Skip to main content

India’s Weaknesses in the Global Spotlight

Farmers’ protests around New Delhi have been going on for four months now. A controversial intervention by the Supreme Court has suspended the implementation of the new agticultural laws, but has raised questions about the dynamics between the judiciary and the executive, and has failed to unblock the negotiations between government and peasant organisations. The assault by Sikh farmers on the Red Fort during the Republic Day parade as India was displaying its military might to the outside world — the Chinese Global Times maliciously noted — paradoxically widened the protest in the huge state of Uttar Pradesh.

The Modi government has been trying to revive India’s image with the 2021 Union Budget: it announced one hundred privatisations and approved the increase to 75% of the limit on direct foreign investment in insurance companies. For The Indian Express (IEX) this is a sign of the commitment to push ahead with reforms despite the backlash from rural India. Also for The Economist the direction is the right one, but at the same time the journal recalls the 161st anniversary of the first Indian Budget, written by its founder, the Scotsman James Wilson. He died only eight months later from the combined effects of climate, anxiety and work, not before having criticised the administrative ineptitude and the faltering uncertainty of the British regime. The current Indian government does not look very different.

Farmers are now engaging in the electoral arena against the BJP, and the upcoming elections in the large states will be an opportunity to measure the depth of the processes of social transformation taking place on the subcontinent.

Separation of powers in the federal dynamics of centripetal and centrifugal forces

The Indian Supreme Court is described as one of the most influential in the world: since the 1990s it has intervened, directly or through its emanations at state level, in civil rights and administrative matters, and acts as a clearing house for the different social stratifications, the legislative, the executive and even the monetary power.

Its authority has been undermined by the passivity shown on issues such as the amendment excluding Muslims from the citizenship law and the archaic sedition law, laws that reek of executive excesses according to The Times of India (TOI). And now, there is the ruling which suspended the implementation of the new agricultural laws and set up a commission to resolve the dispute between the executive and the farmers, For TOI, this is an unnecessary risk, and for IEX, it exceeds the limits of the scope of the Supreme Court and will lead to a dead end, given the rejection of its ruling by the peasants’ organisations.

The Hindu points out that the dispute concerns only a group among farmers and already six large states have passed agricultural laws that over-ride the federal ones: the soluton should not progress through the judiciary, but it would rather be a political one that progresses through the regional parties.

BJP centralist attempt and development

On January 26th, the Sikh flag was flying over the Red Fort: this was the epilogue of the tractor march organised by farmers in opposition to the official Republic Day event. The Red Fort is a symbol of the nation, and from its platform, every August 15th, the prime minister gives a public speech on Independence Day. For Abhinav Prakash Singh, professor of Economics at the Delhi University, displaying the Sikh flag signals a battle over the nature of the state.

According to Singh, India, unlike China, has seen only 100 to 150 years of a strong centre to address centures of fragmentation. India’s traditon of reintegrating defeated rulers to the realm, and the strong influence of religious organisations, merchant corporations, and Brahmin sacerdotal classes are a reflection of a weak state. The British Empire itself was a kind of ghost empire in its systematic co-opting of local elements and minimalist bureaucracy.

With independence, the process of centralisation accelerated. but it also met resistance and backlash in the form of secessionist movements, religious extremism and a type of federalism held hostage by regional elites. An attempt was made to overcome this problem by co-opting local elites: first in the Congress Party, as an alliance between urban elites and landowners of the dominant local castes, then through a coalition policy. The rise of Hindutva, Hindu religious nationalism, has subverted the status quo: this centralising, although not homogenising, force that has found an effective vehicle in the BJP led by Narendra Modi. Its advance, even in non-traditional regions, is challenging the domination of regional elites and clashes with centres of power in the countryside.

In the 1990s, a new stratification emerged from the smaller municipalities and villages, which was not part of the old land-based agrarian elites or of the bureaucratic and political clientele system. It is one of the results, in the ascending sense of social flow, of the migration of hundreds of millions of people, who fed from the villages to the flourishing urban centres: this new urban class is nationalist and brings with it an affirmation of the pride of religious identity that comes with economic and material progress.

According to Singh, economic transition, urbanisation, social change, the rise of Hindutva and the growing support for a strong centre are all interconnected processes: Modi is a product of this socio- economic transformation.

Electoral front of the peasant struggles

India Today speaks of the Jat blowback. Peasants’ protests have spread among the strata of average farmers and also to the capitalist farmers in much of north-western India. These farmers belong to Jat castes, have prospered since the 1970s, often expanding their activities to include money-lending and trade, and have suffered since liberalisations progressed as a consequence of the gradual shifting of rural economy toward one based on non-agricultural occupations. Villagers are increasingly living on non-agricultural incomes and remittances: not only do they no longer depend on the Jats, but they also have conflicting interests with them. The BJP has addressed political and economic aspirations of these villagers.

