,000 farmers have committed suicide. This protest movement, this Kisan Commune, is a scream against suicide.

The 2011 Census says that 833.1 million people out of a population of 1.2 billion live in rural India, which means that two in three Indians live in the countryside. Not all of them are farmers or agricultural workers, but all of them are in one way or another connected to the vitality of the rural economy. There are artisans and weavers, forestry workers and carpenters, miners and industrial workers. An entire social world premised on a sustainable and healthy agricultural economy is in danger of being wiped out. This is what the farmers know: that the capitalist attack will undermine the existence of India’s rural workers and their ability to feed the country’s growing urban population.



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A tractor contingent on GT Karnal Road breaks through barricades and enters Delhi, beginning a confrontation between protestors and the police in Delhi, 26 January 2021.



Two months into the protest, the farmers swarmed into Delhi. The date they chose for their entry into the city was 26 January, Republic Day, when the newly independent India adopted its Constitution in 1950. Farmers rode 200,000 tractors towards the heart of their capital city, while others arrived on horseback and on foot. The police stopped them at barricades along the major highways. The soundtrack for this clash between those who feed the people and those who feed off the people was provided in 1971 by the poet Sahir Ludhianvi in his meditation on Republic Day:

What happened to our beautiful dreams?
When the country’s wealth increased, why this growing poverty?
What happened to the path to increased prosperity of the ordinary?
Those who had once walked with us to the gallows,
Where are those friends, those companions, those beloveds?

Each street is on fire, each city is a killing field.
What happened to our solidarity?
Life drags us through the deserts of gloom.
Where has the moon gone that once rose on the horizon?
If I am a culprit, then you are also a sinner.
Leaders of our country, you are guilty as well.




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A farmer from Punjab protests during a tractor march on Republic Day on GT Karnal Bypass Road in Delhi, 26 January 2021.



From Tricontinental Research Services (New Delhi) comes a remarkable dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India (Dossier no. 41, June 2021), which asks the simple questions: what has happened to agriculture in India and why are the farmers in revolt? At the heart of the dossier is an exploration of the agrarian crisis, a chronic condition whose symptoms are varied: the vagaries of agriculture, including crop failures, which result in low to negative incomes; indebtedness, underemployment; dispossession; and suicide. The roots of this crisis are not inevitable; they can be found in the structure of British colonial rule, in the failures of the new Indian state after 1947 (a state which capitulated to the landlord and bourgeois class), and in the accelerated failures of the neoliberal period from 1991 to the present.

It is one thing to recognise the revolt of the farmers; their active presence on the outskirts of New Delhi cannot be fully ignored. It is another to try and understand why they are there, to understand the deep roots of the crisis to which they respond with such fortitude. This dossier amplifies the views of the peasant unions and provides a thumbnail assessment of the Modi government’s full throttle handover of the Indian economy to the billionaire class, especially its closest cronies, the Adanis and the Ambanis families. In January 2020, Oxfam reported that India’s richest 1% possesses four times more wealth than the total wealth of the 953 million people, or the bottom 70% of the population, most of whom live in rural areas.

This inequality has only gotten worse during the pandemic. Between March and October 2020, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, saw his wealth double to $78.3 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world. In four days, Ambani made more than the total wages of his 195,000 employees. During this period, Modi’s government allocated a mere 0.8-1.2% of the GDP to its population for relief. The farmers and their families respond to this naked class warfare with the formation of their unyielding Kisan Commune.



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Women decorate a palki sahib, a Sikh religious structure at the Singhu border in Delhi, 31 December 2020.



Modi cannot easily back down from his commitment to mega-corporations, and the farmers and agricultural workers cannot surrender their lives. The stand-off has no easy exit. Large sections of the urban public are sympathetic to those who feed them. The application of force, often masked under the pretext of enforcing the lockdown, has been attempted, but it has failed. Will Modi’s government risk using greater force? If it does, will the public tolerate it? There is no easy answer to these questions.

An important study from the Society for Social and Economic Research by Vikas Rawal and Vaishali Bansal shows that Indian agriculture is wracked by massive economic inequality. More than half of the households in rural India are landless, while a few landlords own not only the largest acreage, but also the best land. Landlessness and inequality of access to land have increased over the past few decades, Rawal and Bansal demonstrate, and insecure tenancy relations have only become more common. The Indian countryside, they show, ‘is characterised by a vast mass of peasantry and rural workers who live in abject poverty, do not have access to decent education and health care, and do not have access to basic amenities for living a decent life’. This is the reason why they protest. That is why, Rawal and Bansal argue, land reforms are a precondition for their freedom.



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Aswath (Young Socialist Artists, India), Marching with the Peasants, 2021.



The photographs in this newsletter are from the dossier. They are made by Vikas Thakur, who is a member of the art department at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Of his pictures, Vikas writes, ‘These are portraits of human beings with names, struggles, and aspirations, a way of life. These are portraits of a class. These are portraits of a historic protest’.

