Even as the Chinese and the Indians have been making their own history, they have not been able to, indeed, cannot make it as they please. The revolutionary process has been developing unevenly and more slowly in India, thwarted by its inevitable accompaniment, counterrevolution, whose principal base has been in the “overdeveloped” Indian state. India’s unfinished revolution has, nevertheless, been gathering strength and augmenting its forces against the counterrevolution. However, more recently, a major section of the latter, with a fascist ideology and a powerful, reactionary mass movement backing it, has gone on an offensive against the forces of liberal-political democracy and the left, this by using a mix of electoral politics and illegal violence to advance its goal of instituting a Hindu Rashtra (nation). To be able to write wisely about India’s present, one needs to know where India is going, for which viewing “the present as history” is a must. To understand India, it is essential to get to the roots of the poverty, the misery, the degradation, and the injustice that the majority of its people suffer. And importantly, one must comprehend, recognize, and empathize with the struggles, the unrest, and the ideas emanating from the exploitation, the oppression, and the domination that often become unbearable.
Chapter 1, titled “Naxalite! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase I,” begins with an account of a revolutionary armed peasant uprising in 1967 in Naxalbari, at the foot of the Himalayas. I view this rebellion as part and parcel of a (then) contemporary, worldwide impulse among radicals embracing the spirit of revolutionary humanism. It was this revolutionary struggle that inspired the creation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) in 1969. The uprising at Naxalbari stimulated insurrections in other parts of the country, and so, when Charu Mazumdar, the leader of what became the Naxalite movement, predicted in the fall of 1967 that “Naxalbari … will never die,” he was saying something about the ability of his followers to survive, continue, and expand the movement in the face of ruthless repression let loose by the Indian state. Naxalbari came to stand for the road to revolution in India, and the term “Naxalite” found a place in the lexicon of world revolution.
In chapter 2, titled “‘1968’ India as History,” I try to understand the “1968” decade—a world historic turning-point—in India where, too, revolutionary humanism came to the fore but was sought to be extinguished by extraordinary state repression. I touch upon a number of social movements besides the Naxalite revolutionary uprising—the civil liberties and democratic rights movement; the “Chipko” ecological movement; the Dalit Panther Movement of India’s Untouchables, inspired by America’s Black Panthers; the evolution of the women’s movements; militant movements of workers; and so on.
The “1968” decade was marked by brutal state repression, with the unleashing of political barbarism in a setting of unabated colonial policy. In many respects, independent India has failed to make a break from its colonial past. The ’68ers of the various social movements and the Naxalite insurgency drew their inspiration from the democratic and anti-imperialist proclivities of the many peasant uprisings before and after 1885, the year the Indian National Congress party was founded. That party, supported by Indian big business, led the national movement for independence, successfully disguising what was a class project as the national project.
I view the longer process, from colonial times to the present, in terms of a series of rebellions for justice and well-being by ordinary people that incurred the wrath of the state and were crushed by brutal repression. What followed was reform, with laws to that effect, accompanied by encouragement of a reformist strand among the political elite. The latter’s dependability was gauged by the extent to which it went in condemning the rebels/revolutionaries and expressing faith in the establishment’s will to bring about gradual, progressive change. Opportunist to the core, the political elite took advantage of the persistence of militant struggles to enhance its own bargaining power vis-à-vis the ruling classes. Its omissions and commissions guaranteed the failure or the falsity of progressive reform, and rebellions recurred, in newer forms, like the many Naxalbaris in three phases over the last fifty years. In different ways and in changed contexts, India’s “1968” is still with us, in the questions it raised about the future, and in its quest for an egalitarian, democratic India.
Chapter 2 takes a “voluntarist” view of “the present as history,” focusing on the determination and the will power of the protagonists, inspired by their respective collective memories of India’s modern past. In sharp contrast, chapter 3, titled “Unequal Development and Evolution of the Ruling Bloc,” takes a “determinist” view of “the present as history,” focusing on the ways in which history and the given conditions existing on the ground have determined what has been happening. Neither approach is radical enough without the other. The two, the “voluntarist” and the “determinist,” have to be intelligently synthesized to gain a fuller understanding of “the present as history.”
Chapter 3 tries to throw light on the principal characteristics of India’s underdeveloped capitalism and the process of dependent and unequal development, steered, during the last six to seven decades, by an Indian big business–state–multinational capitalist ruling bloc. The chapter traces the evolution of India from a petty-commodity, tribute-paying social formation in the seventeenth century to Company–State Raj (rule) and the switch from “Old” to “New” colonialism in the nineteenth century, metamorphosing gradually into imperialist domination in the Leninist sense as that century drew to a close. The process leads on to a blossoming of Indian big business during the two wars and the inter-war period in the twentieth century. Following political independence in 1947, an ambivalent, integrated industrial development unfolds, especially from 1957 onward, leading on to the present twenty-first-century high-point of Indian big business, the multinationals, and Northern speculative financial capital in command, together shaping economic outcomes.
The colonial state was “overdeveloped” in relation to the economic base in terms of its powers of control and regulation, and the bureaucracy, the military, and the polity in independent India had a vested interest in continuity rather than change on this score. So also the services sector of the colonial economy relative to the physical commodity–producing sectors, even though, at independence, the primary sector remained dominant in terms of its contribution to India’s gross domestic product and livelihoods. But, it was a matter of time, in independent India, when a bloated services sector relative to the primary and secondary sectors would become a systemic necessity, essential for the realization of the surplus generated in the latter sectors. This was because vast numbers of people got left out of the development that was supposed to accompany the growth of modern industry and there was no way by which agriculture could have ever reabsorbed them. The historical roots of both the contemporary huge reserve army of labor relative to the active army of wage labor and the huge mass of petty-commodity producers of goods and services as part of this labor reserve must be located in “the drain” of part of the surplus of the economy—siphoning this out without any quid pro quo—and in the process of de-proto-industrialization during the colonial period.
Chapter 4, titled “Naxalite! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase II,” basically shows how a significant section of the Naxalites, in the period 1978–2003, take Mao’s dictum that a people’s war “can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them” seriously in their practice. They build a worker–peasant alliance. They set up women’s organizations and link them with the peasants’ and workers’ organizations so that both men and women get joint titles to the occupied lands that are distributed among poor and landless labor households. They assign great importance to the caste question, for caste defines the culture of exploitation in the Indian