Chapter 5, titled “India’s ‘1989’—‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché,” covers the “1989” period—another world historic turning-point—in India, a sharp reactionary counterpoint to “1968,” leading to monstrous income and wealth inequality and the emergence of a financial aristocracy. The latter gets its additional wealth more from pocketing the already available wealth of others, including public/state wealth, than from the appropriation of surplus value (and the surplus product) in production. Poor peasants and tribal forest dwellers, their habitats and environments violently and catastrophically uprooted in the course of capitalist growth of modern industry and infrastructure, have been left with no alternative but to either passively accept their relegation to irrelevance or to actively resist.
Rosa Luxemburg defined imperialism as “the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open for the non-capitalist environment”3 within a capitalist country’s own borders and beyond, through militarism and war. In this respect, one senses continuity vis-à-vis the colonial period, evident in the ongoing penetration of Indian big business and the MNCs into the tribal areas of central and eastern India, and the Indian state’s engagement in a “war against its own people” as part of the land, mineral, and other natural-resource grabs over there.
I try to throw light on the state’s handover of scarce natural-resource and other public assets cheap to Indian big business and multinationals, assets that are then commoditized, and become the source of capital gains. I attempt to unravel, in the specific context of the natural-resource grabs in the tribal areas of central and eastern India, what drives the economic process, and brings on the unbridled greed of the financial aristocracy, the political violence, the contests for political power, the fraud, the looting, the incapacity to recognize the value of older, nature-revering cultures, and the resistance of the victims, led by the Maoists. In short, I endeavor to understand what brings on the “imperialist” onslaught—in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense of the term—of the Indian state and big business, within India’s own borders, against their own people.
Chapter 6, titled “‘The Near and the Far’—India’s Rotten Liberal–Political Democracy,” argues that capitalism in India is incompatible with liberal-political democracy if the latter is understood as governance in accordance with the will of the people. Liberal-political democracy is, however, seldom viewed in this way. Rather, and correctly, it is identified with free competition among two or more political parties for votes and political office, the counterpart of free competition for profits in capitalism’s economic sphere. But, just as, in reality, oligopoly and market power rule in the economic sphere, so, in the political realm, the party that commands the most money and naked power is most likely to be voted into office.
Political rights are invariably violated in situations where bourgeois private property rights are threatened. India’s liberal-political democracy requires the violence of the oppressed to be pressurized to deliver justice. The main reason why India’s liberal-political democracy is rotten is because the process of capitalist development from colonial times to the present has essentially been a conservative modernization from above. And the caste system and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, and religion have, so far, inhibited any stable, long-lasting unity of the oppressed and the exploited aimed at progressive modernization from below. This shackling of modernization from below, accompanied by severe state repression when a section of the oppressed unite and resist, has, so far, worked to deny the Maoist revolutionary movement, and indeed all progressive movements, evolution in accordance with their inner logic.
In chapter 7, titled “Maoist! ‘Spring Thunder,’ Phase III,” I look at the Maoist revolutionary movement in the period 2004–2013, now with a significant guerrilla army in place, but yet grappling with the predicament of not being able to develop in accordance with its inner logic. The revolutionary movement suffers a major setback in the province of Andhra Pradesh (now split up into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) when the ongoing counterinsurgency operations of the state manage to “hunt down” many of the main Maoist leaders. But the movement proves resilient in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh province despite the unleashing of a state-backed, state-armed private vigilante force, and later, a centrally-coordinated, massive deployment of central and provincial armed police forces, that came to be known as “Operation Green Hunt.” A very promising spread of the revolutionary movement in parts of Jangalmahal—the tribal blocks in West Midnapore, Purulia, and Bankura districts in the province of West Bengal—however, suffers defeat. At the heart of phase III of the Maoist revolutionary movement is unrelenting resistance to “imperialism,” the latter, as understood in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense of the term. I round off my presentation of fifty years of the Naxalite/Maoist movement with an explanation of the persistence of revolutionary mobilization and my understanding of where the movement is going.
Chapter 8, titled “‘Rotten at the Heart’—the ‘Secular State,’” deals with the abysmal failure of the Indian state to abide by its duty to safeguard individual and corporate “freedom of religion,” to treat individuals as citizens with human rights irrespective of their religious affiliations, to not identify itself with any particular religion, and to not promote or interfere with any religion, thus separating itself from religion. I look at three major communal-hate pogroms, Delhi 1984, Bombay 1993, and Gujarat 2002, to pinpoint three grave “omissions and commissions” of the executive of the Indian state. One, powerful sections of the executive of the Indian state encouraged its law-and-order machinery to turn a blind eye to the terrible mass crimes that were being committed under its very nose. Two, they considered the perpetrators of these crimes to be “patriots” and those who wanted to bring these xenophobic liquidators to book as “betrayers of the nation.” Three, they demanded of the public prosecutors and the investigative agencies that they protect the “patriots” accused of committing the terrible crimes. I also focus attention on the fact that the country’s two major national political parties, the Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, acted in a manner prejudicial to interreligious harmony, and engaged in unlawful activity with the intent of causing harm to particular religious communities.
Chapter 9, titled “‘Little Man, What Now?’—In the Wake of Semi-Fascist and Sub-Imperialist Tendencies,” discerns a semi-fascist regime in the making following the assumption into office of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014. I also trace the emergence of India as a nascent sub-imperialist power. In trying to conceptualize semi-fascism, I search for clues from historical fascism, even as I caution against permanently fixing the meaning of fascism based on its historical forms in Germany and Italy. Semi-fascism in the making in India encompasses an “authoritarian-democratic” regime and a sub-imperialist power, with the regime maintaining a close nexus with big business, nurturing and supporting the Hindutva-nationalist movement to the extent of being complicit in its criminal acts, and insisting on controlling its “necessary” enemies through the use of terror.
My conceptualization of sub-imperialism draws from the ideas of the Brazilian radical scholar Ruy Mauro Marini. I emphasize India’s strategic alliance as a junior partner with U.S. imperialism, but with the privilege of prior consultation with Washington in matters of common concern in South Asia. I draw attention to the global face of Indian big business with its own multinational companies; state-led infrastructural projects in South Asia; super-exploitation of those who produce the surplus value and the surplus product; and the escalation of militarism with Washington as New Delhi’s “Major Defense Partner.” I emphasize the regional geopolitical–military dimension of Indian sub-imperialism. I also draw attention to the importance of the notions of Akhand Bharat—undivided India, geographically as it existed prior to Partition in 1947—and “Greater India” in defining the nation’s geographical borders and ideological frontiers, respectively. I suggest that India’s semi-peripheral status and its sub-imperialism are conducive to semi-fascism.