India: - Book excerpt - How Bombay’s businessmen and the Congress helped create the Shiv Sena (Sujata Anandan)

scroll.in - Jun 19, 2015
BOOK EXCERPT
How Bombay’s businessmen and the Congress helped create the Shiv Sena
Shiv Sena was founded on 19 June 1966. In this extract from 'Hindu Hriday Samrat', the author describes how disparate groups got together to free Bombay from the grip of ‘the communists’.
Sujata Anandan

Madhav Deshpande... an architect by profession...[was] in many ways, the real architect of the Shiv Sena – or, at least, of the concept of a regional force to oppose the then all-powerful Congress for its perceived neglect of the Marathi people, their culture and ethos...

The Shiv Sena was formed in 1966 but it took Thackeray another decade to register his organization as a political party. ‘It was the fear of the Emergency (in 1975) that prompted him to declare a party hierarchy,’ Deshpande had told me then. ‘And nowhere in the party document that they drummed up at the time does Bal Thackeray figure as any functionary. In fact, from president down to secretary and even treasurer, everyone is a non- entity. Thackeray was afraid of being arrested for political activity and so he thought up this brilliant move – to hold power without any responsibility – to escape the consequences.’...

'The communists'

‘All the powerful Congress leaders from the state like SK Patil – the city’s uncrowned king at the time – looked to Delhi to promote themselves and their careers and no one really cared for Maharashtra except to use it to gain a foothold at the Centre,’ says Deshpande. He and many others like him also discovered that the Maharashtrian people and their culture were being subsumed by the larger Indian one and that it did not really show up in the big picture. Bombay’s was just a business community and while the Congress looked towards it to fund its programmes, politically the city was in the grip of ‘the communists’, who, of course, cared neither for Bombay nor for Maharashtra, nor even for New Delhi. Rather, as goes the well- known accusation against them, ‘they unfurled their umbrellas when it rained in the Soviet Union and all their agenda was set by Moscow’.

However, while most Congressmen might indeed have been looking towards New Delhi, there were still a handful of influential ones who did care for the local ethos. In the typical fashion of Congressmen even today, they decided to do something about it – but without really making it official. So did Deshpande. So did Bal Thackeray. And so also did the businessmen of Bombay, who shared the Congress leaders’ paranoia about the communists-led trade unions in this industrial hub of India which had most workers in their grip. Each went about it in their own way but somewhere – and soon – these streams did meet.

'Rise and unite'

So, along with three other friends – Padmakar Adhikari, an architect like himself as also his business partner, Shyam Deshmukh, who worked with a large industrial house in the suburbs and so could be depended upon to muster the labour force together, and Vasant Pradhan, a railway employee who later trained to be a lawyer to help fight the cases of workers – he set up an organization called ‘Ooth ani Ekjut Ho’ or ‘Rise and Unite’. They would visit the community centres and gyms every evening and talk to the workers about their rights and the need to build a parallel regional force that would challenge and take on not just the Congress but also the communists....

Once Thackeray had decided to set up the Shiv Sena, he lost no time in making the announcement in an issue of the Marmik – it appeared as a small notice at the bottom of the centre-spread. The party’s formal launch went almost unnoticed at first (just a coconut cracked at the doorstep of the Thackerays’ home at Kadam Mansion, off Ranade Road in Dadar, marked it). Deshpande and his friends, who were leaving no stone unturned to raise awareness among Maharashtrians and unite them under one banner, did not miss the small print. ‘We realized here was another man like us, fired by the need to do justice to the aspirations of the locals, and we decided that we must not divide the efforts.’ They merged their ‘Ooth ani Ekjuth Ho’ into the Shiv Sena.

‘One man and one magazine'

Marmik’s circulation was then growing by leaps and bounds (around 50,000 at the time with a readership of nearly two lakh, if not more) and people were responding in good measure to Thackeray’s ideas. But when Deshpande met him after seeing the notice in the magazine to ask what the structure of his organization was like, Thackeray was surprised. ‘Structure? There’s no structure. There’s just me, some friends and that announcement so far,’ he said.

‘That will not do,’ said Deshpande. ‘One man and one magazine are just not enough.’ And the architect that he was, he drew up an elaborate ‘structure’ – a hierarchy of what is now called shakha pramukhs (branch heads) and vibhag pramukhs (division heads), drawing upon both the mandals and the Bombay Municipal Corporation’s own division of the city into wards. It is the cadre structure that has stood the Shiv Sena in good stead till today – and saved the party from near-certain decimation at the 2012 municipal elections in Mumbai.

Deshpande also made two discoveries: that Thackeray was rather ‘piddi’ (cowardly) and that he had a great way with words. ‘His turn of phrase was such that he could enthrall the crowds and hypnotize the audiences – provided we could persuade or drag him out of his comfort zone and get him to the dais.’ Since none of the four founders of the Shiv Sena’s precursor – the Rise and Unite movement – had had as much success at holding the attention of their listeners, they decided to push Thackeray to the forefront and declare him the face of their regional movement. Both the Congress and the Communist Party of India (CPI) had split by then and were speaking in two voices for each ideology.

‘That is why we merged our movement into the Shiv Sena and we decided we would have just one voice and that that voice would be Bal Thackeray’s. The Shiv Sena was never meant to be owned by Thackeray or his offspring. Sadly, that is what the movement has been reduced to today,’ rues Deshpande. But before its decline, there was the rise and rise of the Sena, and Bombay’s businessmen and the Congress party had as much to do with its creation and nurture as had Deshpande and his friends. Though ‘Mumbai’ is seen as a city owned by Shiv Sainiks today, it had belonged to the communist parties in the 1960s and the frequent strikes and demands by workers had tired Bombay’s entrepreneurs to the core. At the time, the left parties were the only political challenge to the Congress and both its leaders and the businessmen who funded the Congress wished to see the back of the communist trade unions whose domination even the Congress-sponsored trade unions had failed to break.

Congress bags of cash

By Deshpande’s own admission, Congress leaders then sent him bags of cash to take care of meetings that the Sena might hold or to put up candidates against those of the communist parties to cut into their vote bank by raising the regional sentiment against that of workers’ unity. That’s how they defeated former Union defence minister VK Krishna Menon who had contested from Bombay North with communist support after he was denied a ticket by the Congress on account of his role in India’s debacle in the 1962 war with China. The Sena was also encouraged to form its own workers’ union (the Kamgar Sena, as it is called today) to bring the Marathi and the workers’ sentiments together. The organization (it was not yet a political party) was also covertly protected by the then ruling party in the state, the Congress, then headed by Vasantrao Naik whose record as Maharashtra’s longest-serving chief minister for eleven years remains unbroken. The government clearly looked the other way when one Kamgar Sena leader (who later ended up as a minister in the only Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra so far) was accused of killing a legislator, Krishna Desai, belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI(M). Four decades later, though sixteen of Thackeray’s ‘boys’ were convicted for the murder, the case against the mastermind and the Sena tiger who had then congratulated those ‘boys’ for killing Desai by stating that ‘we must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists,’ is still meandering through the courts. No government has made any effort to bring them to justice. In the subsequent by-election in 1970, the Sena wrested that seat from the CPI(M) with covert Congress support, marking its maiden entry into the state legislature.

Stunning response

Thackeray had not expected a good response to his call to rally when he published a notice for one in the Marmik. He had wanted a small town hall or a school ground as the venue of the first Shiv Sena meeting, just to test the waters. But Deshpande says he overruled the objections of all others and persuaded Thackeray to go for Shivaji Park, Bombay’s best known and, perhaps, the largest open space, a rallying ground for all political parties. (An earlier meeting of the Sena had already been held in a closed hall.)

‘Thackeray was not so sure about the regional sentiment then but I had gauged the response at our meetings at the mandals and the vyayamshalas. Even the policemen who were on bundobast duty that day in 1966 when the first real public meeting was held had been sceptical and mocked me at the start of the meeting. But the response stunned everybody, including Thackeray. There had been no posters, no mobilization, only that notice in Marmik. And yet Shivaji Park was overflowing that day. I knew that we had arrived.’

The bulk of that crowd was drawn from the working classes, and from the ranks of the unemployed and even uneducated people with idle minds. Not surprisingly, the Shiv Sena gathered enough muscle power in no time at all. With the combination of moneybags and political patronage extended to the Shiv Sena by the Congress to do its dirty work, it is no wonder that the Sena became an irresistible force that met, on its own terms, the Communist Party of India (which too packed a few dirty tricks, like murder of opponents, up its sleeves), and eventually broke its back.