Warmly,

Vijay

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Re: India

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 26, 2021 11:54 am

A Disastrous Approach : Reasons behind India’s Second Pandemic Wave
in India — by Dr Sameeksha Dhillan — 24/06/2021

By Dr. Sameeksha Dhillan & Dr. Divya Singh

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From an average of over 93,000 new cases per day in September last year to roughly 10,000 new COVID cases per day in February 2021, India has made great strides. This significant and consistent decline led to the withdrawal of lockdown with a partial relaxation in various sectors. Social or religious activities along with the cinemas were permitted up to 50 percent of the hall capacity. There shall be no restrictions on the interstate and the intra-state movement of the persons and the goods. Gradually, life was coming back to normal for India.

Just after two months in April 2021, India saw an alarming rise in Covid cases and the daily new cases reached approximately 1,50,000. This resulted in immediate imposing of state-wise curfews, shutting of cinema halls. Once again, people were trapped in their houses and glued to their laptops & TV screens. This marked the beginning of the horrific second wave of COVID-19 pandemic for India.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and Indian medical fraternity anticipated the second wave long before it actually hit India. However, the Indian authorities did not address their concerns. What caused this ignorance? Could this be avoided or at least mitigated? For the sake of historical accuracy in our collective memory, this article provides the possible reasons which led to the devastating second wave of COVID-19.

Let’s recap the first wave for a little bit. The first wave of the pandemic concluded with the constant decline in the number of COVID cases. However, the subsequent ease in restrictions combined with the diminished awareness campaigns resulted in the violation of COVID appropriate behavior by the people. The recklessness could be seen in the widespread video footage and pictures shared on social media depicting people being part of social events and gatherings.

One of the events that turned out to be the super-spreader was the Kumbh Mela that was held on April 12th, 2021 in Uttrakhand, where millions of devotees gathered on the shores of the Ganges without masks and proper social distancing. This incident led India to become the second-worst hit country with 169,000 plus new COVID-19 cases. However, the exact count of fresh cases would never be known due to inconsistency in data collection. In addition, thousands of pilgrims returned home without being screened or quarantined. This portrayed that faith and religion took priority, while preventive measures and life of the people were pushed to the back of the line.

Amidst continuous hike in COVID cases, when centre and states should have concentrated on guaranteeing the safety of the citizens, they were solely focused on the election rallies and voting activities in West Bengal followed by Assam and Kerala. Thousands of people attended rallies where COVID restrictions were often flouted with no social distance and little mask-wearing.

The aforementioned two events emerged as super spreaders, as evident from daily cases increasing by about 6,000 percent between 1 March and 22 April in poll-bound Bengal, and by more than 450 percent between 1 April, when the Kumbh Mela began, and 17 April, when the religious assemblage was called off. Because of these events, India reached a point where it was reporting a global record of over 415,000 new cases each day, with approximately 4,000 fatalities on a daily basis. This catastrophic rise in cases has pushed India’s already overstretched, overworked, and on the point of collapsing public health system even farther. It demonstrated the absence of resources, facilities and infrastructure in the health system. This finally led to congestion in hospitals, shortages of ICUs and general wards. Moreover, the diagnostic laboratories struggled to process increasing caseload of COVID-19 tests. The poor and delayed action by authorities, pushed individuals to wait for hours to buy life-saving drugs, oxygen cylinders. Lag in the implementation of essential commodities acts against the selling of vital medications, oxygen, and even unreasonably high prices by ambulance services for short-distance travel with patients or corpses.

In January 2021, India began the largest immunisation campaign in the world against Covid-19 with first priority being healthcare and frontline workers, the elderly, and those with comorbidities. Just over three months later, the government’s plans went haywire as they could manage to immunise even fewer than 2% of its overall population. The herculean task was not only the logistics to distribute the vaccination to the vast population, but also to acknowledge the misinformation and distrust that continue to cause the widespread hesitation, especially in rural regions where two thirds of the country’s inhabitants dwell. Lack of trust and confidence towards vaccination arise when authorities fail to justify the deaths after vaccination. Moreover, lack of transparency in the aftermath of immunisation led to the anxiety of educated people and rise of imaginary hypotheses to fill the void left by the lack of reliable facts. As a result, vaccination reluctance has increased not only in rural areas, but even in urban areas where people are more open minded. This further led to an increase in severe COVID infections, which burdened the hospitals.

India is still struggling and facing the dreadful impact of COVID-19. This second wave is most likely the result of a mix of societal behaviour, health system flaws, and governmental decisions in India. The second wave, in which the daily average count of COVID cases reached about 3,00,000, has thrown the entire healthcare system into disarray. People have endured not only economic loss, but also the loss of loved ones. There were numerous issues and gaps that could have been avoided or addressed, depending on how the government handled the situation. We can not change what has already happened but we sure can improve our future by mending our actions. India still has a long way to go when it comes to its Public Health system as well as the healthcare system. However, the urgent need of the hour is to win over the pandemic. So, along with the COVID appropriate behaviour, vaccination is critical to slowing and then ultimately stopping the spread.

Dr. Sameeksha Dhillan – I am a dentist who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Public Health from Manipal University. sameekshadhillan27@gmail.com
Dr. Divya Singh – I am a dentist who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Public Health from Manipal University. divyasingh425@gmail.com
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https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/a-d ... emic-wave/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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