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India-The Crumbling 16 State The paralysis of the Indian state, nearly one year after the re-electtion of Indira Gandhi's party on a programme of "firm government", provides an eloquent testimony to the analysis which the Marxists alone have put forward regarding the pre-revolutionary crisis besetting India over the last decade.
In contrast to the furious cacophony of the capitalist press -echoing the isolated and discredited bourgeois opposition politicians of India, who are all "new Emergscreaming about a ency"- the 'Militant tendency alone has consistently emphasised the impotence of the Indian bourgeoisie against the gales of revolution that have swept through the sub-continent. The so-called "strong government" of Indira Bangladesh over the fate of By Roger Silverman Gandhi, despite the shrill protests of paltroon politicians who had gambled mistakenly in the latest election race, has in reality been as helpless as a straw in a hurricane.
Disintegration After more than a year of bloody carnage in Assam, in that long-neglected corner of the North Eastern appendage to India, despite the permanent blockade of India's major domestic source of oil at a time when India's total annual export earnings are hardly enough to meet the cost of its oil imports alone, and despite the looming threat of a war with deported refugees-an ironic mirror image of the situation which provoked the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971—India's selfstyled "strong-man regime" has proved feckless.
How then is Indira Gandhi to be expected to cope with the problems ravaging the entire subcontinent? As India teeters on the brink of the abyss, on the eve of a new and deeper world recession even than that of 1975, which brought in its wake the shocks of the Emergency and of its rapid overthrow, • capitalist India is breaking up fast into national, communal, linguistic, tribal and caste mayhem. In the picturesque words of Mr Mehta, a director of the huge super-monopoly Tatas, Indians will be "eating into each others' entrails" in the struggle
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for food, jobs and land.
On a capitalist basis, the future
can only promise the eventual
disintegration into a thousand
fragments of the India which was
the vision of hundreds of millions
of oppressed and downtrodden,
who rallied to Gandhi's call in the
liberation struggle—a reversion to
the Balkanisation of the sub-
continent into a host of minor
principalities, which in the past
guaranteed its subjection to im-
perial rule, and the eclipse of the
national consciousness which
alone ensured the overthrow of
imperialist domination.
More than three decades after
the winning of independence
under the banner of Congress and the national bourgeoisie-an event which superficially would seem to have refuted the law of permanent revolution-the permanent revolution asserts itself more insistently than ever. The only salvation for the very existence of the Indian nation lies in the victorious struggle of the proletariat: either forward to a united Socialist Federation, or centuries back to Asiatic backwardness. The fate of the biggest capitalist country in the world hangs upon the campaign for a worthy leadership of the proletariat.
Even in the absence of such a leadership, and with only a dim consciousness of its historic mission, the proletariat has risen to the challenge with magnificent élan. Even according to the distorted and inadequate official government statistics, the Indian proletariat over the last decade has proved itself the equal of any working class in history. In the world league table of days lost over the last decade in strikes and lockouts per 1,000 workers, India was the only under-developed (or so-called "third world') country to appear in the top twenty! In organisation and militancy, the Indian proletariat compares favourably to that of any industrially developed country.
Official statistics tell us only of the record of the urban 'organised
sector' (i.e. that sector covered by labour legislation) and excludes all political strikes, sympathy strikes, gheraos (factory sieges), solidarity blackings, factory occupations, go-slows and works-torule, etc, to say nothing of the huge and bloody battles raging in the countryside. Nevertheless, they show that over the course of the whole decade ending 1978, the Indian working class was locked in battle to a greater degree than that of any other country in the world, with the single exceptions of Canada and Italy!
Militant proletariat
When we take into account that this period includes nearly two years of emergency rule when strikes were banned, and that they exclude 1979, a record year for strikes; and that Indian workers risk starvation, sacking, blacklisting, imprisonment and frequently death, to a degree without comparison in the industrially developed countries at this stage, then it would hardly be an exaggeration to call the Indian working class the most militant and combative in the world at the present time (for full statistics see 'Militant' pamphlet 'India-the Gathering Storm').
The vast majority of the population of India still live in the villages, and if there were an idyllic picture of rural stability in the countryside, then the cause of the industrial proletariat, no matter how militant, would still be doomed. But the situation in the countryside is, if anything, even more explosive than in the cities! The pauperisation of the peasantry has proceeded to the extent that practically half the rural population today are landless labourers, and therefore at least technically proletarians, while the shrinking numbers of small and middle peasants have
17
been driven into increasing pen-
ury.