Little surprise then, says Deshpande, that they uncovered a conspiracy by the left (for which there is no police record) to assassinate Bal Thackeray. And even less of a surprise, therefore, that whoever Thackeray might have loved or hated (enemies today, friends tomorrow), he abhorred communists the most. Even more than the Congress, Muslims or even more than the south Indians and north Indians, all of whom he has hated at times and befriended at others, he hated the left: he had a constant paranoia of the left. They were his enemies and he would not be persuaded otherwise. That, in a sense, was truly his only ideology.

Congress backing

The Shiv Sena always had the backing of the Congress, which had an unbroken stint as the ruling party from Independence up until 1995... Through the years of the Shiv Sena’s growth though, the authorities always looked the other way: the Congress had set up Thackeray in business for its own purposes and had to allow the Sena chief some room to secure his own gains. So Shiv Sainiks could get away with much lawlessness with impunity. Moreover, even if successive Congress governments had cracked the whip, they were soon handicapped by the fact that many lower-rung policemen had become Sena sympathizers and closet supporters of Thackeray, a fact that emerged in the open and proved very detrimental to everybody’s interests during the 1992-93 riots in Bombay following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

***

WHEN THE SHIV SENA supported the candidature of Pratibha Patil of the Congress for presidency in 2007, Bal Thackeray could pass it off as a move in keeping with the Sena’s raison d’être, the Marathi manoos. The Shiv Sena was, after all, a nativist party and it had always fought for the rights of local Maharashtrians who many, including those in the Congress, thought were being treated as outsiders in their own homeland. The BJP, with whom the Sena has had an alliance now for nearly three decades, could do little to persuade Thackeray otherwise. But they could do even less when, inexplicably, Thackeray decided to once again support the candidature of a Congressman, Pranab Mukherjee, at the subsequent presidential election in 2012, even without any overt appeal from the Congress to his party to do so.

But Thackeray was only going back to his roots in facilitating a Congress victory in those elections. After all, it was this party which had not only helped establish the Shiv Sena in 1966 but had also, both covertly and overtly, flagged its agenda from time to time with some clever and well-thought-out moves of its own. In 1969, when the Shiv Sena decided to block the entry of Morarji Desai, a former chief minister of the undivided Bombay state, into the city, the then chief minister, Vasantrao Naik, decided to look the other way at first. By most accounts, the police were asked to ignore the troublemakers on the streets. Action was taken against the rioters and Bal Thackeray only when things went completely out of hand and it was well-nigh impossible to ignore the growing mayhem across the metropolis.

The Shiv Sena, at that point of time, was proving to be a handy tool in destroying the communist parties which, in some ways, ruled Bombay without quite being in power, much like the Shiv Sena did in later years. Thackeray had also helped the Congress defeat the Communist Party candidates in the legislative assembly and parliamentary elections in those early years. And with the then Maharashtra home minister Balasaheb Desai proving a powerful ally in his pursuit of the Marathi agenda, the Sena grew by leaps and bounds, even winning about forty of the 140 seats in the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1968 on the Marathi card, just two years after blazing into existence.

Seamless integration

Before Independence, which brought with it universal adult franchise to India without any of the struggles that European nations and even the US had to witness even as late as the twentieth century, only taxpayers could vote or stand for civic elections under the British regime. Not surprisingly then, most of these eligible people were Parsis, Bohra Muslims, Hindu Gujaratis and the British themselves. You could count local Maharashtrians among the voters on the fingers of just one hand. This skewed composition continued well into the years after Independence. The non-Maharashtrians dominated the municipal corporation, despite universal adult franchise, simply because of the headstart that some other groups had had in these matters in the preceding years.

So Thackeray’s ‘Bombay for Maharashtrians’ agenda found great resonance across the board, even among traditional Congress politicians. It is not surprising then that there was, and still continues to be, an almost seamless integration between Congress ideologues and the Marathi agenda of the Shiv Sena.

***

Excerpted with permission from Hindu Hriday Samrat by Sujata Anandan, published by HarperCollins India

India: The Consolidation of the Right Under Hindutva Banners

counterpunch.org, June 27-29, 2014

The Consolidation of the Right Under Hindutva Banners
India’s Saffron Capitalism

by RADHIKA DESAI

It is clear that the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi is unapologetically devoted to corporate interests and promises to bring the wonders of Modi’s Gujarat ‘model’ to the rest of India. With a secure majority of its own in the Lok Sabha, the party can do so is unhampered by even the minimal resistance the stroppy regional satraps that were its coalition partners offered between 1998 and 2004.

A graph of the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex index on counting day would have more fittingly conveyed the meaning of the electoral verdict than the footage of hoi polloi banging drums, lighting crackers, smearing gulal and eating laddoos that usually accompanied reportage of the election results. With a name that calls a condom to mind more readily than a stock market index, the Sensex hit an orgasmic high of 25364.71, crossing the 25,000 mark for the first time.

Never before has the county’s corporate elite stood so solidly behind a single party. Never before has it contributed so massively to its campaign, and never before has any party in India spent more on its campaign than the ruling US President had on his. These facts were not unknown but it took the independent Economic and Political Weekly to call the BJP’s victory ‘the biggest corporate heist in history’.

Even so, India’s capitalists had not secured the BJP victory on their own. The BJP is a member of the ‘Sangh Parivar’ around the fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Parivar’s hundreds of thousands of highly motivated workers campaign for the BJP: no other party has such organizational muscle at its command. The Parivar’s Hindutva ideology targets India’s significant Muslim minority in particular and Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat during the 2002 genocide of Muslims there. He is widely considered responsible, at the very least, of not acting to prevent or mitigate it.

Reportage and commentary are unable to link Hindutva and the corporations satisfactorily. At best, they claim there is a tradeoff between the ‘Hindutva’ and ‘development’ (i.e. corporate) agendas. Development has been foregrounded and Hindutva pushed into the background. That, even on this account, it still lurks there is neither denied nor disinterred for consideration.

In reality, Hindutva was deployed extensively in this campaign – for instance, the BJP chose the ‘Butcher of Gujarat’ as its prime ministerial candidate, profited from the Muzaffarnagar riots and constantly harped on themes of terrorism and meat exports. Moreover, in Hindutva’s long road to power, Hindutva and ‘development’ have always been inextricably intertwined.

There is no pure capitalism. Every actually existing capitalism wears the specific gender, ‘race’, ethnic and religious marks of the social groups its national historical development has required it to consolidate into its ‘historic bloc’. And in India, neoliberal capitalism wears saffron.

Hindutva’s quantum leap forward in the 16th Lok Sabha elections was further favoured by the disarray among all its major opponents. The Congress proved a sitting duck for the relentless (and baseless) attacks on it for economic mismanagement from the BJP media machine. Coming on top of less deniable charges of corruption and dynastic succession, these charges seemed to immobilize a Congress already weakened by its debilitating political ambiguity: should it aim to be, as it so ardently desired, the party of the capitalist class or should it strive to accept the electoral base among the poor, the minorities and the lower castes that history had bequeathed it and learn to articulate its interests? Congress support dropped a whopping 10 percentage points from its 2009 level. The Left continued to lose ground largely because it was unable to evolve a coherent response to neoliberalism. And though as a group the regional parties lost only a couple of percentage points of support, many of them lost electoral ground on the fringes of their respective social bases.

Despite all these advantages, it is remarkable how thin the BJP’s electoral achievement was. Its absolute majority in the Lok Sabha rested on a vote share which, despite going up 65 percent since 2009, stood at a mere 31 percent, a full 10 percentage points below the previous lowest share for a governing party.

Paltry though it may be, this is Hindutva’s political achievement. It has united the more diverse propertied class produced by neoliberalism in recent decades. In their course, the propertied class expanded beyond the upper castes. The single most important addition came from the layer of prosperous middle-caste land-owners. Initially becoming capitalist farmers, they soon began investing in urban industry and services and came to share interests with the established upper caste capitalist class of old. Needless to say, these shared interests also became more keenly opposed to those of the poorer middle castes, lower castes and other marginalized groups.

However, shared interests must be ideologically articulated. Originally forming the base of the Congress in India’s villages, the propertied middle castes began to leave the party in a complex process of advances and retreats that lasted decades. They first formed farmers’ movements and then regional parties as their political needs diversified away from simple demands for more government support for agriculture. However, their middle caste status separated them from the largely upper caste constituency of the BJP.

Hindutva filled this gap between the upper and middle caste propertied and overcame the regional divisions among the regionally rooted middle castes.