The leaders of the peasant organisations are therefore looking for new political alliances and are intervening on the electoral front against the BJP in states, such as West Bengal, which are close to holding elections. However, the big battle will be next year in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. The BKU, the region’s largest branch of the Farmers’ Union, is looking for allies against the BJP. Its leader has already tried his luck in elections, with little success. He is carrying on the legacy of his father who in 1988 and 1993 blocked the Indian capital for several days: farmers were then asking to be allowed to sell their products on the free market, the opposite of what they are demanding today.

China and India in comparison

Shenggen Fan and Ashok Gulati, in their essay The Dragon and the Elephant: learning from agricultural and rural reforms in China and India, compare the different paths of the two countries. China began with reforms in the agricultural sector in the late 1970s, while India began with reforms in the manufacturing sector in the early 1990s.

According to the authors, China ensured both a wide distribution of earnings and a political consensus for the continuation of reforms by starting with agriculture: this fostered the development of a non-agricultural rural sector, and triggered in turn a process of reforms in urban state-owned enterprises, which had become less competitive than those in rural areas.

In India, conversely, the growth of agriculture has been mainly driven by external interventions, such as the devaluation of the currency and the reduction of protection in the industry. Economic growth in the 1990s remained confined to non-agricultural sectors and did not have such a significant impact on poverty as in the case of China.

For Fan and Gulati, the rapid growth of non-agricultural rural enterprises in China is one of the most obvious differentiating factors between the two countries. India’s delay is also linked to lower education rates in rural areas and lower investment in infrastructure. The different initial conditions have also had an impact: in 1970, life expectancy in India was 49 years, compared to 62 years in China, and 70% of India’s rural population was illiterate, compared to 49% in China. According to T.N. Ninan, former chairman of Business Standard, China is now I0 to 15 years ahead of India as it reached India’s current per capita income 15 years ago. But what worries Ninan is the loss of momentum and the fact that India is not outperforming countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Cambodia, which instead benefit from the relocation of supply chains in higher labour-intensive sectors.

Relaunching the manufacturing industry?

The Modi government is trying to reverse this trend and has announced production-related incentive programs (PLI) and privatisations. The goal of the first is to develop a manufacturing sector orented to the local market and exports, modelled on the Made in China 2025. This programme launched by Beijing in 2015 and aims to improve the competitive strength of selected sectors by reducing dependence on foreign countries. Manufacturers like Ap ple seem to believe in it: about 10% of its production capacity is likely to move to India through partners such as EMS, Pegatron, Foxconn and Wistron. Others are skeptical and see the incentives as a kind of legacy of the Merchandise Export from India Scheme. This programme was closed last December due to its violations of WTO rules.

The government has also announced its intention to sell 100 stateowned enterprises, but it will not be easy to convince buyers: of its 274 companies, only 32 have a significant net profit, while all 12 public banks are burdened by bad loans. How the government manages the sale of BPCL (the second group in the ranking of Indian Energy producers and distributors) and that of LIC (India’s largest insurance group) and how much it earns will be an indication of the strength of the privatisation drive and the amount of ‘fuel’ available to facilitate the path of reform.

Lotta Comunista, March 2021

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Political Battles of European Leninism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...
Read more

The Defeat in Afghanistan — a Watershed in the Cycle of Atlantic Decline

In crises and wars there are events which leave their mark on history because of how they make a decisive impact on the power contention, or because of how, almost like a chemical precipitate, they suddenly make deep trends that have been at work for some time coalesce. This is the case of the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, which is taking the shape of a real watershed in the cycle of Atlantic decline. For the moment, through various comments in the international press, it is possible to consider its consequences on three levels: America’s position as a power and the connection with its internal crisis; the repercussions on Atlantic relations and Europe’s dilemmas regarding its strategic autonomy; and the relationship between the Afghan crisis and power relations in Asia, especially as regards India’s role in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Repercussions in the United States Richard Haass is the president of the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations; despite having ...
Read more

Crisis of the Order and European Question

The dialectic between economic weapons and weapons of war in the crisis in the world order requires specific reflection where concerns European imperialism. Dealing with monetary weapons in their book War by Other Means , Jennifer Harris and Robert Blackwill place great emphasis on the strategic success of the European monetary federation: Through forging the eurozone, Germany has also realized its century-long quest for a pliant European market for German manufacturing. Both of these were things it had previously tried (and failed) to accomplish by force. The long quotation below is from the speech Helmut Schmidt made to the Bundesbank Council in 1978 in favour of the EMS, the European Monetary System that would lead to the euro. Classified as confidential for 30 years, the text was declassified in 2008. There emerges from it a highly political vision of the German use of the monetary weapon and of the strategic weight of a single continental market: What now concerns German pol...
Read more

