Mercury in the Medicine: Indian Privatization

This week’s piece comes from Tigerlegion on DeviantArt. Check his page out, and support his work! Also, the week’s quote is from Elizabeth Warren, an American Senator.

Today, over two decades after India introduced IMF constructed neoliberal economic reform, many Indians are concerned with the evaluation of economic-reforms to find out how the reforms have affected the country's growth, development and ultimately the standard of living of its countrymen. The context in which these reforms may be viewed, is of course, of the era of intensive planning, and high level micro-management, particularly through restrictive production caps. For any economy of India's nature, that being, an underdeveloped, predominantly rural and agrarian economy, would maintain the long term objective of planning not only being to achieve growth, but also to ensure equality as well as eradication of poverty. The success of any economic reform process should thus be judged by the social and economic objectives it achieves, to put it into context with the previous era. In a country like India, reducing poverty level is by far, the most important manifestation of socio-economic progress, signifying improvement in standard of living, such as better health and education.

India as a nation, is founded on the principles of a parliamentary federal government and a progressive, democratic state and society. This theoretical foundation of the Indian state and society is clearly outlined in the constitution of India. The ideas of Fabian socialism and the welfare state also find expression in Part IV of the Constitution on directive principles of state policy. However, these principles are not enforceable in a court of law in contrast to Part III on Fundamental Rights of citizens and communities, which are legally enforceable, which in fact goes against their original role, which was to be an essential regulating mechanism in Indian polity. The constitution is thus at pains to point out, that the directive principles, even though non-justiciable, are to be "fundamental in the governance" of the country. The Supreme Court and High Courts have often invoked the directive principles to buttress their rulings, sometimes even going to the extent of clothing with the status of fundamental rights.

In practice, the Indian state led by the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, initiated a massive strategy of development of what it professedly called "the socialistic pattern of society" by the means of centralized democratic planning. It actually amounted to industrialization under a dominant public sector, in a mixed economy aimed at a nationally reliant industrial economy. This system of autarky proved itself capable to function in many sectors, as displayed by such firms as BHEL. The primary issue arising was not of ability to produce, or quality, but management, which could be avoided as seen in the case of SAIL, the state steel producing firm. Due to further distortions, like the trend of neo-feudal rent-seeking in the public sector and in the governmental apparatus in general, the Indian state was driven to make a paradigm shift to neoliberal capitalist reforms in 1991 to deal with a serious crisis of balance of payment in international trade and the fiscal overload on the government in India (Predominantly due to the oil crisis resulting from the Gulf War), under pressures of an almost neo-feudal rent-seeking by the political and bureaucratic class as well as populist public policies to placate a socially and politically mobilized, and demanding electorate.

At first glance, India appears to be a fairly successful case of a developing democracy in the South both in terms of "free and fair" elections and governance. But if we probe deeper, this impression does not stand up-to scrutiny. With the neoliberal shift in the economic policy in India, especially since 1991, two major trends have evidently gathered momentum. These are the rise in the clout of the capitalist classes in the industrial, commercial, service, agricultural sectors, and the rise of politics of identity and ethnicity, most strongly mobilized in the form of the increasingly fascist Hindutva (many groups such as the RSS organized on Nazi party and fascist lines, and expressing admiration for such groups) in the national arena and a variety of regional parties based on religious, caste, and tribal identities. There has also been an unprecedented growth of the weeds of corruption and criminalization of politics since the rise of neoliberalism in the Indian political economy. It is not to be said that these vices were non-existent prior to the neoliberal shift; rather that they have become more endemic since then.

The foregoing new trends in the Indian polity have had a considerable corrosive effect on the elections, party system, and governance. Corruption and criminalization of politics have made the elections an affair of the rich and powerful, by and large. This point is illustrated by the number and proportion of "Crorepatis" (individuals residing in residences with a net worth of over 10 million rupees.) in the 15th Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament), elected in 2009. The proportion is a clear majority. Similarly chilling data exists on those charged with crime in the 15th Lok Sabha. In the Lok Sabha as a whole, 57.8 percent, or 315 of 545 MPs (Members of parliament) are Crorepatis. In the two major national parties the percentage of such members is as high as 70 percentage in the Indian National Congress and 50 percent in the Bharatiya Janata Party. In several regional or nominally national parties the figures are also quite high or in fact higher. The percentages of the charged MPs in the two major national parties are 37.93 in the BJP and 21.36 in the INC. As a whole, 162 of 545, or 29.7 percent of MPs have been charged with various crimes.

