The brewing rebellion in India cannot be extinguished by Hindutva campaigns
Monday, June 27, 2016
As per the report of the Finance Ministry of India, the external debts of India stood at $483.2 billion in September 2015, if roughly calculated on the basis of the present valuation of Indian Rupees viz a viz US Dollars, then the amount will be Rs. 32843.08 billion, which means that on an average every Indian in this country has an additional debt of Rs. 25,000 apart from their personal liabilities. This figure includes children and adults, semi pauperised Indian tribal people and BMW riding urban rich.
In 2014, India had 198,000 billionaires, with a combined wealth of $785 billion. India is one of the fastest growing economies where the economic growth has prospered only a microscopic section of the population; while poverty stuck population of India far surpasses the collective number of poor people in 26 sub-Saharan countries of Africa. India stands 130 among 188 countries in Human Development Index of the United Nations, performing better than Bhutan and Honduras while even countries like the Philippines and Indonesia ranks above India in terms of human development. In a world, where as per an Oxfam research published in Forbes magazine, the richest 1 per cent people have the share of 48 per cent of the global wealth in 2015, which Forbes suspect will reach 50 per cent in 2016, meaning that 80 rich people of the world have same wealth as 3.5 billion poor people of the world, what better can we expect regarding economic disparity between the haves and have-nots?
India, being a snake charmer’s paradise, has not yet got out of the box, it is still a charmer’s paradise; however, this time, the charmers have a different snake to play with, the global monopoly and finance capital.
The much hyped economic growth story of India, which the national mainstream political parties of the right celebrates with a feast, came through the route of foreign investments in the country following the neo-liberal economic policies unveiled by the Congress government in 1992, applied in its actual form since 1999 by the BJP led NDA government. The economy became a super growing economy without any asset creation, service sector turned out to be the top contributor to Indian GDP, while agriculture, the profession of more than 70 per cent of the population, kept on plummeting due to adverse conditions. Hiring less than 30 per cent of the Indian population the service sector grew exponentially between 2004 to 2014, while at the same time the growth of agriculture was on the negative scale, thanks to the dynamics of neo-liberal economic policies.
As the input cost of farming increased manifold viz a viz income from selling the yields during 1994 to 2014, many peasants, mostly the poor and landless peasants became unable to feed their families anymore from agriculture and seasonal rural works. It was during this period, especially between 2004 to 2014 that the country experienced a large-scale exodus of the rural poor, especially the poor and landless peasants who were either evicted from their lands by the landlords or were unable to cultivate their land due to the rising cost of farming. Many of these people were absorbed by the real estate and construction industries in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, and other metropolitan cities.
This was the period that cities like Delhi saw a surge in the number of slum dwellers, yearly migration into urban slums crossed the number of people who have migrated to the slums of Mumbai and Delhi during the 1970s and 1980s. The migrant labour who could not find any employment, even with the temporary construction jobs, turned into street hawkers, some became rickshaw pullers, many more became part-time workers in the most hazardous industries, mostly the small scale industries, where they worked without any formal contract and with a wage that was far below the national average. In 2016 itself hundreds of families, mostly drought victims from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, rallied to cities like Delhi and Mumbai in search of a livelihood. Reporting by NDTV showed how people chose to live in the scorching heat of Delhi under bridges and without toilet, bath, or drinking water. The same is happening in Mumbai as well, these distressed peasants, mostly the poor, landless, and lower middle peasants, have death and intimidation waiting back at home, where the feudal landlords and moneylenders would be drooling for their blood. They have no land to retreat and thus they decided to try their luck in these cities, to at least survive.