Hindutva also defined the terms of this expanded capitalist class’s relationship with India’s working population and minorities. They can choose between accepting the superiority of Hindu culture and the economic and political dominance of Hindu upper and middle class/caste capitalist classes in return for, at most, a miserly set of material concessions or suffering justified by carefully cultivated ideological othering of a range of groups among whom Muslims are the most prominent.

Hindutva others Muslims as malcontent, violent, lascivious, disloyal, repressive toward women and terrorists (here, the West’s Islamophobia provides invaluable aid). The only good Muslim is a ‘Hindu’ Muslim, one who is prepared to accept Hindu economic, political and cultural supremacy and agree to mend his ways. Hindu violence against Muslims can then be justified, as Modi did in 2002 in Gujarat, as legitimate anger against Muslim transgressions. The same model can apply to other recalcitrant groups: women can be othered as (western) feminists or harlots who do not know their limits, workers as lazy and greedy, if not communists, environmental and information activists as meddlers smearing the achievements of Hindutva and Hindu society.

The much-touted Gujarat model is revealing. Critics have already pointed out that Gujarat’s growth record is unexceptional among India’s prosperous states while its human development indices compete with some of the worst in India. In terms of governance, the Gujarat model has no developmental strategy, only a fawning subservience to corporations. Modi’s fabled ‘decisiveness’ refers chiefly to the speedy provision of clearance, complete with government giveaways in cash or in kind (such as land and infrastructure development), for corporate investment. It is ironic that Congress’s attempts to do the corporate sector’s bidding, only slightly less eagerly, have been exposed for their shady practices because Congress passed and implemented Right to Information legislation. Modi’s Gujarat escaped such unflattering scrutiny simply by resisting RTI implementation and actively repressing RTI activists. Clearly, corporate India’ preference for Modi ultimately boils down to his ability to silence opposition. It only remains to note that despite its heavily repressive administration and culture, Gujarat experiences an exceptionally high incidence of strikes, testimony to courage as well as desperation of its workers.

Modi has a secure majority in the Lok Sabha and appears set to complete a his five year term. Whether he can repeat or improve upon his 2014 performance depends on how things unfold economically and politically.

It is possible that corporate India has achieved its great electoral victory a few years too late. Before the 2007-8 economic and financial crises, the Indian economy’s high growth was fuelled by the rising incomes and expanding consumer debt of middle classes at home and reliance on exports, especially service exports, to the west. However, with western economics gripped by stagnation, this inegalitarian strategy can no longer work. While corporate India and the BJP appear to have only the faintest inkling of this – for example they are seeking to explore alternative international economic links, particularly with China. However, exports will likely never provide the scale of stimulus they once did. The stimulus for further growth must be domestic and expanding the domestic market will require relieving poverty and increasing equality. However, corporate India and the BJP appear to imagine that just having a more ‘decisive’ prime minister in office, energetically clearing their investment projects and lifting remaining restrictions on the international integration of Indian capital will restore India’s growth rates.

On the political front, there are two open questions. One is when and in what form the Sangh Parivar will demand its due for the BJP’s victory? Moves to implement the divisive core demands of Hindutva – building a Ram temple on the site of Babri Mosque infamously destroyed by the Parivar in 1992, the abrogation of Article 376 of the constitution granting special status to Jammu and Kashmir and the implementing a Uniform Civil Code to replace the religious community-specific laws governing personal law – are certain to cause mayhem and cannot but affect both India’s people and the BJP’s record as a party of capital adversely.

More importantly, how well will the BJP’s political opponents, who, after all did win 61 percent of the vote between them, read the writing on the electoral wall and take up the task of organising those who have lost so much from neoliberal policies? Given the consolidation of the right under Hindutva banners, only that, not pious invocations of ‘secularism’ detached from wider socio-economic issues, can truly move India toward both a sustainable growth path and a society in which its religious minorities, women and lower castes can prosper.

Radhika Desai is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba.

The Polls Are Over | Research Unit for Political Economy (R.U.P.E.)

Research Unit for Political Economy (R.U.P.E.)

The Polls Are Over

April 29, 2014 by rupeindia

More than two weeks remain for the declaration of the election results (May 16). However, discussion in the media more or less takes for granted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or rather its leader Narendra Modi, will win. And this presumption may well be justified. For he has clearly won, by a landslide, the constituency that matters most: the private corporate sector. In fact, polls for that real constituency were over last year, and they have drastically shaped the formal elections being held this year.

This fact is so well known that it now hardly bears repeating. Last September, the Nielsen/Economic Times survey of 100 corporate leaders found that 74 per cent favoured Modi as prime minister, compared to just 7 per cent who favoured Rahul Gandhi.[1] But the drumbeat began much earlier. Telecom magnate Sunil Mittal declared in 2009 itself: “He [Modi] is running a state and can also run the nation.” At a ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summit, Anil Ambani called Modi “lord of men, leader amongst leaders and king amongst kings”, and Mukesh Ambani affirmed that “In Narendra bhai, we have a leader with a grand vision.” Anand Mahindra prophesied that in the near future “people will talk about the Gujarat model of growth in China.” When Modi organised an extraordinary package of clearances, land and huge subsidies for Tata Motors’ Nano car project, Ratan Tata joined the Modi fan club. Having tasted peasant resistance in Singur, what Tata found attractive about Modi was that “If he says it will be done, it will be done”.[2]

Several studies have appeared in the last two years countering the myth that Gujarat under Modi has been a model of growth and governance.[3] But it is important to note that it was corporate chieftains who helped create the myth in the first place. Gushed Tata: “I have to say that today there is no state like Gujarat. Under Mr Modi’s leadership, Gujarat is head and shoulders above any state.” Mukesh Ambani said that “Gujarat is shining like a lamp of gold and the credit goes to the visionary, effective and passionate leadership provided by Narendra Modi.”[4]

Crucially, foreign capital, as represented by the international credit rating agencies, has cast its vote. The research wing of Moody’s bluntly declared in January: “If elected, a Modi-led BJP government should offer a more business-friendly policy that will further support confidence and investment.” Last November, Goldman Sachs, the world’s leading investment banking firm, upgraded India’s rating on the basis of predictions that Modi will come to power: “Equity investors tend to view BJP as business-friendly, and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi as an agent of change.” The Japanese brokerage firm Nomura said it expected a BJP-led coalition to form the next government. The share market has surged with inflows of foreign institutional investor capital. Last year the UK and several European Union countries sent their ambassadors to meet Modi, and the US ambassador made the trip to Gujarat’s capital in February this year.

Unprecedented focus on the corporate constituency
For admirers of India’s parliamentary institutions, it ought to be puzzling that the views of foreigners and a mere handful of Indians are given such prominence, even when they do not directly influence the masses (unlike, say, godmen, film stars, and other entertainers). Yet a curious feature of the current election campaign has been its unprecedented focus on what the corporate sector wants from the polls (and, correspondingly, a near-absence of the burning economic questions of the working people). A visitor from another planet could be forgiven for assuming that the electorate was composed solely of corporate chieftains. In his address to FICCI on December 21 last year, Rahul Gandhi talked of them as “the voices we represent”:

A political party’s strength lies in the voice of those it represents. We will listen to the voices we represent…. You are stakeholders of the Congress party…. listening to your voice and heeding it is imperative. Over the last few months, many of you have spared time to meet with me and discuss your views. For this I am grateful. (emphasis added)

He proceeded to present their views as his own, on questions such as environmental clearances, agricultural marketing, and labour laws. He pointed out that the recently formed Cabinet Committee on Investment had cleared some 300 projects with an investment of over Rs 5 lakh crores (Rs 5 trillion). “Sectors affected by delays in clearances such as power, petroleum and mining have been the biggest beneficiaries of this focused approach.” Yet it was not enough; he rebuked his own government for its tardiness in attending to its stakeholders: “Frankly,” he said, “there are no excuses for the length of time required to clear some of these projects. We are a fast moving economy. We cannot allow you to be held back by slow decision making.”

The next day, the Environment Minister was sent packing (though she herself had been installed in July 2011 precisely in order to clear projects faster than her predecessor). For good measure, the Petroleum Minister was given additional charge of the Environment Ministry, ignoring the obvious conflict of interest involved in clearing projects of his own ministry.[5] That gentleman has proceeded to clear projects at an even more hectic pace.

