Where then is India going? Will what remains of India’s continuing “1968” bring twenty-first-century “New Democracy” to the collective agenda? Or will the ongoing regression of “1989” lead the way to full-blown semi-fascism and sub-imperialism?
Chapter 10, “History, Memory, and Dreams—Reimagining ‘New Democracy,’” as its title indicates, senses the need to re-imagine and state up-front what kind of “New Democracy” the united front against the sub-imperialist-capitalist order needs to institute upon coming to power in the course of a national, popular, democratic, anti-imperialist, anti-semi-feudal revolution in India. The sub-imperialist-capitalist order and present-day Indian society have proved to be totally incompatible with democracy when the latter is understood in terms of its basic principles and aspirations—liberty, equality, and comradeship (fraternity is not the appropriate word now).
While keeping in place its historic legacy, “New Democracy” needs to be re-imagined as part of a truly democratic, human needs–based “political transition period” on the long road to a communitarian basis for socialism. Taking the perspective of the “small voices” of “the present as history,” and in empathy with those voices, I relook at the classic peasant question and the agenda of radical land reform and conceptualize the contemporary peasant question in terms of a series of peasant questions. I also stress the need for an interim program to first win the political battle against Hindutva-nationalism and semi-fascism.
But, more importantly, and in the light of the core political question that I pose in this book, semi-peripheral underdevelopment or revolution, I re-imagine the revolutionary horizon of India’s Maoists, hoping that my scholarly doggedness and their political efforts might converge. Seventy years have gone by since India’s independence, and my analysis (and conviction) is that capitalist development will not be able to overcome underdevelopment—mass poverty, misery, and degradation stemming from super-exploitation, oppression, and domination; technological backwardness; and economic dependence. Behind the affluence and luxury of the few lies the poverty and misery of the many. Behind the apparent civilization of the few lies the degradation of the many. From the latter half of the 1950s onward, the process of unequal development has led to a transition from peripheral underdevelopment to semi-peripheral underdevelopment. This is evident in the greatly enhanced power of the Indian state and the burgeoning wealth of Indian big business, but with the extreme backwardness of the periphery remaining in large parts of the country. There are definite limits to development in a semi-peripheral underdeveloped country like India, its sub-imperialism notwithstanding.
I’d like to say a few words about my analytical approach to the subject matter of the book. When I started work on the book I was not sure of the most fruitful approach, so I indulged in a bit of trial and error, and retained what I thought best. Reality, I was convinced, is fluid and ever-changing, and so one’s definitions, concepts, and framework must be open-ended and capable of being adapted and applied in different contexts and periods. It is hardly the case that the political and ideological superstructure is always tightly circumscribed by the economic base. One must be open to empirical evidence. In this light, I sense that in an underdeveloped capitalist system like that of India’s, the economic structure is not as much the autonomous sub-system it usually is in a developed capitalist system. But, of course, I view India as part of the capitalist world-system, operating within the framework and constraints of that system. And I am convinced that the truth of the “center” is, more often than not, revealed in the “periphery” and “semi-periphery” of the capitalist world-system.
In a country like India, politics dominates over economics more than in the developed capitalist countries. This is because—as Joan Robinson and John Eatwell put it in a heterodox economics textbook, An Introduction to Modern Economics—economic policy has been involved with the type of society that is emerging. “Is development intended to aim primarily at feeding the people and overcoming the grossest misery, or is it primarily to make room for a prosperous middle class, or to defend the privileges of [capital and] landed property?”5 I came to studying economics after an exposure to science and engineering, and found the division of labor and the specializations in the social sciences a hindrance and detrimental to attaining a comprehensive understanding of the problems I sought to investigate. To be meaningful, social analysis must not partition real-world phenomena into separate economic, political, and sociological domains.
My approach in this book is interdisciplinary, with a historical perspective throughout, and I focus on the class struggle, even as I try not to lose sight of caste, which, with the persistence of its very slowly moving structure over the longue durée, continues to significantly define the culture of exploitation and oppression in India. This book draws on existing knowledge and analysis from “the library” and “the field,” and puts them together in new and different ways, to raise questions and offer some conclusions which, hopefully, might help other writers to advance their own researches on India. If there are a few rich insights, these eye-openers might inevitably be accompanied by strands of incredible blindness. My intellectual debts will be found in the text and the endnotes, but, as regards the conceptual and analytical framework, I must mention, in particular, the influence of Samir Amin, Hamza Alavi, Ranajit Guha, Nirmal K. Chandra, Paul A. Baran, Paul M. Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Ruy Mauro Marini, Immanuel Wallerstein, Barrington Moore, Jr., Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong. At the heart of this book is a comprehension of “the present as history”—the way Paul M Sweezy understood this important intellectual task—for the present is still at hand and so we have the power to shape it and influence its outcome.
Without the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency and the other progressive movements that were kindled in the ’68 period, capitalism in India would have by now turned barbaric. Revolution didn’t happen but it forced reform; one can think of what it takes to grab a chunk of meat from the mouth of a tiger. A word or two about the spirit of the revolutionaries is then called for. They have been the architects of the revolutionary process that has being developing, albeit slowly and unevenly. I have, metaphorically, put myself in their shoes to feel their rage, fury, revulsion, and moral indignation directed against the powers-that-be, their empathy and compassion toward the oppressed, both in the face of the terror and the inhumanity of the counterrevolution … A refusal to remain silent and unmoved in the face of the myriad injustices and indignities the poor are made to suffer … The fetters of intuitive self-preservation thrown to the winds … Ready to fight on in the face of impossible odds … There’s always the satisfaction of having fought courageously and conscientiously for a better world. India’s underdevelopment is guaranteed to bring such people back into the political arena; stubborn individuals, they’ll constantly be reborn; indeed, some of them might just refuse to die. They’re bent upon doing what they promise to do—their deeds in harmony with their words. I take recourse to citing stanzas of Naxalite poetry to convey the feelings and emotions.
But as regards the Maoist strategy of “protracted people’s war,” the hard reality on this score is that all they have after fifty years is a relatively small guerrilla army of the poor, operating on the margins of Indian society. So they need to take serious stock of the impasse of this strategy when the movement is confronted with India’s overdeveloped state, particularly the state’s repressive apparatus, which is backed by a coercive legal structure and is endorsed by a colonial value system. The Indian state has been aggressively working to wipe out the movement by all available means, fair or foul, violating with impunity Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Protocol II, relating to non-international armed conflict, and even conventional civil and political rights. The cycle of repression, resistance, and further repression seems endless.
I nevertheless grasp the significance of the Maoist movement, and provide both a romantic eulogy and a critical analysis of it. This anti-systemic movement has been holding the Indian banner for a relatively egalitarian and a relatively democratic world high over a fairly