I thank Subhas Aikat of the Kharagpur-based Cornerstone Publications; Rajani Desai and Girish Srinivasan of the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy; Alpa Shah, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Ajmal Khan, and Arup Sen for readily responding to my requests to locate and send me certain essential books and papers. The construction of the maps I owe to my EPW colleague, Abhishek Shaw, and I am grateful to him for devoting precious hours to the task. For the photograph of Maoist guerrillas on the march that graces the book’s cover, Monthly Review Press and I are obligated to the well-known documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak.
The writing of this book put an unintended additional load on my EPW colleagues, for I was on leave from my job for a year and a half. I express my sense of obligation to them.
I am grateful to John Mage for reading a first draft of the entire manuscript. His classical approach to Marxist analyses, his queries, his pointing me to errors, his encouragement. John, I needed the kind of gentle assurance and guidance you provided with regard to my ways of looking at and thinking about the subject matter of this book. Uma and Anand Chakravarti’s helpful comments on a draft of the Appendix on Caste were valuable. Swapna Banerjee-Guha’s reactions to a draft of chapter 1 gave me the confidence I needed to plod on, for she had been what social anthropologists call a “participant observer” in Kolkata in the course of “Spring Thunder,” Phase I. Stephen Rego, who copyedited the entire manuscript, actually did much more than that—his observations on chapters 1, 4, and 7 have enriched both form and content. Michael D. Yates, Director, Monthly Review Press, read the entire manuscript after it had been copy-edited, and helpfully pointed to transatlantic differences with regard to commas and much else that both Stephen and I had overlooked. Michael’s words, “I enjoyed reading your book and learned a great deal from it,” mean a lot to me. Thank you, Michael.
I must record a big thank-you to Martin Paddio and Susie Day at Monthly Review Press; and to K. K. Saxena, publisher, Aakar Books, Delhi; for all it takes to reach out to readers and keep the enterprise going.
Finally, words would never suffice to express my gratitude to ma and pa, Jean Florence Abrahams and Charles Francis D’Mello, working-class parents who raised me; to Pauline Menezes, my partner, who has stood by me through my darkest nights, kept me from the brink of the abyss. And, to our son Samar and daughter Vera, I am now in debt to the tune of five holidays in the hills and by the riverside.
—BERNARD D’MELLO
Mumbai, May 1, 2018
Introduction
Alongside China, India has been hailed as one of the world’s most significant “emerging” economies/markets. But one might well ask: in what way has India been “emerging”? Open to the expansion of Northern multinational capital that is driven to exploit “global labor arbitrage” opportunities? Open to international financial capital in its perennial hunt for capital gains? Unlike India, it is China, with huge current account surpluses on its balance of payments, deriving mainly from export of manufactured goods, which has proved capable of setting the terms of its “economic openness” and successfully directing the accumulation process to its own national development. While China has been open to capital exploiting the global labor arbitrage opportunity it offers in the production of manufactured goods for export to Northern markets, India has been offering the same in Information Technology (IT)-enabled services. India’s international competitiveness in IT–enabled services derives from the fact that the value created by its IT workers is a multiple of what they are paid, and much of the surplus value is captured through exchange by the Northern clients of the Indian IT–enabled service-providing firms.
But despite being a successful exporter of IT–enabled services, India continues to systematically run a deficit on the current account of its balance of payments. And it has been dependent mainly on inflows of speculative capital to finance that deficit. Its foreign exchange reserves have been built up mainly because net capital inflows have been exceeding the current account deficits. India’s fiscal, monetary, and financial policies are significantly tailored to entice international financial capital and retain it, for a steady depletion of the foreign exchange reserves could possibly set off a capital flight by financial speculators, leading to quick disappearance of these reserves. After all, it doesn’t take much Northern money to push up stock-market prices, nor will it take much to generate a capital flight and a sudden collapse of those prices. The “emerging” Indian stock market can suddenly turn into a “submerging” one.
At $2,088.5 billion and $1,590 in 2015, India’s gross national income (GNI)—total domestic and foreign value-added claimed by residents—and GNI per capita are merely one-fifth of China’s. Moreover, India’s monstrous income inequality is worse than China’s. The proportion of India’s population below an international poverty line of $3.10 a day in 2011 was 68.0 percent (more than Bangladesh’s 63.0 percent figure) while the same was only 19.1 percent in China. In 2015, India’s under-five mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) and maternal mortality rate (per 100,000 live births) were 48 and 174, respectively, compared to China’s 11 and 27, respectively.
The percentage of children under age five who are stunted—a largely irreversible outcome of inadequate nutrition and repeated bouts of infection during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life—is 38.7 percent in India (higher than Bangladesh’s 36.4 percent figure) compared to 9.4 percent in China.1 Mother India, “Yours is a sadness that / fails to comfort the children crawling over / your barren breasts,” the radical Telugu poet Cherabanda Raju would have lamented. Indeed, the percentages of India’s urban and rural populations not even able to access the minimum calorie norms of 2,100 and 2,200 calories per person per day, 65 percent and 68 percent, respectively, in 2011–12, is indicative of mass hunger. The corresponding figures in 1993–94 were 57 percent and 58.5 percent, respectively, and so there is growing mass hunger.2 To give meaning to the above-mentioned development indicators in a world context, one must emphasize that in 2011, as much as 17.5 percent of the world’s population resided in India, and 19.4 percent in China.
One can go on, but the sharp differences between India and China on key indicators of development is there for all to see, and one begins to feel India’s misery. India remains among the most poverty-stricken countries of the world, with most of its population still inadequately fed, miserably clothed, wretchedly housed, poorly educated, and without access to decent medical care. Its deeply oppressive and exploitative social order is crying out for revolutionary change.
I am, however, not going to say that China did this and that, which India did not do. India gained political independence in 1947; China accomplished a popular, national, anti-semi-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution in 1949. This as a result of a protracted class struggle from 1927 to 1949 led by the Chinese Communist Party, independently of Chinese big business. This revolution succeeded in changing the class structure and social institutions