AAP’s futile plea
The newly-born Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been equally desperate to court big business. In his speech to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Arvind Kejriwal sang what he thought would be music to the ears of his audience: that it was not the job of the Government to do business, nor even development (vikas); rather, it was business people who were creating wealth and employment for the nation; the Government should merely provide security, justice, and corruption-free governance. Instead, he claimed, businessmen are being “harassed and persecuted” by the income tax department and the police (“Even an inspector of the income tax department can make a big industrialist miserable”). He called for doing away with the “inspector and license raj” and other such “interference” with business, for taxes on business to be reduced and stabilised, and for policies that “encourage” business; after all, “If businesses are closed then who will generate employment.”

These seem very similar to the policies being implemented since 1991: privatisation, deregulation and delicensing, reduction in taxes on the rich, and an overall pro-business policy regime. Indeed, Kejriwal presents himself as a more effective, honest implementer of the same policies: “The world’s best economic expert is our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. During the last 10 years of UPA tenure, you saw best economic policies but the biggest drawback was lack of honest politics. As there was no honest politics, those economic policies could not be implemented.”

However, Kejriwal’s wooing of the corporate constituency flopped, for two reasons. First, he pleaded that AAP was not against capitalism, but only ‘crony capitalism’. But he was addressing a body of precisely the principal beneficiaries of unprecedented gifts of natural resources (often at huge, uncompensated environmental cost), gargantuan subsidies to the corporate sector, rigging of tariffs, and so on. These are features of what has conveniently been labeled ‘crony capitalism’, as if it were some freak phenomenon, but which is no more than actually existing capitalism, the norm of development of the big bourgeoisie.[6]These are the very people who have been lobbying furiously for even more such gifts, and for the removal of all legal restraints on such gifts, in the name of reviving ‘growth’. They could only have smiled at Kejriwal’s attempt to paint them as persecuted producers striving to create jobs and earn an honest penny.

In other circumstances, big business might have treated Kejriwal’s talk as mere rhetoric; after all, all parties claim to be against corruption and ‘crony capitalism’. The more important reason Kejriwal’s plea fell on deaf ears was that big business wants a “strong” Government, and the prospect of AAP attracting some of the anti-incumbency votes, and thus weakening Modi, disturbs them. Why is big business so keen on a “strong” Government? The reasons have been stated in many places, but they are neatly summed up in a recent statement by a big business forum, Assocham.

Candid presentation of corporate agenda
According to Assocham, “the prospects of a highly fractured mandate look real and that would not be a good development for the economy, ironically at a time when we are getting desperate for a turnaround”. For the measures desired by big business are unpopular measures: to slash spending on the people, and not raise taxes on the corporate sector and the wealthy. The Government will need the political strength to ram this through in the face of popular opposition: “While the country has learnt to live with coalition governments in the last 15 years, it would require a strong anchor party supported by smaller parties which are committed to a strong growth model.” However, a Government formed from a “fractured mandate” would not be up to the job. So, according to ASSOCHAM, “regional aspirations and urge to go in for populist measures could create major road-blocks.”

On the one hand, there would be increasing expenditure due to populist and mega schemes in the social sector, on the other, the taxation kitty would not be robust enough in the face of slowdown…. Irrespective of the party or a coalition of parties forming the new government, any marked departure from reforms measures that may involve some hard options like capping subsidies, could create ruptures in the economy and push it on the precipice again.

Indeed there is direct competition for fiscal resources between the people and the corporate sector:

India Inc, which itself is facing headwinds of very high debt in several sectors like real estate, telecom, wind energy, capital goods and infrastructure projects, would have its own expectations from the new government. The industry would need a big push from the new government in terms of reviving manufacturing and investment in the big ticket infrastructure projects requiring large scale financial debt…However, only a strong government will be able to come out with a credible blueprint.

Standard and Poor, the US-based credit rating agency, similarly warns the Indian electorate that its failure to give a single party a clear majority will be punished by international capital:

the direction and pace of policy reforms in India, more than which political party takes control after elections, will have a bearing on the sovereign rating…. An important factor is how fragmented the government will be. The more parties involved in the next coalition government, the more likely policies will be incoherent and less supportive of credit attributes.[7]

‘Mandate’ – for an attack
Foreign capital and Indian big business in fact want a ‘strong’ Government in order to clear roadblocks set up not only by popular opposition, but even by the courts, the CAG, environmental authorities, and the like. These involve precisely the questions of what AAP calls ‘crony capitalism’. In ASSOCHAM’s words,

on several issues like corporate debt restructuring, easing of environment rules, allocation of natural resources, the new government will have to take decisions since delays and rigid attitude has already cost much in terms of loss of economic opportunities. While the corporate India wants a transparent and clean government, the zeal to “clean up the system” may lead to policy hold up. Honest officers should be given protection in case the decisions taken in good faith turn out to be less gainful. Hindsight analysis is easier while decisions with foresight necessarily involve risks…..As long as these risks are taken in good faith, the bureaucrats and public sector bankers should be protected.

Deepak Parekh, chairman of HDFC, greasy eminence of big business, similarly bemoans the case filed by the Kejriwal government against Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), petroleum ministers who favoured RIL, and the former Director General of Hydrocarbons who rigged things in favour of RIL. “What is happening is not good for India,” he lamented. “Why would any bureaucrat or a minister take a decision?… This will slow down decision making, slow down growth and development.”[8] When ‘growth’ is dependent on gifting public resources to the private corporate sector, public questioning of such gifts naturally amounts to an obstacle to ‘growth’.

The real import of Assocham’s (and big business’s) view is this: a large “popular mandate” is needed for the Government to force through measures which have faced public questioning and popular resistance. In Assocham’s candid view, then, the parliamentary process has little to do with democracy or voicing popular aspirations; rather, its purpose is to provide a stamp of legitimacy for an attack on the people. For this job, the corporate sector now clearly views Modi’s credentials as superior, both because he is in a position to take advantage of the anti-incumbency wave against the Congress, and because he has shown he has the stomach to use force and inspire fear.

Big business deserts old faithful Congress
And so, despite the best efforts of the Congress government, despite its long and carefully nurtured ties to the corporate sector, its corporate backers have deserted it en masse. The rupture began, remarkably, with the man who once referred to Congress as “apni dukaan”, namely, Mukesh Ambani. A detailed article in the Economic Times provides a vivid picture of the relationship between the country’s richest man and the two leading parliamentary parties. Ambani has been displeased at the inefficiency of the UPA government (both UPA-1 and UPA-2) in promoting his interests, in particular the UPA’s failure to shut down investigation of Reliance Industry Ltd’s (RIL’s) illegal actions, and its delay in increasing the price of RIL’s gas. In both cases, in fact, other forces and individuals which played the main role: for example, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), members of the CPI, CPI(M) and AAP, other experts in the field of energy, the fertiliser and power industry, and sections of the media all played a role in exposing RIL’s misdeeds and in building opposition to the price hikes. Nevertheless the Congress government did eventually do the job for RIL: it set up a committee to recommend a doubling of the gas price, appointing a petroleum minister who behaved like an employee of RIL, and so on. Regardless, according to the Economic Times report, Ambani had decided by the 2009 elections itself to shift its support to the BJP.

According to the report, RIL’s key link to the BJP in the last few years has been Parimal Nathwani, RIL group president (corporate affairs and projects). Nathwani was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand with the support of 18 BJP legislators. The Congress took note of this development, and replaced petroleum minister Murli Deora (referred to as the Reliance minister for petroleum) with Jaipal Reddy, who was hostile to RIL. Senior Congress leader Motilal Vora told the Economic Times that during the state assembly elections at the end of 2013, “Congress took no money from Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries or any entity connected with them.” “Our leaders don’t use RIL planes for travel any more”, said a Congress leader who has known the Ambanis for a long time.

A front-page report in the Times of India[9] tells us the Congress is facing a

severe funds crunch, which has put it at a further disadvantage vis-a-vis a resurgent BJP. A Congress heavyweight told this paper, ‘Between Congress and BJP, they are getting 90 per cent of the money, we are getting just 10 per cent’…. conversations with Congress candidates and their managers over the past week indicate that the ruling party has, for a change, been vastly outgunned by the BJP, and may actually be running on half-empty. ‘I have seen several Lok Sabha and assembly elections, but the financial deficit the Congress is facing this time is unprecedented’, says a veteran Congress MP….

Leading business houses, and sectors that are flush with cash like real estate and mining, are this time almost fully behind the BJP. Half of the 48 Congress-NCP candidates in Maharashtra that Times of India spoke to admitted as much…. Though the Congress has been in government in Mumbai for 15 years, a party leader confessed, ‘Even we are feeling it.’

