Comment
The emperor’s new clothes
IN a recent meeting with a group of (doubtless select) editors at the prime ministerial residence, Manmohan Singh declared that the reason why free foodgrains should not be supplied to the poor was because ‘this would destroy the incentive of our farmers to produce more food.’ A truly blinding flash of insight: unfortunately no one has ever suggested that government take foodgrains from farmers without paying them in order to distribute to the poor. The suggestion is that it subsidize food for the poor in the same way that it subsidizes corporations. But for our rulers (and their middle class constituents), there is something subversive in the idea of helping the poor, as opposed to the rich. Thus subsidies become a dangerous word when applied to the former; the latter they fit like a glove. The argument is a familiar one: corporations must be showered with tax exemptions, land acquired for them at cut-rate prices, allowed to draw water and pollute indiscriminately, because they generate – what else? – employment.
Which brings us to the second of the prime ministerial maxims, namely that, ‘India has no option but to industrialize... The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of agriculture...’ Approximately fifty years ago, a distinguished agrarian economist pointed out that since India was industrializing at a time when technological progress was increasing output per worker (exponentially rather than incrementally, he might have added), the chances of transferring a significant proportion of the population from agriculture to industry were close to zero: thus ‘progress towards modernization is unlikely to be reflected in a sizeable increase in the percentage of workers engaged in manufacture.’
1 In support of his contention, Daniel Thorner cited the case of West Bengal, where the number of factory workers rose by 400,000 between 1951 and 1961 but remained stable as a percentage of total population (15 per cent).India’s growth rate was much lower in the ’50s than it is now; conversely, the prevailing pattern of industrialization was considerably more labour intensive. Current trends bear out Thorner’s argument. Between 1991 and 1995, the Tatas’ flagship steel plant at Jamshedpur succeeded in reducing its workforce by half while increasing production from one million to five million tons of steel: a feat much applauded by business analysts. The Bajaj group’s motorcycle plant in Poona performed prodigies of efficiency by producing more than twice the number of motorcycles than it did in the mid 1990s with less than half the number of workers (10,500 against 24,000). Figures suggest that total employment in the organized sector declined between 1977 and 2004: public sector employment fell sharply and the growth in the private sector failed to bridge the gap. Since the Indian state is not overfond of collecting reliable data, these figures are contradicted by others equally official; however, Amit Bhaduri contends that even a favourable interpretation of NSS data suggests that employment growth since 1991 has been disproportionately concentrated in the unorganized sector.
2One part comprises sweatshops – the garment factories of Bangalore, the hosiery industry of Tirupur, the diamond cutting workshops of Surat – that remain unregulated because their profits depend upon inhuman exploitation of the workforce. The other part consists of an army of scavengers, scrabbling desperately to make a living at the margins of the economy: contract workers, construction labourers, ragpickers, waste sorters, pavement vendors, domestic servants etc. Conditions of work are almost as brutal and dehumanizing as the worst examples in agriculture: whether the workers in question are forced to expend themselves to the point of physical breakdown in order to survive or exploited by their employers makes little difference. Under the circumstances, it is hard to see how a simple change of employment constitutes a gain. It merely increases the country’s GDP without making any difference to actual conditions of life for the poor (when it does not worsen them, that is).
Thus the economist (or politician) who claims that industrialization under current conditions generates significant employment in the organized sector is being economical with the truth. If he or she actually believes this dictum, it betrays a woeful ignorance of how late 20th century capitalism actually works. For profits in industry can be made in two ways – either by replacing men with machinery (which is increasingly the case in the organized sector) or exploiting them as brutally as the law allows and more. As we know, the law – or its guardians – allow a great deal. No one pretends that a third way of regulated and socially responsible industrialization would be easy in today’s context – or indeed any context. But we might dispense with a great deal of cant if we stopped pretending that the rate of growth has more than a tenuous connection with industrial employment under tolerable conditions.
The intellectual bankruptcy of this government – and the political class as a whole – is exemplified in its adherence to the theories of Milton Friedman. Friedman challenged the dominant trend of economic theory since the Great Depression which sought to explain the cyclical fluctuations of capitalism and devise methods of controlling them: in its place, he substituted the dogma of the market as a self-regulating mechanism. His theories became popular precisely because they pandered to the interests of a business class rising to unprecedented prosperity and power in the post-war economic boom. The growth of the Chicago school reflects the historic conflation of business with politics to the point where they have become indistinguishable. Not even the robber barons of 19th century America were as powerful, for the life experience of ordinary Americans was still remote from the touch of large corporations. This explains the phenomenon of that perennial presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who became ‘famous and popular and dangerous to the status quo when he put together a huge coalition of poor farmers and poorer labourers and, in their interest, spoke against the rich and their gold standard’ – not to mention popular approbation for Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting.