Their increasing numbers, reeling upon the streets of India's globalised cities of excellence, cities of a mall strolling middle-class fiddling with newly found wealth through credit and status through servility, caused terrific chaos among the civilised members of the cities, for whom these bunch of migrants with stinking attire on their bodies became threats, perceived threats to the cause of the ideal state called India. These migrants getting killed in suffocating hazardous plants, or when a car drove by a drunk celebrity crush them, or when the government agencies simply put their makeshift habitat on fire, doesn't bother the conscience of the urban elites and upper-middle-class members. For them, it's like pest control. The pest control should be strong to prevent multiplication and infestation. A reason why some yesteryear playback singer criticised the victims of a road accident saying that the victims deserved it as they were sleeping on the pavement and that's what happens to someone when they sleep on the pavements. The protagonist of new India forgot to mention or even think about what forced those dead people to sleep on the pavement in the first place. Being anti-poor is the new fashion of the Indian elite until they decide to join parliament to reap higher ROI in the most profit minting industry of the subcontinent.
The government, especially under the Modi-fied system, has no time to address the distressed peasantry, the large section of tribals threatened by greedy multi-national corporations all set to deforest India and mine away its mineral resources at a throwaway price, or the people who are thrown out of jobs due to the most "liberal" hire and fire rule in place. The government of Modi and his sycophants, over the internet and offline, are quite busy in rejoicing the achievements of the government, especially its FDI policy, which made it easy for the comprador and crony capitalists of India to source foreign investment in their projects as well as for the foreign monopoly capital owned giant corporations to plunder the resources and exploit the labour of India to fill its coffer in Switzerland. Even the so-called sacrosanct defence sector also lost a protective status under the self-styled "patriotic" dispensation, as 100 per cent FDI was allowed in this industry, apart from a host of other industries. The government is also busy in saffronising the state machinery and the auxiliary units like education so that they can officially conform with the Hindutva polity of the ruling Brahminical dispensation. It's like officially announcing what was whispered as a grapevine earlier, that India is a Hindutva nation-state with a reactionary Brahminical hegemony in place. The government is also busy in arming its military and paramilitary forces with satellite imagery and most predatory lethal combat weapons to defeat the indomitable tribal people who have declined to prostrate before the mighty corporations like Essar, Vedanta, Tata, Posco, Adani, Ambani, etc. This busy schedule prevents the government to even think about the poorest of the poor of India, let alone taking any concrete steps to help these people.
The apathy shown by the state machinery and the ruling classes is underplayed by the corporate media, which is busy to push down our throat the concept of "all is well" and "India is changing". We, especially those who can luckily read and write in this country, are made to believe that the economy of the country is progressing, thanks to the impetus provided by foreign capital. The middle and lower middle-class people of the mainland is made to believe that without foreign capital India can neither survive nor create jobs for its unemployed people. While this is said, in the one and half decade of extreme liberalisation era, India could only see the rise in "self-employed" in the employment section. This rise of "self-employed" people clearly indicates that the state machinery and the ruling classes are trying to fudge the real scenario of the employment sector to dupe people. Self-employment model is nothing more than an attempt to paint a rosy picture of the scenario where millions are languishing in utmost poverty. The poverty no economy eyeing a double-digit economic growth can afford to make public. It's surprising that the Modi dispensation didn't put in place a PR agency in the finance ministry yet to publish stories of accomplishments and progress that the economy has made under the neo-Hindutva Tsar.
The unemployment is gradually rising and even the rural compassionate measures like the MGNREGA and other schemes that sustain on exploiting the labour of rural workforce in lieu of meagre and often delayed wages, cannot curb the crisis that is getting acute every day. The people are hungry, they are thirsty, and the government is simply putting a veil on their agonised condition to hoodwink the middle class. "All is Well" as the song goes. It's an undeniable fact that western style democracy is a super-imposed concept on a hardcore feudalistic society, where people strongly believe in the supremacy of one caste over another and follows a reactionary apartheid system based on the birth of a person. In this feudalistic democracy, the leaders and ministers try to justify everything in the name of "development", which they point as the central focal theme of governance.