As the Times notes, there is a visible difference between the election campaigns of the two leading parties:

Saffron is daubed all over – on billboards, bus stand shelters, kiosks and newspapers – forming the backdrop to the smiling visage of Narendra Modi. When you don’t see him, you hear him on the radio and on your phone. Indeed, rarely has the country seen such an election advertising blitz. In comparison, the Congress appears in bits and patches.

Union Minister for Industry and Commerce Anand Sharma alleged that the BJP had obtained more than 80 per cent of the hoarding corners throughout the country. “They have given advertisements to all the 714 channels, all the major newspapers. Look at the airtime they have consumed. Unless the media organisations have given them the space out of charity, where has all the money come from?” Sharma put the cost of the BJP campaign at Rs 10,000 crore.[10] Union Minister for Law Kapil Sibal estimated the total cost of some 15,000 hoardings put up by the BJP all over the country at Rs 2,500 crore, and the the budget for TV spots on various channels at between Rs 800 to Rs 1,000 crore. He put the cost of Modi’s rallies at hundreds of crore, including the organisation of special trains, thousands of buses and SUVs, gizmo laden stages under 30-ft dynamic screens with scores of LED screens, besides the cost of the event management company.[11]

No politician likes to mention an even more important head of expenditure than advertising: Namely, the outright purchase of votes (see “The Economics of Parliamentary Politics”[12]). It is here that the cash crunch will be most sharply felt.

Congress leaders are now more openly expressing their hurt and resentment at this corporate betrayal. Sibal told an interviewer: “The pink papers are with Modi. You know that, the corporate sectors are with Modi. They are fueling his campaign…. They want freebies from Modi as he has given them in Gujarat. That’s why they are backing him that’s why this all is happening.”[13] Elsewhere, he talked in terms usually used by Marxists: “Those who funded will seek favours. The rich will demand rich returns. There is no free lunch. The nation will be on sale. This is a party for the rich, by the rich.”[14]

Changed tone of Congress campaign
Late in the day, in April, the Congress leaders changed the tone of their campaign. Earlier, as we saw above, the young leader of the Congress had attempted to win over corporate chiefs with an explicitly pro-corporate agenda. The Congress tried to present itself as the original pro-corporate party. When Modi declared his economic policy, Anand Sharma accused Modi of “stealing” the UPA government’s economic vision and policy agenda: “Mr. Modi is just repackaging what the UPA government has already been doing.”[15] More recently, Chidambaram called the BJP manifesto “a copy, not even a cut and paste job. It is a copy of our ideas. It’s not wrong to copy but they should acknowledge.”[16]

But as it became clear to the doomed Congress that it had nothing to lose, its reigning family started harping on class questions. “The only way India is going to move forward is through a partnership that includes both the interests of business as well as the interests of the poor. If you try to construct a Government that focuses only on business or focuses only on the poor, you will not take India forward,” said Rahul Gandhi in an April 23 interview. Adopting Kejriwal’s language, he criticised Modi’s “crony capitalism” and affirmed that “Forward thinking, progressive business interests are firmly behind us,” pointing to IT czar Nandan Nilekani.[17] At a rally in Mumbai on April 21 he said that Modi’s model “was meant for development of the rich, while it neglects the common man, labourers, farmers and women.”[18] In Gujarat on April 26 he declared: “The [Gujarat] model is all about snatching the rights and lands of farmers and giving them away to such businessmen.”[19] In Latur on April 14 he called the Gujarat model a “toffee model”, one in which the BJP doled out toffees to businessmen.[20] In Chandigarh, Sonia called the Gujarat model “exclusive, discriminating against the poor and favouring select industrialists at the cost of the public.”[21]

However, this rhetoric has come much too late to benefit the Congress. It is hardly convincing to attack the “toffee model” in Gujarat while having distributed toffees for the last decade at the Centre. Those who live by cash must die by cash.

Moreover, even as they maintained large subsidies to the corporate sector, the Congress rulers have sharply cut welfare expenditures in the last two years – a near-suicidal adherence to the instructions of international credit rating agencies which has certainly deepened the economic slump and heightened ‘anti-incumbency’ sentiment. It is true that the new incumbent in place of the Congress may be even worse for the people, but the electorate does not know that from its direct experience.

While the Congress’s anti-corporate language and complaints regarding BJP’s money power may not help the Congress much, they do offer a telling portrait of India’s parliamentary democracy, from within.

Corporate sector alarm at new Congress rhetoric
The Congress’s new rhetoric may be shallow and tardy. But it has alarmed the corporate sector and its media. Noting that Rahul Gandhi had attacked concessions not only to Adani, who is closely identified with Modi, but to Tata as well, Business Standard warns him against anti-corporate rhetoric:

Mr Gandhi shouldn’t confuse cronyism and pro-business policies…. the problem arises when such accusations acquire the tone and character of a general attack on incentives for business that are not preferentially doled out only to the favoured few. It is important to distinguish between business-friendly economic policies for industry to revive investment and crony capitalism, where the government favours specific business houses with special concessions – often in return of political support from them. Mr Gandhi should focus on specifying how certain decisions of the Gujarat government smacked of crony capitalism, instead of allowing his criticism to be seen as an attack on the idea of pro-business policies altogether.[22]

In an April 25 editorial titled “Monkey Business”,[23] the Times of India warns: “Anti-private sector sloganeering in elections should not carry over to the next government.” It is alarmed that anti-corporate rhetoric is getting a response from the people, with longer-term implications:

What has been surprising is the traction that anti-business rhetoric has gained. The question is whether this is just election-time bombast or whether it will spill over into the post-poll phase, weighing down the economic policies of whoever heads the next government. The latter scenario would be very worrying….

Although global conditions are becoming a little less hostile, taking domestic advantage of these headwinds will require substantial course correction. Stalled projects need to be cleared, coal linkages sorted, manufacturing needs morale boosters, and so on. The new PM will have to hit the ground running. As even a cursory study of pre-1991 vs post-1991 history showcases, the partnership of a resurgent private sector will be indispensable….

The Times does not maintain the illusory distinction between ‘crony capitalism’ and capitalism as such:

Congress and AAP accuse the Gujarat development model of crony capitalism when it comes to allotment of land to industry. Whatever the accuracy of their maths, these accusations sidestep the fact that governments all across the world facilitate land acquisition for infrastructure projects and other big investments. This is true from China to the US.

As we noted in an earlier piece[24], the norm in recent years was for the corporate sector to fund the major parliamentary parties more or less equally. The current corporate sector’s desertion of the Congress is thus a remarkable phenomenon. Not since the days of Indira Gandhi till the mid-1970s has the corporate sector plumped so decisively for one party.

This shift indicates the desperation in the corporate sector. The underlying sickness of India’s political economy has surfaced once more in the form of paucity of demand – not only paucity of mass demand, which is a continuing factor, but even that of middle and upper class demand, which grew rapidly with the earlier bubble-growth of the economy. Mired in recession, the corporate sector in India, and foreign investors behind it, actually demand more State intervention, not less. They want land, other natural resources, and public sector assets at throwaway prices, in the face of mass resistance. They want the continuation of, and even increase in, giant subsidies to itself. They need the State to rig tariffs in its favour. They demand the encroachment of yet more vulnerable sectors to corporate capital. And they want the State’s strong arm to tackle an increasingly restive working class.

29 April 2014



[1] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-09-06/news/41835249_1_narendra-modi-pm-candidate-rahul-gandhi

[2] Quotations in this paragraph are from: http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/the-good-m-113092001155_1.html, B. D’Mello, “It’s in the (Indian) air, smells like semi-fascism”, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/dmello220913.html, and http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/Ft667DfOmDQKRGbHQZWu6M/In-Narendra-Modi-big-money-backs-the-wrong-man-in-India.html

[3] For example: Indira Hirway, “Partial View of Outcome of Reforms and Gujarat ‘Model’,Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), 26/10/13; Indira Hirway, Neha Shah, “Labour and Employment under Globalisation: The Case of Gujarat”, EPW, 28/5/11; R. Nagaraj, Shruti Pandey, “Have Gujarat and Bihar Outperformed the Rest of India? A Statistical Note”, EPW, 28/9/13; Maitreesh Ghatak, Sanchari Roy, “A Look in the Mirror”, Outlook, 31/3/14, http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?289889.

[4] http://svaradarajan.com/2014/03/27/the-cult-of-cronyism/

[5] Interestingly, the present Petroleum Minister, Veerappa Moily, was brought into the Petroleum Ministry to replace Jaipal Reddy, who was proving an inconvenience to Mukesh Ambani. As such Moily is now on a dual rescue mission.