3In much the same way, the life experiences of the overwhelming majority of Indians still remain remote from big business. The organized sector is a drop in the bucket of the workforce, its members too cowed down to protect their own interests (those of the unorganized sector were never of any interest to them). ‘Service’ industries, like the behemoths of the IT sector, have dispensed with the threat of industrial action by recruiting from the middle class. It is the unorganized sector that determines conditions of work while the government preens itself on the growth rate. Agricultural production is concentrated in pockets occupied by medium to large farmers from regionally dominant castes (Punjab, Haryana, western UP, the Godavari delta, southern Gujarat, western Maharashtra) for which the vast majority of peasants and labourers in regions of dryland agriculture serve as a reserve army of labour. Meanwhile the accelerating collapse of dryland cultivation also drives them into cities, keeping wages down in industry and the trades. The absence of labour regulation is intrinsic to this model of growth.
It short-circuits the second stage of the industrial revolution in which rising wages fuel demand for articles of common consumption. Amit Bhaduri has pointed out that domestic demand rests on consumption by a small fraction of the population, perhaps a quarter to a third: the remaining two thirds play no part in the calculus of growth (apart from keeping labour costs down). It is true that the ‘classic’ trajectory of the industrial revolution is unrepeatable, not least because imperialism played such a large part in shifting the burden: the historic compromise between the working class and the bourgeoisie embodied in social democracy had colonial exploitation as its obverse. Inevitably our rulers have decided to ignore this fact and pretend that we inhabit, in the words of Pangloss, the very best of all possible worlds.
4The industrial revolution was an abyss into which England’s poor were thrust, to emerge, after more than a century and half of struggle, as citizens of a short-lived social democratic state. This bargain, indeed the west European welfare system (now on its last legs as big business strikes back in the name of international competitiveness), was paid for by economic imperialism. It is notable that the advocates of free trade and global specialization for ‘developing’ economies never bother to explain the logic of natural endowment by which developed economies are magically able to produce such a profusion of manufactured goods and agricultural commodities. The blessings are not of nature but historical advantage: the formative industries of western Europe – shipping, metallurgy, textiles – were defended against their competitors through fierce protectionism. Having fought their way – quite literally – to global domination through this doctrine, their rulers decided that it would be a good idea to preach its opposite to the rest of the world: a lesson fraying thin as far as China, India, the East Asian ‘tigers’ (along with a few other countries) are concerned but still enthusiastically applied elsewhere. The price of this victory, of course, was the wrecking of the planet, a destruction in which the emerging economies ‘of the first tier’ are now wholly complicit. For the ceaseless destruction of nature – of rivers, forests, oceans, glaciers; the conversion of all other living species to disposable ciphers; the erosion of subsistence livelihoods are the inevitable concomitants of unregulated industrial capitalism.
Lacking external colonies to exploit, the Indian middle class turned inwards. Which brings us to the third of Manmohan Singh’s maxims. In his own words: ‘Environmental issues are important, they cannot be wished away... We must adequately ensure that whether it is tribal rights, environmental concerns or forest concerns, they are given their appropriate place. But at the same time there has to be a balance. You cannot protect the environment of this country by perpetuating poverty.’ Given that India’s development after 1947 has been based on unchecked destruction of the environment – not to mention subsistence livelihoods – both in its so-called socialist and capitalist phases, this is truly hilarious. From Manmohan Singh’s remark we might be forgiven for assuming that his predecessors had displayed a culpable solicitude for the environment (and tribal societies), whereas the truth is exactly the opposite. The point is to save what little of wilderness and wildlife is left to us after sixty years of rapine; to return forests and nature to sensible subsistence use. Except that Manmohan Singh suggests that this little is too much, and that some of it must be sacrificed in order to abolish poverty. This is doublespeak of a high order: Orwell’s Big Brother would have been proud of it. Unfortunately our good economist seems perfectly sincere. Or perhaps, as H.L. Mencken said of President Harding, ‘the relations between word and meaning have long since escaped him.’
5As the country’s current hard man, P. Chidambaram embodies another aspect of the bourgeoisie’s bad faith. Rather like the retainer of a house who pretends that it belongs to him, India’s home minister appears to believe that he makes policy, administers affairs of state, governs. However, so derivate are his ideas, and so slavish his devotion to those who make money, that he merely carries out their instructions unbeknownst to himself. Chidambaram belongs to the professional classes whose members played a distinguished part in the revolutions that established the rule of law in Europe (‘Captain Bellodi... was by family tradition and personal conviction a republican who followed what used to be called a "career of arms" in a police force with the dedication of a man who has played his part in a revolution and has seen law created by it. ...[I]f he had not left the service to become a lawyer, the career to which he had been destined, it was because the task of serving and enforcing the law of the Republic was becoming more arduous every day’: Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl). Unfortunately, India’s complicated class-caste structure ensured that they sold their souls to business from the very beginning.