Agricultural labourers in an
under-developed country do not
normally attain, even at their
most militant, a fully proletarian
consciousness. Even in the Chin-
ese revolution, which was fought
as a peasant war; even in Russia,
where the poor peasantry surged
behind the Bolshevik banner of
the urban proletariat, their main
battle-cry was for land. In their
aspirations they remained peas-
ants. But the breakdown of peasant life in India has wrought amazing changes in the consciousness of the masses. The war launched by the so-called "harijans" ("untouchables"), in effect the landless agricultural labourers, has been fought with guns and bombs, not from scattered vanguard bases as in a classic peasant war, nor even in localised labour disputes, but in a mass uprising involving millions, in every major state in India, and not principally for land, but for decent wages, a guaranteed income, the dignity of labour... proletarian demands, flowing indissolubly from the demand for the fulfilment of the elementary democratic task of putting an end to caste servility and degradation, still shamefully un-resolved by the bourgeoisie. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with a combined population of nearly 200 million, the situation has reached the point of civil war. The semi-proletarian agricultural labourers are demonstrating in heroic deeds their unity with the industrial workers.
But so rotten-ripe is the socialist revolution in India that the whole of oppressed society is crying out for a socialist solution. There cannot be any historical precedent for the peasant movement which is now raging. Even the peasants, even the share-
ard lars oldars hant farmers
croppers, small tenant farmers
own desperate struggle for survival and by inspiration from the implacable struggle of their proletarian and semi-proletarian brothers, have attained a cons-
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18
ciousness far transcending the narrow horizons of the classic traditional peasant. In Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, as well as other states, the peasants have come on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, prepared to sacrifice their lives in the struggle for their elementary demands-that their accumulated debts be written off, that taxes be cut, for cheap credit, etc.—in such a massive and relentless movement that they have already succeeded in wresting concessions from various state governments. In March 1980, Delhi was invaded by two million barefoot peasants and labourers, on the biggest demonstration in India's history!
Hell-Bent Bonapartism
But even more extraordinary is the extent to which the blind movement of these formerly backward peasants has become translated into a primitive socialist consciousness and a partial identification with the proletarians. Rioting peasants quoted in the local Indian press have exclaimed indignantly: "Let the government take our land off us! We can't make any money off this land. Let the government take it over and pay us a wage for working on it!" Even the peasantry are thus crying out aloud for a socialist lead from the workers' parties. How much more poignant that the bureaucrats at the head of these parties continue to use as their alibi for failing to mobilise the workers behind a socialist programme, the alleged conservatism and backwardness of the peasantry!
It was against a background of strikes, economic collapse, communal and caste conflicts, political instability, and riots soberly computed at a rate of nine per hour, that the bourgeoisie resol-
ved in the summer of 1979, shaken to the core especially by the recent national police strike, to forgive Indira Gandhi her past misdeeds and restore her to power, at no matter what cost. Even their alarm at the social consequences of Indira Gandhi's irresponsible declaration of an Emergency in 1975 had paled beside the shocks of the Janata interlude. They were hell-bent on a bonapartist solution. Hence their ruthless intrigues and manipulation, unexpectedly decisive and unanimous by the standards of the Indian bourgeoisie, to smash up the relics of the Janata mish-mash, force premature elections, bribe defectors by the score, organise a crescendo of pro-Indira sycophancy, indulge in ballot-rigging, and hence ensure a "landslide" victory for their championalbeit on the votes of less than a quarter of the registered electors.
But the bourgeoisie has been appalled to discover that all their unexpected resolution-no mean achievement for their sluggish and parasitical class-means nothing if no weapon is at hand by which to impose a bonapartist regime. The legacy inherited by Indira Gandhi in 1980 was a state machine in tatters. The police by mid-1979 had reached a point of mutiny, again without true precedent. One million policemen, the length and breadth of India, ordinary constables, shoulder to shoulder with some sections of their inspectors, the Provincial Armed Constabularies, the riot squads of the Central Reserve Police, the Central Industrial Security Force and other paramilitary security bodies, not only struck but in certain cases stood armed on the picket lines and fought bloody battles, bullet for bullet, with army strikebreakers. Their ultimate victory, taking their wages above those of the army private, was the signal for widespread public speculation as to how long it would be before the army followed the inspiring
example of the police! To impose a police state requires at least a reliable police force! But the rot has set in so deep that in India a clandestine employees' union has even been formed within the heart of any bourgeois state, the Intelligence Bureau!
If there had been a mass revolutionary party, there can be no doubt that the overwhelming majority of policemen could have been won to sympathy towards the workers, and many of them to active participation in the struggle for socialism. In the absence of any clear-cut appeal from the parties of the working class, the policemen were left in a dangerous limbo. Disenchanted with the cause for which they had first been enlisted, disgusted with their overlords, they nevertheless remained sceptical and unconvinced about the ability of the working class to offer a road forward to a new society.
Collapse of state machine
The result today is a complete disintegration of morale and cohesion within the police force, a situation as perplexing for the working class as it is disturbing to the bourgeoisie. Plunder, violence and rape have become the hallmark of police activity in every state. This is the reverse side of the same coin of police demoralisation as the magnificent strike of 1979. The road to revolution blocked, this same mood has expressed itself in ugly form. So out of control have the presumptive guardians of law and order become, that in the period immediately preceding the state assembly elections earlier in 1980, the police chief of the state of Madhya Pradesh solemnly issued a circular to all police stations under his jurisdiction, urging policemen, at least for the period up until the elections, to try to "desist from all further rapes"! (His job was at stake!).