[6] The term ‘crony capitalism’ is a sleight of hand whereby the blame for features intrinsic to capitalism in general is shifted to some alleged ‘distortions’ of capitalism. In particular, the term is used to describe developing countries, who have supposedly not absorbed the market discipline and rule of law required for real, non-crony capitalism. Thus ‘crony capitalism’ in the Southeast Asian countries is blamed for the 1998 crisis there, not those countries’ integration with global capital in the preceding decade. The truth is: in the US itself, the ‘revolving door’ between Wall Street and the US Treasury is common knowledge, and political ‘lobbying’, scarcely distinguishable from bribery, is a $9 billion industry that employs an estimated 1,00,000 lobbyists: See http://www.thenation.com/article/178460/shadow-lobbying-complex

[7] http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/market-news/indias-policy-reforms-to-affect-sovereign-ratings-sp_1069464.html

[8] “India Inc against political witch hunt”, Times of India, 17/2/14. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/India-Inc-against-political-witch-hunt/articleshow/30531731.cms

[9] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/lok-sabha-elections-2014/news/Congress-candidates-arent-getting-much-money-from-the-party/articleshow/33467608.cms

[10] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/bjp-spent-rs-10000-cr-black-money-on-poll-campaigns-anand-sharma/article5928901.ece

[11] http://www.rediff.com/news/report/ls-election-modis-campaign-would-cost-5000-crore-most-of-it-black-money-sibal/20140416.htm

[12] http://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/the-economics-of-parliamentary-politics/

[13]http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-03-23/news/48491583_1_narendra-modi-prime-ministerial-pm-candidate

[14] http://www.rediff.com/news/report/ls-election-modis-campaign-would-cost-5000-crore-most-of-it-black-money-sibal/20140416.htm

[15] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sharma-says-upa-government-selling-its-achievements-short/article5598356.ece

[16] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-04-08/news/48971230_1_bjp-manifesto-food-security-act-congress-policy

[17] http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/politics/progressive-business-interests-are-with-us-rahul/article5940878.ece

[18] http://www.business-standard.com/article/elections-2014/gujarat-model-a-balloon-has-benefited-only-the-rich-rahul-114042000737_1.html

[19] https://in.news.yahoo.com/gujarat-development-model-snatching-lands-rights-poor-rahul-090236847.html

[20] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/lok-sabha-elections-2014/news/Gujarat-development-model-a-toffee-model-Rahul-Gandhi/articleshow/33747020.cms

[21] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/modi-model-divisive-says-sonia/article5952281.ece

[22] http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/toffee-and-land-114041601287_1.html

[23] http://mobiletoi.timesofindia.com/mobile.aspx?article=yes&pageid=22§id=edid=&edlabel=CAP&mydateHid=25-04-2014&pubname=Times+of+India+-+Delhi&edname=&articleid=Ar02204&publabel=TOI

[24] http://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/the-economics-of-parliamentary-politics/

Narendra Modi and the Indian election: Why the corporates love a fascist | Amrit Wilson

http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/narendra-modi-indian-election-corporates-love-fascist/

Narendra Modi and the Indian election: Why the corporates love a fascist
With India's general election set to begin on Monday, the BJP is widely expected to secure victory and its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, to become the country's next prime minister. Amrit Wilson reports.
New in Ceasefire - Posted on Friday, April 4, 2014 21:40 - 1 Comment
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By Amrit Wilson

‘Modiji, is like Lord Krishna’, an elderly woman admirer of Narendra Modi, the Hindu Right’s Prime Ministerial candidate in India’s forthcoming elections, tells me outside the Hindu temple in Neasden, North London, ‘he is everywhere and everyone loves him - people like me love him because he is traditional and young people love him too.’ In a way it is true, like Lord Krishna (or the ‘blue god’ as UK’s multicultural school curriculum calls him), Modi is indeed everywhere -at least on the internet. He is on Facebook, twitter, tumblr, stumbleonit. You name it, and he is there: speaking directly to his admirers.

It is true also that he is a traditionalist of sorts. His version of tradition comes largely from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organisation modelled on Mussolini’s Black Brigades, where Modi began his political life, and from the Sangh Parivar the sinister ‘family of organisations’ to which belong both the RSS and Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), along with cultural organisations and a number of other violent paramilitary outfits such as the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal.

In Gujarat, where Modi has been Chief Minister since 2001, these ‘traditions’ led to the state-sponsored massacres of Muslims in February 2002 in which some 2,000 people were murdered and 200,000 displaced. Court cases are still being heard which accuse Modi of complicity, including one filed by Zakia Jafri, whose husband Ahsan Jafri, a former MP, was brutally murdered in the violence. The family of two British citizens, Saeed and Sakil Dawood, who were murdered in Gujarat while on holiday in 2002 are also pursuing a civil case against Modi.

The violence was, as the British High Commissioner noted at the time in a leaked report, ‘planned, possibly months in advance, … with the support of the state government…. reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims is impossible while the chief minister [Narendra Modi] remains in Gujarat.’

Women and children were specifically targeted in the pogrom. As feminist academic Tanika Sarkar wrote:

‘The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One, the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes’.

The aftermath of the violence, too, was managed by the state. As Sarkar noted:

‘Bodies were not just massacred, they disappeared, as did houses, shrines, mosques. Overnight, roads were laid, and Hindu temples were built where Muslim homes used to be. Identities disappeared as well, for refugees in relief camps have neither documents nor identification papers of any sort to prove that they ever had property, jobs, bank balances, land, families, Indian citizenship.”

In the years that have passed since 2002, Modi has never expressed any regret for what happened in Gujarat, stating, when asked about his feelings, that he felt as sad as an occupant of a car that runs over a puppy. The Sangh Parivar which declared Gujarat ‘the Laboratory of the Hindu State’ has repeated this experiment in Odisha, in 2007, in an anti-Christian pogrom, and again most recently against Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh during Modi’s election campaign.

In Muzaffarnagar, as in Gujarat, the violence was carefully planned. Here Jat Hindus and Muslims had lived in harmony for decades. But last summer, Amit Shah, Narendra Modi’s right-hand man and the Home Minister of Gujarat state, was put in charge of Modi’s election campaign in Uttar Pradesh (a key swing state) and the forces of the Sangh Parivar began to create conflict between the two communities.

The tension had already built up when the actual trigger for violence occurred. It was a comparatively minor incident the details of which are unclear to most people in the area. As journalist Neha Dixit writes ‘a Muslim boy … ‘eve-teased’ a Jat girl (though some say it was a traffic-related incident)’. The boy was killed by the girl’s cousin and brother and they in turn were killed by Muslims. The storm troopers of the Sangh Parivar then began to whip up a frenzy of anti-Muslim hatred, with inflamatory speeches, fake videos and other materials portraying Muslims as aggressors and potential violators of Jat womanhood. Soon, mass meetings of sword-brandishing Sangh Parivar activists were held where slogans urging Hindus to save their daughters and restore their honour were followed by ones urging Hindu men to abduct and rape Muslim women. The violence against Muslim women in Muzaffarnagar was horrific, following similar patterns of cruelty to events in Gujarat.

What is the history of these organisations of the Hindu Right which are aiming to take control of India as a whole? The origins of their ideas are not in India’s ancient history as they claim, but deeply colonial: they emerged in the 19th century, informed by the British rulers’ ‘scriptural’ and elite-based interpretations of Hinduism, and their deliberate policies of divide-and-rule in response to the first war of independence of 1857. The strategic British rewriting of Indian history as an age-old struggle between Hindus and Muslim ‘invaders’ was adopted wholesale by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy, and continues to be used to target India’s Muslims as ‘enemies’ and ‘outsiders’.

While the RSS was established in the 1920s, in opposition to the anti-colonial movement, the other organisations of the Sangh Parivar have emerged after Indian independence in 1947. However, it is in the period after 1991 – when India, then ruled by the Congress Party (the BJP’s main rival, currently in power at the centre under Manmohan Singh), embraced neoliberalism – that the Hindu Right became a force to be reckoned with. The BJP’s specific form of nationalism, however, was not a reaction to neoliberalism, rather it shaped itself to fit in with it. The Congress’s record – its anti-Muslim communalism for example, and its pogrom against Sikhs in 1984 – had also acclimatised the electorate for the far-right BJP’s more systematic anti-minority politics.

