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INDIA SLIDES INTO CHAOS UNDER BJP
By B. Prasant, PV correspondent in India
(This article is from the August 1-31/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
THE ATTACKS on places of worship of minority communities started at an extremely low key: a church ransacked in a province in central India; an Islamic institution for multi-religious gatherings "partially looted" in a remote hamlet in western India; a repository of religious memorabilia of a Syrian Orthodox Christian community defiled. The corporate media would not report such "minor" incidents, and while the regional press did highlight the events, the barrier of language kept most people blissfully unaware of this grave trend.
The ruling classes were in the meanwhile a little too busy bargaining for their survival, as the transnational corporations joined the fray to capture ever larger slices of the vast market that is India. The BJP-led Federal Government chose to be silent on the sad events, in an attempt to gradually foist on the nation an institutionalization of intolerance.
Then priests started to get killed, and nuns began to be systematically targeted for violent physical assaults, not at the hands of "hooligans," but of organized mobs baying for the blood of all minority communities. The chanting of a slogan which called for the establishment of Hindutva gradually assumed the fearsome war cry of Fascist legionnaires.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayi's response was nonchalant even while fear spread like wildfire among the vast number of people who would not swear by Hinduism. The situation is giving birth to a hard core of dangerous militants, but the BJP continues to speak in terms of the "worrisome religious conversion drives of missionaries." The attacks continue with impunity.
With the IMF and the World Bank becoming more impatient by the hour, the Federal Government has lately gone into a rush of disinvestment of state sector industries. Paradoxically, the units to be sold for a song to foreign direct investors are those which have raked in the most profits, thanks mainly to the level of efficiency that the workers built up over the five decades since India got its political independence. Banks, telecom units, railways, airlines and airports, offshore oil production units, manufacturing industries, postal services - all disappear into the bottomless pit of privatization and corporatization.
Too late, the Indian capitalist classes seek desperately to remind the BJP-run government of its promise about a "level playing field." The response? An assurance that the parallel economy ("black market" to the common people) will flourish as never before, enabling India's corporate houses to make the best of a bad bargain.
At another level, the mercantile community, the principal support base of the BJP and its allies, is kept happy by fuelling runaway inflation. The Federal Government keeps quoting falsified figures to assure the middle classes of the "gradual winding down" of the rate of inflation, even as the rising number of those below the poverty line threatens to tear apart the social fabric. A fearsome rise in the rate of crime, and an increase in repressive measures by the Federal Government, duly follow.
The weak response of the organized sector of the working people has been alarming. The trade unions continue to suffer from functioning under the tutelage of different political parties. The lack of success of all-India TU actions against the relentless privatization drive has sent alarm bells ringing among the entire array of Left and democratic forces.
Worrying developments have taken place elsewhere. Bengal has long remained (to quote the Prime Minister) an "obnoxious and irritating bastion of the Red." Suddenly things there have assumed shapes that have made the common people, and the rural and urban poor in particular, fearful of the future.
The Left Front-supported Communist Party of India candidate for a recent byelection to the lower house of the Indian parliament (the Lok Sabha) in Bengal's rural Midnapore district lost by a crushing margin to a former bureaucrat put up by the Rightist combination of the Trinamul Congress (an offshoot of the Congress party) and the BJP. The Left has never before lost this seat, in a district known for militant peasants' struggles.
Soon after, the Communist-led Left Front lost the municipal elections in Calcutta where it had held office for over 15 years. This time, too, the Trinamul Congress-BJP combine proved victorious in a province where the people have always voted Left.
Meanwhile, an orgy of violence has been let loose in several districts of Bengal by the superior landed elements who had smarted under the redistributive land reforms initiated by the Left Front government since 1977. The administration (including the police) have started to display on which side their loyalty remained.
The political setback in Bengal may not indicate any general debacle for the Left in India. But the fact remains that once the ruling classes discover the faintest scent of triumph in the evolving political scenario, they are bound to step up an aggressive drive against all existing democratic norms. It is the working class which stands to suffer most once this becomes an unwelcome reality. India's current slide into chaos will no doubt intensify even further.
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