Review India is broken: a people betrayed, independence to today, Ashoka Mody, Stanford University Press, hardback, February 2023, £24.99
On 22 January 2024, India’s Ram temple complex in Ayodhya was consecrated on the site of the violently demolished 16th-century Babri Masjid, to the great joy of Hindu nationalists. It is the latest signal of India’s turn towards a fascist Hindu ethnostate. Communal divisions stoked by British imperialism long before 1947 independence are escalating, inflamed by India’s dire economic situation and the ruling class’s attempts to distract India’s millions of dispossessed from their stark reality. Fanfare for the Ram temple obscured the Oxfam report, released just days earlier, that the richest 1% of India now own 40.5% of India’s wealth, a level of inequality that is greater now than it was under British colonisation. In 2020, the World Bank estimated 10% of India’s population was still in extreme poverty (below $1.90 per day purchasing power parity) and 45% in poverty (below $3.20), suggesting over 700 million Indians were poor or extremely poor before Covid-19. The Pew Research Center has since estimated that by December 2020, Covid-19 had pushed a further 75 million Indians (nearly 6% of the population) into extreme poverty, contributing to 60% of the global Covid-19-related increase in extreme poverty. In this context, Ashoka Mody’s India is broken: a people betrayed, independence to today describes the political and economic history of India since 1947 and attempts to explain its current rotten state. While his book is useful for its history, Mody fails to elucidate the key underlying political currents that drive India’s backwards development. India is not ‘broken’; its fascism and economic decay are natural results of capitalism and imperialism’s incessant drive to sacrifice the working class for capital accumulation.
The missing Indian working class
No account of India’s history since 1947 can begin without context of the struggles that led to its independence. This is Mody’s first mistake. FRFI detailed the lead-up to Indian independence and how the forces of British imperialism through the Tory and Labour Party, and the Indian bourgeoisie through the Congress Party, brutally crushed the Indian working class movement (see FRFI 138/139 ‘India: The struggle for independence – parts 1 and 2’). The Congress Party, established in 1885 by Allan Hume, a British retired official of the Indian Civil Service, was envisaged as a ‘safety valve’ for the release of political tensions and aspirations stimulated by British colonial policies, serving as a political home for the English-educated Indian elite and a method of managing their discontent. It is this Congress that Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the popular ‘heroes’ of Indian independence, belonged to. Terrified of the threat to their wealth, the Indian bourgeoisie throughout the first half of the century used the Congress Party, aligning closely with British imperialism, to stifle any potential for a working-class-led anti-capitalist revolution. Between 1919 and 1931, the Indian working class played a pivotal role in resisting British rule. The first half of 1920 saw 200 strikes involving 1.5 million workers; in 1928, a colossal number of strikes led to over 30 million days lost to industrial action and 70% growth in union membership. Gandhi and his bourgeois wing of Congress recognised that the working class was awakening to its own concept of a liberated India which did not just expel the British but also the elite that oppressed them, seen through rent strikes and land occupations that accompanied industrial action. In 1922, Gandhi called off major non-cooperation movements, raving about ‘non-violence’ after an incident between protesters and police resulted in dead police officers, but his declaration was as much about the property rights of zamindars (landlords) as it was about non-violence. Instead, Congress cooperated with the British Raj and Labour Party to ensure that leaders of these new working class movements were imprisoned, decapitating the movement in crucial stages of the liberation struggle.
It is this history of struggle and repression in India that Mody dismisses. In significant moments since independence working class movements shook the nation like the rail strike of 1974 (involving 1.7 million workers), textile mill strike of 1982 (involving 250,000 workers) and most recently the farmers’ protest and strike of 2020 (involving over 250 million workers, farmers and allied students, women and civil society groups). Mody characterises these movements as appearing out of nowhere, failing to connect them to crucial working class organisation in India’s pre-independence period.
This comes as no surprise considering Mody’s background. A professor at Princeton University, Mody formerly worked at the World Bank from 1987 to 2003 before joining the IMF’s European Department as assistant director in 2001. This is the same IMF that holds poor countries hostage with loans, demanding economic liberalisation and structural adjustment in return for financial assistance. Mody sits comfortably abroad, evaluating India from the idealistic perspective of a well-intended, respectable bourgeoisie. It is this class position that undermines his ability to coherently explain the conflicting capitalist interests and working class oppression of the last period.
Economic stagnation and low productivity
While Mody’s political background misguides his analysis, his overview of India’s economic history is useful. During Nehru’s term as prime minister from 1947 to 1964, Mody describes how Nehru focused on heavy industrialisation, what Nehru referred to as ‘big temples’, instead of labour-intensive industries that could have alleviated poverty more effectively. Mody also laments Nehru’s neglect of mass primary education and agriculture reform. Instead, Nehru invested in elite institutions that could only ever educate a miniscule fraction of India’s population and ‘heavy’ industry like steel production that could only ever employ a small fraction of India’s labour force. Without investment into primary education, India’s labour force remained at low productivity. As Mody details, land reform under Nehru was botched: while the zamindari system was legally abolished in the 1950s, zamindars simply evicted small tenant farmers and kept the land using the lie that they cultivated the land themselves. This failure comes as no surprise as the traditionally bourgeois Congress Party leaders, many of whom were large landlords, undermined the reforms to protect themselves.