In 1992, the Sangh Parivar launched a campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid, a 500-year-old mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. The actual demolition was planned carefully in advance by the RSS with the knowledge of senior BJP leaders, and in December that year a mob of 15,000 Sangh Parivar activists, led by senior BJP leaders such as L.K.Advani, actually destroyed this beautiful building, sparking violence between Hindus and Muslims across the country that claimed some 900 lives. Against this background, the BJP rose to power and, between 1998 and 2004, ruled India in alliance with a number of other parties. This was a period during which it took the opportunity to systematically penetrate state institutions and build a framework for fascistic interventions that remains intact.

The BJP also continued to try to reshape India’s syncretic culture. Most strikingly, it has attempted to transform Hinduism itself from a religion which had the capacity to absorb ideas and beliefs, and had no fixed religious book, into a monolithic faith. To this end, the storm troopers of the Hindu Right have demolished not only the shrines of Sufi saints and poets, who had many Hindu followers (the tomb of the well-known 18th century Urdu Poet Wali Gujarati in Ahmadabad being one example), but also temples to Hindu Gods whose origins are in indigenous religions or those worshipped by the so-called ‘low’ castes.

This new version of Indian history, culture and tradition and Hindu religion is being used in school textbooks in the Indian states ruled by the BJP. It is also increasingly finding its way, in an airbrushed and neatly packaged form, into multicultural aspects of curricula in British schools and other representations of India in the West.

With the election starting on Monday, Modi is desperately trying to play down the many court cases which implicate him and those closest to him. These include not only the cases arising from the Gujarat massacres but the stalking of a young woman through the surveillance machinery of the Gujarat state at the behest of Narendra himself. The stalking was supervised by Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah; and that this happened under the orders of Modi is clear from what are now known in India as the ‘snoopgate tapes’. In one, for example, Amit Shah informs Gujarat Police official G.I.Singhal, who had been given the task of recording the woman’s movements, that ‘Saheb’ has told him she will be going to lunch with a young man and that they must be watched. In another, Shah chides Singhal for his errors, indicating that ‘Saheb’ (Modi) would be displeased.

If this is not considered damaging to Narendra Modi’s reputation, there are other, far more sinister, cases going through the courts too, among them the abduction, torture in a private farmhouse, and murder of 19-year-old college student Ishrat Jahan and three others in a so-called ’encounter killing’. The Gujarat police alleged that Ishrat and her associates were terrorists involved in a plot to assassinate Modi. But in 2009 an Ahmedabad Metropolitan court finally ruled that the encounter was fabricated and, in July last year, India’s Central Bureau of Intelligence filed its first charge sheet saying that the shooting was a staged encounter carried out in cold blood.

The chilling truth, that Ishrat Jahan and many others were murdered simply to boost Modi’s popularity, is now emerging. As the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association notes, between 2002 and 2007:

‘Modi’s super cop D.G. Vanzara eliminated a series of “terrorists” on mission to Gujarat to assassinate Modi. Sadiq Jamal (2003), Ishrat Jahan (2004), Sohrabuddin Shaikh (2005), Tulsiram Prajapati (2006). Years later it has emerged that these were cold-blooded executions… Vanzara and his gang of men are since then in jail (and Gujarat didn’t see any more attempts on the life of its Chief Minister). These fake encounters however helped Modi build his image as the Hindu Hriday samrat [king of hearts] – forever in the firing line of “Islamic terrorists”‘

These deaths are still haunting Modi, who does not want them discussed in Gujarat. Last week, five jeep-loads of police officers prevented film maker Gopal Menon from showing his documentary about encounter killings in Ahmedabad.

In the eyes of corporate bosses, however, all this does not matter. In fact, Modi’s image as a strong man who can sideline the law is seen by them as an advantage. Currently, transnational companies are targeting India in a massive land-grab. India’s central belt is crawling with mining companies like Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, South Korea’s POSCO, the British multinational Vedanta and the Indian-owned Essar and Tatas, eager for the coal, iron, aluminium and other minerals under the ground.

Here, forests which are a source of livelihood for local people, fertile agricultural land and sacred sites are being taken over, whole villages uprooted and thousands of indigenous people are being robbed of their homes, livelihoods and culture. Many of these companies are also ignoring environmental laws and destroying the land itself, not only in the present but for generations to come, as they rip off the topsoil and pollute rivers and streams for miles with toxic effluents and poisonous mud.

The corporates know that if Modi comes to power nationally he will smooth their path far more effectively than the Congress Party has done. They can see from experiences in Gujarat that they will be given land at a pittance, that tax regulations and environmental and labour laws will be ignored and, more than anything, Modi’s ruthlessness will mean that he will crush all dissent, particularly the people’s movements which have been resisting this massive looting of their land. ‘Encounter killings’ are already widespread in the mineral-rich belt of India, but Modi will have no qualms in intensifying this form of warfare.

Experiences of the communities destroyed in these corporate land-grabs, and the apparently very different experiences of women and children in the context of the Hindu Right’s anti-Muslim and anti-Christian pogroms, may seem worlds apart, but they are two inseparable aspects of the politics of Narendra Modi. While triumphal Hindu supremacism provides this version of fascism with a base built on fear and intimidation, its ruthlessness on behalf of, and complete identification with, corporate capital means that it can draw sustenance from and be celebrated by financial institutions and western governments.
Amrit Wilson

Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan, a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women's organisation dedicated to combating violence against women in Britain.

India: Corporates backing Modi's communalism for vested interest - Brinda Karat

by Arunav Sinha,TNN | Jan 19, 2014, 09.40 PM IST

LUCKNOW: Stepping up the ante on Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, CPM politburo member Brinda Karat said that the corporate sector is trying to reap dividends from communalism, and it is the sole reason that the corporate sector is backing Narendra Modi.

Addressing a meeting held on Sunday, to put pressure on the Centre to pass the communal violence bill, Karat said, "Fighting the communal forces in the country would mean upholding the values enshrined in India's Constitution. Narendra Modi, who is BJP's prime ministerial candidate has been handpicked by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for their vested interest."

She further added, "Even the corporate sector is trying to yield rich dividends using Modi, and they know the best option for them to remain in profit zone is to enhance the level of communalism in the country. And as far as economic policies are concerned, there is no difference between the policies of the Congress and BJP."

The meeting called on Sunday by the Communist party of India (Marxist) aimed at mounting pressure on the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance to pass the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 in Parliament.

Citing recent examples, Karat said, "The latest strategy adopted by the communal forces is that they are using women as shields in the garb of women's honour, which must be condemned in the harshest possible manner. And, the pity is this that all the political parties are using women as a shield to score a brownie points, while the reality is that they are least bothered about the welfare and safety of the women." She also slammed the prominent national political parties for adopting dual policy vis-a-vis the terror accused.

Continuing her onslaught against Modi, the CPM politburo member said that if Modi claims that his governance is good, then how come 2000 innocent Muslims got killed during his rule. "If Modi claims that he made a humble beginning as a tea vendor, then why is it so that the tea vendors in the state of Gujarat are robbed of space to earn their livelihood."

She also accused the Gujarat CM of colluding with industrial houses, and, added, "It is because of this Modi-corporate nexus that nearly 1 lakh acre of land belonging to tribals has been given to the corporates. The manufacturers of Nano car in Gujarat got a subsidy of almost Rs 31,000 crore, she alleged.

source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Corporates-backing-Modis-communalism-for-vested-interest-Brinda-Karat/articleshow/29068517.cms

Mainstreaming Modi

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 18, May 04, 2013
Web Exclusives

by Avinash Kumar


Big business and mainstream media are not just hailing Narendra Modi’s arrival on the national stage, but beautifying him and making all that he represents, acceptable to the people.

Avinash Kumar is a historian based in New Delhi.