As the chieftains of different corporate think tanks are anticipating the huge outburst of anger and the futility of using the types of Anna Hazare and other pacifist elements to defuse the mass discontent unlike 2010-11, the government and the ruling classes could only come up with the idea of more cosmetic and alluring projects to bluff the people and quell the brewing rebellion. The government of India and the ruling clique comprising the feudal landlords, big comprador and crony capitalists, foreign monopoly corporations, are unwilling to let more Bastars and more Latehars trouble them at a time they want to flush out the tribals from the heartland of India and to ensure a proper corporate hegemonic rule in India by buttressing the feudal landlord gentry. However, their doles and compensation packages will fall short to quell this rebellion, which is gaining prominence even at the outskirts of New Delhi and Bengaluru. They are left with no other option but to resort to strengthening the police state and curtail even the minimal liberties that the Indian people enjoyed until now.
A mass rebellion, stronger than any of its predecessors, is on the horizon, approaching like a cyclone to engulf the entire political arena of the country and it will surely ring the death knell of the parasites sucking the blood and life out of the Indian people, the majority of whom are the peasantry and the working class. The ruling classes are also able to perceive this apparent threat to their hegemony and hence we can see their desperation in pushing their long pending agendas towards implementation. We can also see their utter frustration manifested in their attempts to incite communal and caste hatred amongst the elite upper caste Hindus to create a ruckus and buy time from their impending catastrophe. We can see how the ruling classes and their Hindutva agents try to lure away the attention of the people from burning issues using gimmicks and low-level politics. A certain former US agent turned Harvard professor turned Hindutva Anglophone Congress basher cum ministerial berth aspiring loose cannon is given maximal coverage by the corporate media than the people who are battling the fascist Hindutva forces at the grassroots and are uncovering the goof up operations of Modi & Co. so that the people keep themselves busy by pondering over the mundane topic magnified out of proportion
Despite all high voltage drama and despite all type of gimmicks that they may use, neither the RSS-BJP nor any other political outfit of the Indian ruling classes can crush the revolutionary force of democracy that is rising on the crimsoned horizon. The defeats and the set back the ruling classes and their foreign corporate masters faced in Bastar will probably be replayed on a broader and nationwide scale. The outcome of the Uttar Pradesh elections or even thousand hours of TVC highlighting Modi government's so-called "pro-people" measures will not be able to stall the forthcoming storm. The entire ruling classes could only delay the arrival by manoeuvring very tediously, however, they will have no respite under any circumstances.
In 2014, India had 198,000 billionaires, with a combined wealth of $785 billion. India is one of the fastest growing economies where the economic growth has prospered only a microscopic section of the population; while poverty stuck population of India far surpasses the collective number of poor people in 26 sub-Saharan countries of Africa. India stands 130 among 188 countries in Human Development Index of the United Nations, performing better than Bhutan and Honduras while even countries like the Philippines and Indonesia ranks above India in terms of human development. In a world, where as per an Oxfam research published in Forbes magazine, the richest 1 per cent people have the share of 48 per cent of the global wealth in 2015, which Forbes suspect will reach 50 per cent in 2016, meaning that 80 rich people of the world have same wealth as 3.5 billion poor people of the world, what better can we expect regarding economic disparity between the haves and have-nots?
India, being a snake charmer’s paradise, has not yet got out of the box, it is still a charmer’s paradise; however, this time, the charmers have a different snake to play with, the global monopoly and finance capital.
The much hyped economic growth story of India, which the national mainstream political parties of the right celebrates with a feast, came through the route of foreign investments in the country following the neo-liberal economic policies unveiled by the Congress government in 1992, applied in its actual form since 1999 by the BJP led NDA government. The economy became a super growing economy without any asset creation, service sector turned out to be the top contributor to Indian GDP, while agriculture, the profession of more than 70 per cent of the population, kept on plummeting due to adverse conditions. Hiring less than 30 per cent of the Indian population the service sector grew exponentially between 2004 to 2014, while at the same time the growth of agriculture was on the negative scale, thanks to the dynamics of neo-liberal economic policies.