Chinese Rearmament Projects Itself in Asia

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 5 From the series Asian giants Trends in rearmament spending and comparisons of military equipment are increasingly set to dominate coverage of the contention between powers in the crisis in the world order . The military factor has entered the strategic debate, accompanied by a wealth of figures and technical details. The increase in military spending as a percentage of GDP represents a widespread sign of the rearmament cycle at this juncture, but spending alone cannot entirely explain the situation, given the qualitatively different natures of the arsenals being compared. Nor are comparisons between this or that type of weapon useful in themselves, because ultimately all weapons are only ever used in combination with the complex military means available to a power, either in alliance or in conflict with other powers in the system of States. Therefore, while it is difficult to assess the real significa...
Read more

The Hidden Costs of Covid-19

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 5 From the series The struggle against coronavirus Around 227 million people have been infected by the novel coronavirus SARSCoV-2 worldwide, causing 4.7 million deaths [Johns Hopkins University, September 17 th , 2021]. If tracked over time, both figures can be seen as indicators of the pandemic’s evolution . However, they do not give the full picture of the humanitarian disaster — not only because the coldness of the statistics hardly expresses the violence with which this health crisis has disrupted the lives of millions, but also because the official figures are believed to greatly underestimate the real situation. Missed diagnoses The number of Covid-19 cases indentified and registered in the statistics depends in fact on the number of diagnostic tests performed. It also varies greatly from country to country and in the different phases of the pandemic curve, as well as being...
Read more

The Political Form at Last Discovered

From the special series 1871-2021. The 150 th anniversary of the Paris Commune The struggle, by now more than a hundred years old, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie encompasses the whole world. One hundred and fifty years ago, in March 1871, in a single city — Paris — and in a very short time span — 72 days — the assault on the sky attempted by the proletariat and ferociously repressed by a rising bourgeoisie resolved, in practice, fundamental theoretical issues of socialism that until that moment only had provisional solutions. In the Manifesto [1848], Marx and Engels had limited themselves to stating that the indispensable precondition for the communist revolution was the conquest of democracy , i.e., the conquest of the state machinery on the part of the proletariat. However, it remained to be seen whether and to what extent the dictatorship of the proletariat could avail itself of the bourgeois state machinery. Moreover, in the definition Lenin gives, Marx’s theo...
Read more

Forces and Consequences of the New Strategic Phase

The new strategic phase in the world balance, with its new corresponding political cycles within powers, requires attention to the materialistic, historical and dialectical method of political analysis itself. The changing forces and basic trends need to be identified; we can make conjectures about the developments in single political battles, but the outcome of these battles will always require us to contemplate a plurality of solutions: some more probable. others less. but never Just a mechanical consequence of long-term economic movements. Many fixed points of the method of political analysis are usual tools in our Marxist elaboration, but this does not mean they must be taken for granted: it is of use to recall them, in relation to the new unknowns of the political battle. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from t...
Read more

Variations and Gradations of Democracy in China

Internationalism No. 50, April 2023 Page 10 From the series Giats of Asia : the dillemas of Chinese single-party pluralism Only the materialist analysis of the intraction between structure and superstructure can explain the variety of the political forms. Why did the entrenchment of the capitalist mode of production in China occur in populist and Maoist forms? Why does Chinese imperialism express itself in CP single-party pluralism and not, for example, in the classical multi-party system of imperialist democracy? This specific political analysis does not regard the study of the economic causes which determine China’s political struggles, a scientific investigation which is its premise, “but the way” in which these struggles present themselves in the superstructure. “By analysing basic economic facts, Marxism can identify at first the interests which find expression in the political struggle. The form in which these interests appear politically, however, is a qu...
Read more

Uneven Development, Job Cuts, and the Crisis of Labour Under Global Capitalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Uneven development is a fundamental law of capitalism. We have a macroscopic expression of this in the changing balance of power between States: Atlantic decline and Asian rise are the key dynamics behind the political processes of this era, including wars caused by the crisis in the world order. But behind all this there is a differentiated economic trend, starting from companies and sectors: hence the differentiated conditions for wage earners. And this is the element to keep in mind for an effective defensive struggle. It’s only the beginning The electrical and digital restructuring imposed by global market competition affects various production sectors. The car industry is the most obvious, due to the familiarity of the companies and brands involved. We have already reported on the agreement reached before Christmas at Volkswagen, which can be summarised as a reduction of 35,000 employees by 2030. Die Zeit [De...
Read more