Under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s tenures as prime ministers from 1966 to 1989, respectively daughter and grandson of Nehru, little changed in economic policy but corruption proliferated. Mody describes how Indira Gandhi relied on her father’s legacy, ‘socialist rhetoric’ and political manoeuvres to distract and control the population. A good example of this is the nationalisation of India’s fourteen largest private banks in 1969 which she described ‘as a measure for the common man and a rebuff to big business.’ Instead, as Mody describes:
‘Banks became hotbeds of corruption. Wealthy, politically powerful, and corrupt elites received loans on favorable terms, on which they frequently defaulted. The integrity and financial viability of the nationalised banks steadily eroded, making nonsense of the claims that the nationalised banks were serving a socialist – or indeed any economic – purpose’ (p148).
Missing here is the fact that any nationalisation under a capitalist state will inevitably serve the ruling class’s purposes, that the resultant corruption is inherent to the system rather than due to ‘moral failings’ as suggested by Mody.
As prime ministers cycled through government in the 1990s representing conflicting communal interests, India remained economically stagnant despite a much-acclaimed IT ‘boom’ in Bangalore, one that only contributed 2% of total GDP by 2005 (p286) and primarily employed India’s educated elite. Stagnation could be seen most directly in foreign direct investment (FDI): India received between $100m and $200m in FDI from 1985 to 1989 compared to China’s $1.7-$3.4bn per year (p224), indicating an international ruling class skepticism of India’s productive potential that remains today.
State repression
Another key thread is the use of state repression against marginalised populations’ movements and demands. Perhaps the most instructive examples are the 1970s student movements and rail strikes under Indira Gandhi as prime minister. In the late 1960s and 1970s, India faced a series of agriculture crises as devastating droughts and floods struck the country. West Bengal, Bihar and Gujarat all experienced tremendous upheaval as the debilitated agricultural sector caused soaring prices, shortages and unemployment (p164). Guerrilla warfare in Bengal, student protests in Gujarat and Bihar and rail strikes followed. Policemen and army killed thousands and beat up and gaoled tens of thousands of protestors. During Bihar’s rail union strike of 1974, policemen physically camped at railway colonies, arrested workers who stayed home and terrorised the families of workers including raping the wives of workers. By the end of the strike 20 days after it started, police were holding 25,000 workers without trial while a vast number faced permanent job loss (p166).
Mody correctly describes Indira Gandhi’s tactics as ‘repressive’. Anyone familiar with the tactics British imperialism used to suppress the Indian working class pre-independence would easily recognise Indira Gandhi’s tactics as an evolution of the same. Mody fails to recognise this as an unavoidable consequence of capitalism, misconstruing her actions as an individual attempt to ‘increase authority’. He mischaracterises Indira Gandhi as power-hungry instead of acting in the interest of the ruling class that she herself is a part of.
Rise of Hindu nationalism
Ongoing elections in India predict another triumph for the Hindu nationalist BJP. As such, it’s impossible for Mody to avoid the question of Hindu nationalism and what has led to its flagrant expression today. As Mody details, current Hindu nationalist ideology can find its roots in the text Hindutva published in 1923 by Indian nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Hindutva describes Savarkar’s idea of India as a nation of Hindus, ‘those who considered India their fatherland as well as a holy land’ (p237). While many Hindu nationalists reference Hindutva now, Hindu-Muslim strife began much before its publication and was used to divide and rule the Indian people by British imperialists and the Indian bourgeoisie, Hindu and Muslim, who fought to capture the spoils of India (see FRFI 138). This detail is missing from Mody’s analysis of the rise of Hindu nationalism, misleading him to point to India’s 82% Hindu majority population as the cause of Hindu nationalism’s popularity instead of the crisis of Indian capitalism.
Mody tracks the rise of Hindu nationalism beginning with the aforementioned 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid. The 16th-century mosque was violently demolished by dozens before a rally of over 150,000 Hindu nationalists who believed that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of Lord Rama, a Hindu god. The demolition instigated pogroms targeting Muslims across India, killing over 2,000. In 2002, a train fire that killed 59 Hindu pilgrims in Gujarat led to riots which killed thousands of Muslims. Current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a member of BJP, infamously presided over these riots as Gujarat’s chief minister and exploited them for BJP’s electoral success. In 2019, the Supreme Court awarded the disputed site to a trust for the construction of the Ram temple, leading to its consecration early this year.
Mody does little to connect the rise of Hindu nationalism to India’s economic stagnation, presenting them instead as concurrent trends. He does not even mention the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, a racist law that excludes Muslim immigrants from access to citizenship. By doing so, Mody dismisses the reality that the Indian state has no option but to use racist, divide and rule tactics to control its population that faces a deep economic and political crisis with no end in sight.
‘Socialism’ and ‘democracy’
Throughout his book, Mody describes India as ‘failed socialism’ and claims that ‘democracy betrayed Indians’. For Mody, ‘socialism means the creation of equal opportunity for all.’ This gross misrepresentation of socialism encapsulates all of Mody’s analytical weaknesses. While pointing out all the symptoms of capitalism, he continually fails to use the word ‘capitalism’ and assumes that some sort of real democracy for the majority is possible under capitalism. Mody’s failure to explain the rot of India is yet another example of why a class analysis is essential to understand the world and fight for a better one.
Soma Kisan
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 300 June/July 2024