As the input cost of farming increased manifold viz a viz income from selling the yields during 1994 to 2014, many peasants, mostly the poor and landless peasants became unable to feed their families anymore from agriculture and seasonal rural works. It was during this period, especially between 2004 to 2014 that the country experienced a large-scale exodus of the rural poor, especially the poor and landless peasants who were either evicted from their lands by the landlords or were unable to cultivate their land due to the rising cost of farming. Many of these people were absorbed by the real estate and construction industries in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, and other metropolitan cities.
This was the period that cities like Delhi saw a surge in the number of slum dwellers, yearly migration into urban slums crossed the number of people who have migrated to the slums of Mumbai and Delhi during the 1970s and 1980s. The migrant labour who could not find any employment, even with the temporary construction jobs, turned into street hawkers, some became rickshaw pullers, many more became part-time workers in the most hazardous industries, mostly the small scale industries, where they worked without any formal contract and with a wage that was far below the national average. In 2016 itself hundreds of families, mostly drought victims from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, rallied to cities like Delhi and Mumbai in search of a livelihood. Reporting by NDTV showed how people chose to live in the scorching heat of Delhi under bridges and without toilet, bath, or drinking water. The same is happening in Mumbai as well, these distressed peasants, mostly the poor, landless, and lower middle peasants, have death and intimidation waiting back at home, where the feudal landlords and moneylenders would be drooling for their blood. They have no land to retreat and thus they decided to try their luck in these cities, to at least survive.
Their increasing numbers, reeling upon the streets of India's globalised cities of excellence, cities of a mall strolling middle-class fiddling with newly found wealth through credit and status through servility, caused terrific chaos among the civilised members of the cities, for whom these bunch of migrants with stinking attire on their bodies became threats, perceived threats to the cause of the ideal state called India. These migrants getting killed in suffocating hazardous plants, or when a car drove by a drunk celebrity crush them, or when the government agencies simply put their makeshift habitat on fire, doesn't bother the conscience of the urban elites and upper-middle-class members. For them, it's like pest control. The pest control should be strong to prevent multiplication and infestation. A reason why some yesteryear playback singer criticised the victims of a road accident saying that the victims deserved it as they were sleeping on the pavement and that's what happens to someone when they sleep on the pavements. The protagonist of new India forgot to mention or even think about what forced those dead people to sleep on the pavement in the first place. Being anti-poor is the new fashion of the Indian elite until they decide to join parliament to reap higher ROI in the most profit minting industry of the subcontinent.
The government, especially under the Modi-fied system, has no time to address the distressed peasantry, the large section of tribals threatened by greedy multi-national corporations all set to deforest India and mine away its mineral resources at a throwaway price, or the people who are thrown out of jobs due to the most "liberal" hire and fire rule in place. The government of Modi and his sycophants, over the internet and offline, are quite busy in rejoicing the achievements of the government, especially its FDI policy, which made it easy for the comprador and crony capitalists of India to source foreign investment in their projects as well as for the foreign monopoly capital owned giant corporations to plunder the resources and exploit the labour of India to fill its coffer in Switzerland. Even the so-called sacrosanct defence sector also lost a protective status under the self-styled "patriotic" dispensation, as 100 per cent FDI was allowed in this industry, apart from a host of other industries. The government is also busy in saffronising the state machinery and the auxiliary units like education so that they can officially conform with the Hindutva polity of the ruling Brahminical dispensation. It's like officially announcing what was whispered as a grapevine earlier, that India is a Hindutva nation-state with a reactionary Brahminical hegemony in place. The government is also busy in arming its military and paramilitary forces with satellite imagery and most predatory lethal combat weapons to defeat the indomitable tribal people who have declined to prostrate before the mighty corporations like Essar, Vedanta, Tata, Posco, Adani, Ambani, etc. This busy schedule prevents the government to even think about the poorest of the poor of India, let alone taking any concrete steps to help these people.