This government’s hard line on Maoism and a variety of other issues reflects a wider consensus. This is nowhere more evident than Dantewada where more than 30,000 people (no one knows the precise number) have been systematically uprooted from their villages in an operation supported by both the BJP and the Congress: the only analogy is with the Indian Army’s operations in Mizoram in the late ’60s. Yet this massive and violent eviction has disappeared into a black hole of silence and complicity: no one cares for the sufferers are, in effect, disposable, and the wider objective of these operations, now openly acknowledged, is to reclaim resource rich regions for commercial exploitation in the name of nourishing that implacable deity, ‘the rate of growth’. The fact that this growth excludes approximately two-thirds of the population is of no consequence to the middle class as a whole.
In a recent article, Ashis Nandy suggests that there are two sections of this middle class: a settled, stable layer that understands the norms of free speech and civilized discourse; and nouveau riche arrivistes, distinguished only by their possession of money, who don’t.
6 Alas, there is nothing new about this ‘new’ middle class: it has been with us from the very beginning, flourishing like the green bay tree, and cheerfully subverting the institutions of the republic. Ruthless, parasitic, on the make, it has, if truth be told, always been the dominant wing of the bourgeoisie. Its junior partners, the liberals (from which most of our public intellectuals until the ’70s came), favoured state intervention to build industry, and ameliorate inequality, without questioning the fundamentally undemocratic character of the development process or the state’s institutions.7 Inevitably their well-meaning policies were hijacked by the commercial, industrial and farming interests that controlled the Congress as a whole to serve their own ends.The contrast between the socialist past and free market present is essentially chimerical; the neo-liberal ‘reforms’ of 1991 followed logically from the dominant trend of India’s economic policies: it is in the republic’s formative years that the rot began. India’s development policies, for want of a better word, have always been inequitable: inequality is built into the very fabric of our institutions, their everyday working. The peculiar phenomenon of Indian capitalism (whose foundations were laid in the Nehruvian years) rests upon savage exploitation of the labouring poor; the effective denial of any kind of security (or even social services) to them.
No wonder the problems – and the fate – of the vast majority of those engaged in agriculture (debt, suicides, the ruinous extraction of water, the poisoning of the land) are of perfect indifference to Sharad Pawar, representative par excellence of prosperous, politically influential farming interests; that Murli Deora’s closeness to Reliance evokes no outrage (the spectrum scandal, by contrast, is merely business as usual); that Orissa’s chief minister acts as ‘enforcer in chief’ for assorted mining interests; or that the grim-faced apparatchiks of the organized left are on the rampage again, in the Jangalmahals this time. Meanwhile waiting eagerly in the wings are the members of the loyal opposition – loyal to the same interests as the current government and even more unrestrained and dangerous in their appetites. Gujarat and Chhattisgarh are well on their way to becoming proto-fascist enclaves: the invocation of chauvinism to defend a pogrom, the brutal repression of popular struggles, illegal monitoring of phone conversations of civil liberties activists (held to be an open secret), the regular ‘encounters’, are straws in the wind as it were. Invoking the bogey of Naxalism has become a favoured gambit across the political spectrum from the organized left to the organized right: one of the hot buttons, like nationalism, to which the middle class can be trusted to respond reflexively.
It is a fascinating and bitter pageant: one only wishes that its actors were worthy of their roles; that they would tell us what they really think instead of mealy-mouthed platitudes for public consumption. As it is, our very own harbingers of the apocalypse wear dunce’s caps and ride pigs instead of horses.
Someone once remarked that America is not unlike India. So it is: our ruling elites should derive considerable satisfaction from the fact that their goal is half achieved. We are not too different from the US in the degree of inequality we are prepared to applaud; our blind and predatory nationalism; our ignorance of the world and its history; our contempt for the unpropertied; the rapacity of our elites and their capacity for the lie so gross it outweighs truth. The promised land is almost there, close enough to touch. If more than half of our citizens must remain half-starved in order to make India a great power and provide the middle class the standards of consumption it aspires to, that does not sound too unreasonable. As a king of France once remarked: after me, the deluge.
Shashank Kela
Footnotes:
1. Daniel Thorner, The Shaping of Modern India. Delhi, 1980, p. 132.
2. These figures are taken from Amit Bhaduri, The Face You were Afraid to See: Essays on the Indian Economy. Delhi, 2009, see pp. 68, 32, 95.
3. Gore Vidal, ‘H.L. Mencken the Journalist’ in United States, Essays 1952-1992. London, 1994, p. 758.
4. The case of China which has succeeded in shifting a significant percentage of the population from agriculture to industry is very different not least because of its political absolutism, its cultural history and the (comparative) homogeneity of the social structure in its core regions; even so there are no indications that it can ever achieve the level of social security that prevails in South Korea, let alone western Europe, or remain anything other than an exceptionally unequal society: it is simply too big, too populous.
5. Quoted in Gore Vidal, op cit., p. 759.
6. ‘The Great Indian Love Affair with Censorship’, Outlook, 8 November 2010.
7. I discuss this more fully in ‘A Republican Agenda’, Himal Southasian, June 2010.
