A Gathering of The
Left
A grand gathering of left-wing parties of Telangana,
including the CPI, the CPM, the different M-L factions, the Forward Bloc, and
socialist groups, held a meeting to ‘develop consensus,’ on October 21st, at
the Sundarayya Vigyan Kendra, Hyderabad. The veteran leader, Chukka Ramaiah,
spoke with great feeling about the sacrifices that had been endured in the
past. He reminded the audience that left-wing philosophy was at the core of
Telangana political culture. He bemoaned corruption of the political system, in
which hero worship had replaced participatory decision making. The veteran CPI
leader, Venkat Reddy, said that despite progressive laws, complete failure in
implementation was witnessed in all aspects of public policy. Professor Rama
Melkote asked why the left parties had not joined hands with progressive Dalit
and Muslim movements. Professor Haragopal declared that the left parties had no
cultural roots in society, and hence were unable to mount a massive challenge to
national parties, like the Congress and the BJP, though both were almost
identical in their politics and class structure. Several other leaders spoke
with passion about the failure of the left parties to come together, time and
again, to an audience that contained the cream of Telangana’s intellectuals and
activists.
The meeting, not the first of its kind, was a reminder to
people that the left parties had failed to seize the initiative during the
hugely popular people’s movement for a separate Telangana, that had rocked the
region for over five years. The palm of victory had been surrendered to a new
political grouping, the TRS. Perhaps, at the back of the minds of the political
leaders, who had summoned the meeting, was the thought that it might not be too
late to put forward before the people a left-wing agenda for the future
development of Telangana State.
For such a belated expectation to produce political
acceptance with the people, it might be vital to reconsider where Indians find
themselves today. Disgust with the unashamed corruption of Congress leaders,
who left no stone unturned to make a quick illegal buck, even in sport arenas,
swung the loyalty of people away from a flaccid party which had no belief in
itself towards a populist leader heading the BJP, which was vociferous in its
claim to be the traditional guardian of culture. So high is the expectation
heaped upon Modi’s government that there is little chance that any superman can
meet the aspirations of people within the foreseeable future. Bitter
disappointment could erupt into anger and chaos, and this is the greatest
potential threat facing India today.
No political leader should be misled by the present-day political
euphoria masking this real threat. America-trained gurus keep repeating the
mantra that the fundamentals are strong, meaning that the financial market is
soaring on expectations, and that the major business entities are making
profits. Curbing of inflationary trends with cheaper money seems to be their
cure, while they are confident that even the poorest common man acknowledges
that God alone is responsible for fluctuating monsoons controlling crops.
Manipulated statistics further give comfort to the rulers that poverty is
declining, however slowly. The focus of the rulers of India is turned on its
nuclear arsenal, its demand for a seat on the Security Council, its political
competition with China, its successful billionaires, its numerous IT
professionals, its well staffed army and bureaucracy. All these are of no real
consequence to India’s debatable future.
What remains unseen is the swelling tsunami of aspirations,
awakened by global media connectivity, and disappointment, exacerbated by
inter-community rivalries, and frustrations unleashed among the young, by the
sexual repression of traditional culture and class-dominated exclusion from
economic opportunities. The age old patience of the Indian poor under privation
will not last forever.
‘What needs to be Done?’ was an urgent question first raised
by Tolstoy, and later by Lenin. An answer closer to meeting India’s crying
needs was provided by Tolstoy who saw the primacy of labour not only for
changing society, but oneself, and for recognising labour as the true human
quality at the core of society. He provides a spiritual explanation of Marx’s
labour theory of value, which the simplest Indian can appreciate, again making
true his statement that ‘all great ideas are simple.’ But how is this idea to
be applied practically to national development?
Many in India’s left leadership joined hands with Western
adventurists on the left and quickly dismissed Chinese developments since the
1980’s as a return to capitalism.We have failed to learn from the developmental
experiences of our greatest neighbour. Despite this, the astonishing success of
China and the growth of its economy remains the ‘elephant in the room’ for all
economists, which refuses to be driven out of discussion. Chinese experience is
all the more relevant to Indians when we consider that World War II had
exhausted all economies, except the American, and India stood as a potential
industrial power in 1947, while China was in shambles as a destroyed economy
and polity.
The ease of growth of the Chinese economy and its commercial
successes has mesmerised Indian planners into a belief that a similar
trajectory is possible for India with a little more tinkering of the system.
The flatulence of political bombast that has clouded Indian relations with its
greatest neighbour has further obscured from reasonable analysis the causes
that have differentiated the growth trajectories of the two great economies. It
has suited Western theoreticians and their Indian disciples to accept the
masked and politically motivated Chinese interpretation that Deng Xiaoping and
capitalism happened after Mao’s death in 1976, ‘and all was growth.’ If anyone
is amazed at the industry of the Chinese working classes the simple acceptable
explanation among these experts is that it is extorted by totalitarian control.
The Chinese have shown no intention of arguing this point.
The long years of struggle and privation, and the Long
March, taught Mao, the Chinese communist party and its army, that their country
and its nationalities and classes lived under varied conditions and
possibilities, which required local solutions and management, and that the hope
for the future depended upon a working collaboration between the leaders and
the communities of the poor. Building on traditional clan practices, the first
years of development saw the emergence of the mutual aid teams, then the larger
production brigades and the bigger communes. A feudal and oppressed people
learned that they had capacities of self governance, and during the ill-fated
Great Leap Forward that even simple peasants could aspire to make backyard steel.