The apathy shown by the state machinery and the ruling classes is underplayed by the corporate media, which is busy to push down our throat the concept of "all is well" and "India is changing". We, especially those who can luckily read and write in this country, are made to believe that the economy of the country is progressing, thanks to the impetus provided by foreign capital. The middle and lower middle-class people of the mainland is made to believe that without foreign capital India can neither survive nor create jobs for its unemployed people. While this is said, in the one and half decade of extreme liberalisation era, India could only see the rise in "self-employed" in the employment section. This rise of "self-employed" people clearly indicates that the state machinery and the ruling classes are trying to fudge the real scenario of the employment sector to dupe people. Self-employment model is nothing more than an attempt to paint a rosy picture of the scenario where millions are languishing in utmost poverty. The poverty no economy eyeing a double-digit economic growth can afford to make public. It's surprising that the Modi dispensation didn't put in place a PR agency in the finance ministry yet to publish stories of accomplishments and progress that the economy has made under the neo-Hindutva Tsar.
The unemployment is gradually rising and even the rural compassionate measures like the MGNREGA and other schemes that sustain on exploiting the labour of rural workforce in lieu of meagre and often delayed wages, cannot curb the crisis that is getting acute every day. The people are hungry, they are thirsty, and the government is simply putting a veil on their agonised condition to hoodwink the middle class. "All is Well" as the song goes. It's an undeniable fact that western style democracy is a super-imposed concept on a hardcore feudalistic society, where people strongly believe in the supremacy of one caste over another and follows a reactionary apartheid system based on the birth of a person. In this feudalistic democracy, the leaders and ministers try to justify everything in the name of "development", which they point as the central focal theme of governance.
As the chieftains of different corporate think tanks are anticipating the huge outburst of anger and the futility of using the types of Anna Hazare and other pacifist elements to defuse the mass discontent unlike 2010-11, the government and the ruling classes could only come up with the idea of more cosmetic and alluring projects to bluff the people and quell the brewing rebellion. The government of India and the ruling clique comprising the feudal landlords, big comprador and crony capitalists, foreign monopoly corporations, are unwilling to let more Bastars and more Latehars trouble them at a time they want to flush out the tribals from the heartland of India and to ensure a proper corporate hegemonic rule in India by buttressing the feudal landlord gentry. However, their doles and compensation packages will fall short to quell this rebellion, which is gaining prominence even at the outskirts of New Delhi and Bengaluru. They are left with no other option but to resort to strengthening the police state and curtail even the minimal liberties that the Indian people enjoyed until now.
A mass rebellion, stronger than any of its predecessors, is on the horizon, approaching like a cyclone to engulf the entire political arena of the country and it will surely ring the death knell of the parasites sucking the blood and life out of the Indian people, the majority of whom are the peasantry and the working class. The ruling classes are also able to perceive this apparent threat to their hegemony and hence we can see their desperation in pushing their long pending agendas towards implementation. We can also see their utter frustration manifested in their attempts to incite communal and caste hatred amongst the elite upper caste Hindus to create a ruckus and buy time from their impending catastrophe. We can see how the ruling classes and their Hindutva agents try to lure away the attention of the people from burning issues using gimmicks and low-level politics. A certain former US agent turned Harvard professor turned Hindutva Anglophone Congress basher cum ministerial berth aspiring loose cannon is given maximal coverage by the corporate media than the people who are battling the fascist Hindutva forces at the grassroots and are uncovering the goof up operations of Modi & Co. so that the people keep themselves busy by pondering over the mundane topic magnified out of proportion
Despite all high voltage drama and despite all type of gimmicks that they may use, neither the RSS-BJP nor any other political outfit of the Indian ruling classes can crush the revolutionary force of democracy that is rising on the crimsoned horizon. The defeats and the set back the ruling classes and their foreign corporate masters faced in Bastar will probably be replayed on a broader and nationwide scale. The outcome of the Uttar Pradesh elections or even thousand hours of TVC highlighting Modi government's so-called "pro-people" measures will not be able to stall the forthcoming storm. The entire ruling classes could only delay the arrival by manoeuvring very tediously, however, they will have no respite under any circumstances.
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