In ideological and democratic vacuity, none of the major political parties can mobilize genuine grassroots support. In the legislative arenas too, the fragmentation of the party system is sought to be bridged by immoral coalitions for governance and opposition through political maneuvering corruption, and crime. Politics of defection that first surfaced in India in the aftermath of the 1967 general election have continue, despite the 1985 Anti-defection Act incorporated in the 10th schedule of the Constitution. In fact, the bribing of legislators to win confidence vote, not only in states where it first made appearance in the late 1960s, but also in the Parliament in New Delhi, has become an uncontrolled and recurrent political menace. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) bribery case decided by the Supreme Court in 1999 indicting the P.V. Narasimha Rao Congress minority Government brought out the extent of moral and legal decadence to which Indian democracy has descended. In addition, instances of bribes for raising questions in the Parliament, selling of ministerial and parliamentarians' discretion in allotment of services and utilities, and economic and political scams, etc. have enormously multiplied since the 1990s. The biggest among the scams being investigated at present are the cases relating to the 2-G spectrum allocations by the telecom ministry, the Commonwealth Games of 2010, and the Adarsha Housing Society allotments in Mumbai, all involving the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance Governments in New Delhi and Maharashtra. There are scams galore also at the state level, involving all political parties and governments across the board. Perhaps for the first time in Indian politics, ministers and MPs of the ruling dispensation have been put behind the bars in the course of investigation in the 2-G spectrum and the Commonwealth Games cases. The leakage of taped conversations of Nira Radia who was lobbying first for the Tatas and later for Mukesh Ambani have revealed how the corporate capitalist sector has begun to influence the news and views of supposedly free media and even the allocation of ministerial portfolios in the federal coalition governments headed by national parties like the Indian National Congress and steered by supposedly clean politicians like Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.

Another remarkable, or rather terrifying trend which has largely emerged in conjecture with the reforms, is the rise of the Hindu nationalist (see fascist), and "secular" right wing, being the BJP and INC respectively.  None of the two major national parties (the Indian National Congress and The Bharatiya Janata Party) appear to have viable political alternatives in governance and development. One is democratically stymied by dynastic control, not only as seen in Prime Ministers (Although a significant bulk of Nehru and Indira Gandhi's measures were undeniably pro-people, The Emergency aside), but MPs, and the other is democratically debilitated by its nexus with non-democratic Hindu traditional Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and neo-Hindu conservative Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), both of which have been associated with atrocities against minorities such as the 2002 Gujarat Pogroms, and openly admire Hitler and the Nazis. Hindu communalism and neoliberalism have become its staple programme. The Congress has lost its former socialist inclined progressive programmatic posture of Nehru as well as political populism of Indira Gandhi. It exists in an ideological vacuum, so to say, since its acceptance of the neoliberal capitalist persuasion, on the one hand, and contingent political populism under the pressure of "vote bank" politics, on the other. The Indian mainstream left wing, which electorally survived the global onslaught of neoliberalism until the 2009-10, continuously ruling in West Bengal since 1977, in Tripura, and intermittently in Kerala, has now been badly mauled. While in recent years, many of their actions, such as the Maruti factory incident, are questionable, their achievements are undeniable in terms of social indicator development. While far from revolutionary, their social policy and opposition to neoliberal crimes continues to be a significant force, as is their influence in Kerala, West Bengal, Tripura, and other states, and their role in the trade union system. The regional political theater is sadly devoid of any viable democratic alternatives on the whole, even for their respective states, to say nothing of the national or federal politics.

The sites of democratic political action that rightfully belong to the party-political processes have been practically vacated by the political parties. The decline and stagnation of the party system is therefore being partly compensated by judicial activism, investigative journalism, civil society movements against corruption like those of Anna Hazare, and new social movements on environment and ecology, quality of life and services, child rights and gender justice, administrative and political transparency and accountability, and human rights in general. But the sustainability of these factors and trends depends on the overall extent of repression, which has been seen emerging through mass surveillance, extrajudicial executions, and the police-political party complex. It is sad to note, that this is merely the tip of the iceberg.