A huge human cost was paid then, and later during the Cultural Revolution,
which despite the shambles posed a more thorough challenge to the Chinese
bureaucratic mandarinate than Manmohan Singh’s curbing of some bureaucratic
power through liberalization.
This great storm-tossed political period from 1949 till the
beginning of the 1970’s was a period, which can be called one of ‘latent development,’ that is, an
economic process that was real but hidden from view, which could not be
measured in economic terms while it lasted, but which would ensure economic
growth in the future. Hence it had not much to show in dollar terms in the
years between 1949 and 1976, but vastly more than the world had ever seen
before in the rise of the self-confidence of the masses in their own social,
technical, economic and political abilities. ‘The battle for China’s past,’ as
a recent scholar, Mobo Gao, has put it, is by no means over in terms of
understanding it, but it is time our economists researched it.
What is clear is that ‘development
is a political process,’ which requires politicization of associations of
the people, as farmers, as artisans, as women, as workers. Real development
cannot occur without a genuine partnership between government and communities,
however destabilizing this may be for inefficient and self-serving politicians.
Such a partnership would be a real growth initiator, while the much touted
public-private mode is merely collusion among the despoilers.
The possibility of such partnerships with communities should
not be viewed as a mere heuristic construct in the present instance. Telangana
with under-developed natural resources, and lacking in a large cadre of skilled
professionals, is blessed with a large population of poor SC and ST communities
who could be mobilised in their and the national interest. Telangana’s present
situation in any case is far better than that of Cuba in 1992 when soon after
all Soviet help was withdrawn, Cubans were left with little financial
resources, no markets, and a crippling American economic blockade that was
forcing them into starvation. The record of the remarkable recovery of this
tiny island and its brave people holds many lessons for Telangana’s leadership
in how to create self-sufficiency through such government and local community
partnerships.
So far in India, developmental processes have been entrusted
to bureaucratic hands, which can only do what was previously laid down. But ‘development’
immediately implies change across several dimensions, and this depends on the
political acumen of the masses to take appropriate and sustainable decisions
for their myriad disparate communities and localities. The elite belief that a
few experts can solve problems created by complex differing development issues
over a vast landscape has proved self-delusional, and dangerous for national
stability.
A stable future depends on the rapidity with which
grassroots communities are politicized and linked to empowered Panchayati Raj
Institutions in a working planning relationship with higher structures of
government. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments
must cease to be political ploys and PRIs must become in reality engines of
local governance. This cannot happen unless the masses are mobilised in their
own interests. The labour of India’s excluded masses are the only engines of
steady growth. The primary agricultural sector can sustain itself despite
periodic monsoon failures, and support the manufacturing sector, whose growth
must exceed that of the tertiary sector for years to come if the economy is to
meet people’s aspirations.
None of these ideas can be termed in common parlance as
rocket science. They have the virtue of simple common sense. And the Indian
elite are also well aware that this is so. After the days of Mahatma Gandhi,
the political elite lazily corrupted itself benefitting by the patience and
enormous ability to bear pain of the masses. But media and the globalizing
world warn that the days of unaccountable self-serving indulgence are fast
coming to an end. The elite for survival need to change.
The bureaucrats and the learned middle-classes have grown up
within a hierarchical system of governance created by the East India Company,
and inherited without much change by Independent India. If Mahatma Gandhi had been
alive he might have seen the dangers of a continuation through brown sahib
rule, but the aristocratic Nehru found the old system convenient and to his
taste. The early British rulers had
little need for development, and none for trusting the people. A system was
created to keep the masses in their place at little cost. There was no thought
of involving subject races in a partnership of governance. Upper caste Indians
who came later to rule the country found no issue with this approach. But their
own survival in a darkening future depends on accepting the simple idea that
the Indian masses can be trusted to develop their communities and localities,
and save the nation from the possibility of chaos and collapse. Individual good
men while reaffirming our faith in human nature can do little by themselves,
however committed they may be. Telugu-speakers have seen great and good men do
their best for people over the last two centuries. Sir Arthur Cotton could help
irrigate five million acres, but he could not give land to the tiller or
prosperity to Indian farmers. SR Sanakaran, a saintly bureaucrat, helped many
Dalit families, but dalit communities continue to remain oppressed and
dispossessed.
The freedom struggle, though by and large peaceful, was
extraordinarily revolutionary in a systemic sense, for its tactics and
processes of struggle were such that the oppressors were ‘unable to rule in the
old way,’ while the struggle itself taught the masses through practical
experience that they need not ‘be ruled in the old way’ – a distinction that
Lenin would have welcomed.
A people-centred Telangana political leadership should
mobilise communities not to support their party, but around people’s own
immediate interests and demands. The leaders must support people in their
demands for better agriculture support; public distribution systems, water,
energy, housing, jobs, medical and educational facilities. If these are
non-negotiable political demands of people, independent of whatever delivery
system the government has inherited, technical solutions can be found. If these
demands remain petitions, the age-old system structured to deny people their
rights and resources will continue to starve them of all benefit. These demands
can only become political demands if associations of people and their PRIs have
rightfully seized power guaranteed to them by the Constitution. If the left
leadership can bring about this peaceful transformation of rightful political
inheritance by the people they would have created a revolution of greater
consequence than that of the French, of the Bolsheviks and of Mao, for they
would have created a replicable revolutionary model for other Third World
peoples to follow which cannot be countered by force or by fraud.
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