We have all heard of the fairytale where the frog turned into a prince when kissed by a princess. A somewhat similar situation seems to be upon us with media willing to kiss and turn Narendra Modi into “prince charming”. This means not just hailing Modi in some abstract way, but more significantly turning mainstream and acceptable what he represents.
In the past few months, the mainstream media has gone all over town telling us how Modi is now “mainstream” and not a pariah anymore. The reasons for this change in perception range from how even the United Kingdom and the European Union have “normalised” relations with him, that he has been elected thrice in a row to the chief ministership of Gujarat, which surely speaks of his abilities as an “efficient” and “able” administrator, that Gujarat has become corporate India’s favourite investment destination, and most importantly, that he is the guy who can take “decisions” and not keep the nation waiting for action.
From the best known names of the mainstream media, like Shekhar Gupta and Rajdeep Sardesai, to international magazines like the Economist and Time, are now churning out reams of paper about Modi's ability to take decisions. Though some of them have been circumspect enough to mention his role in the Gujarat killings of 2002, they consider these riots as a blip on the radar for which, at best, he should apologise and move on to seal the bigger victories awaiting him. Shekhar Gupta talks about the rural prosperity which has occurred in Gujarat under Modi’s rule. Sardesai talks of his “decisive leadership style and good governance mantra” and Madhu Purnima Kishwar talks about women and families happily walking about in neon lit streets of Ahmedabad. Even a self-proclaimed “secularist” like Vinod Mehta had said sometime back that though he did not doubt Modi’s complicity in the 2002 killings, given Gujarat’s prosperity in “other” spheres he was not sure what to make out of this man.
When protesters were laying siege to Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) in Delhi where Modi was delivering a speech to students inside its premises, the NDTV news channel was running an online poll asking “Rate Narendra Modi’s speech at SRCC”. Articles with titles like “Can Modi Deliver at the National Stage?” are being printed by the dozen. In a sense, therefore, the “normalisation” of Modi on the national scene is already complete even before he has been formally nominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as its prime ministerial candidate.
The point of this piece, however, is not to accuse these mainstream liberals of complicity with Modi, but to look at the reasons behind why this has happened and at a pace that defies logic. Some clues to the same can be found in a recent piece which appeared on the edit page of Times of India written by Arvind Virmani (18h April, 2013) who incidentally served as the chief economic advisor to the first United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) government. In this piece, he uses three criteria to compare the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress with the Modi-led BJP namely, social inclusion, economic growth & development, and domestic and national security.
While giving credit for better results on the first criteria to the Congress, Virmani rates the BJP higher on the other two. Hence the “tentative score for Rahul-led Congress is A, B+ and B on the three fronts with a net score of B+. Modi-led BJP's scores, meanwhile, are C+, A and A- with a net of B+”. He goes on to emphasise the importance of “governance” and “economic growth” for both the parties. An economist who till recently served under the Congress led government is rating the “Modi-led BJP” higher on two of his three criteria. This underlines the fact that there is a near consensus among policy makers and the mainstream media over the way the country should be run. Barring some minor tweaking with words like “inclusion”, the prescription remains the same. That is, a “growth led trajectory” obsessed with percentages and numbers, a large-scale withdrawal of the State even from basic services, a wilful neglect of sectors like agriculture and small industries (which provide employment to the largest number of people even today) and a unending belief in the ability of the corporate sector to be the panacea for all ills. Hence there is also agreement in terms of emphasis like “good governance” and “efficient administration” even among people who seem politically divergent.
But the question, why is the Modi-led BJP preferred over the Congress, still remains? Is it simply due to a chain of scams which have plagued the current regime over the last few years, or is it something beyond that? Surely, the BJP has found itself ensnared in as many scams as the Congress party.
In my view, there are two specific reasons that explain Modi’s “normalisation” by the corporate groups and that national media. One, it shows the success of the Modi-led BJP’s selective interpretation of issues such as growth, governance, peace and security, and how these have now been mainstreamed. To come to “peace and security” first, a constant projection of “threat-perception” both from within and outside -- meaning Muslims and sometimes Maoists from within and Pakistan from outside -- is now complete and mainstream. So much so that during the current Congress-led regime we have suddenly witnessed a flurry of decisions confirming capital punishment. Those in power have to show they are “decisive” just like Modi was in 2002. The perception of threat is now so internalised that government sponsored messages on radio constantly tell you to get the identity of your tenant verified by police, and even encourage your neighbours to do that. It is in times like these that a “decisive” persona like Modi would score over the “vacillating” Congress.
Another magic word in this context is “governance”. What does it mean under Modi? That he cut down all bureaucratic rigmarole so that the Tatas could set up their Nano car factory within a matter of days. Or that thousands of investors could flock down to the green pastures of Gujarat (never mind occasional court rulings that harass an Adani or a Mundhra for the violation of laws and community’s rights). Infrastructure, ports, highways and electricity to urbanised parts of Gujarat are the hallmarks of his governance, but not the fact that he “governed” over the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims, or that he “allowed” scores of people, mainly Muslims, to be killed in fake encounters. Modi’s governance means bureaucrats fear him and do what he says without questioning. In these times of the ideology of less government this is exactly what is loved by the corporate sector and the media. This interpretation of governance obviously does not include the prevalent high malnutrition and anemia rates among women and children and the worsening situation of Dalits and Tribals in the state. It also does not include large-scale displacement of communities in the name of “development”.
Modi’s panacea for growth is more upfront on issues such as a voucher system for education and reducing government expenditure on basic services like health and education, thereby leaving the masses to fend for themselves. With the growth rate plummeting to below 5%, the “threat perception” which may finally turn the tide in favour of Modi is that of an economic downturn. As long as the sailing was smooth under the UPA regime the corporate and media could keep Modi away. With the threat of falling economic growth profits cannot be compromised on any count. As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Hence the clamor for a decisive and tough leader like Modi who can help us attain the mythical 10% growth rate. If this means weakening our civil and political rights, so be it. If it means denying justice to those killed and displaced, so be it. But for this it is necessary that we “humanise” Modi, divest him of the accusations of being complicit in killings and paper over the human suffering that his model of development has entailed for many people. It is only by erasing the entire memory of the 2002 riots and their aftermath that Modi can be made acceptable for the elections.

“Middle Class Wants Nation-State To Be Run Like A Company” Outlook Interviews Christophe Jaffrelot

Outlook Magazine | Apr 22, 2013

interview
“Middle Class Wants Nation-State To Be Run Like A Company”
The eminent political scientist and India-watcher took some questions from Outlook
Outlook Interviews Christophe Jaffrelot

Political scientist and India-watcher Christophe Jaffrelot took some questions from Outlook. Excerpts:

On the rising power of corporates: The rising power of the business community makes sense in post-1991 liberalized India. While it suffered from clear opprobrium under the Nehruvian pattern, the private sector has become the role model in India—like elsewhere. Middle class people may even think that the nation-state should be managed like a company, that it would perform more effectively if the country's leaders went only by meritocratic values—which would put reservations into question for instance. Interestingly, this discourse downplays the role of the private sector in corruption cases. The guilty men are the politicians who take money more than those who give.

On Narendra Modi and big business: Narendra Modi needed to embark on an alternative repertoire after the 2002 pogrom and he chose “development”. For that, he needed the money of the private sector and he has been able to attract huge investments (not as much as he claims though) by changing the rules of the game. The decision-making process has become very quick indeed—and has resulted in a form of proximity between capitalists and a BJP politician that only Pramod Mahajan had developed to such an extent before. More importantly, Gujarat’s exchequer is suffering, but that is not what hits headlines—the Nano plant did!

“The urban elite is tired of ‘a country of 5,00,000 villages’ and wants to project its modern face instead.”

On why politicians seek corporate platforms: This is the "shining India" syndrome. The ruling class is urban and middle class oriented, even when it comes from some low extraction. Incidentally, the Dalit leaders are not hugely different because they are products of the reservations. Since 1991 the gap between Bharat and India (to use Charan Singh's words) is widening. The urban elite is tired of "a-country-of-500,000-villages" and wants to project its modern face instead. This is also the best way to "sale" India abroad: the soft power on which New Delhi can capitalise is located in Bangalore, not in the tribal belt of Chhattisgarh. But the elite ignore more than 50% of the country at their own cost. In 2004, the BJP was punished by the voters because of such miscalculations. And more importantly, you cannot really develop a rural country by not investing more in agriculture—or letting this kind of investment to the private sector. Can Reliance build irrigation canals, in the end? Not in Saurashtra

On the perils of trying to manufacture a US-style Presidential contest between Modi and Rahul Gandhi: This personalization of politics is not specific to the US. It developed in Europe in the context of parliamentary systems. See what happened in UK under Thatcher and Blair? See Merkel in Germany. This is the age of communication when a political party hardly exists if it cannot project a face. It will remain anonymous if its has no family name—this is an additional factor to dynastic politics by the way. The last state elections are a case in pojnt. In Gujarat, it was Modi vs. Who? Nobody on the Congress side. And Modi was a marketing genius when he gave masks of his face to every Gujarati who wanted to identify with him to that extent—plus the NaMo Channel and the 3 D holographs...

On the world outside Delhi and Mumbai: The India shinning syndrome of the early 2000s continues to prevail because the middle class runs the show (where are the Charan Singhs of rural India today?), be they congressmen or BJPwallahs. And, yes, they may face strong opposition from villagers. But urbanization is making progress and money plays also an even larger role in politics—so they my get away with it… and let the red corridor grow. The question mark that remains pertains to the state parties: will they endorse non-middle class interests, and get the upper hand? A Third Front of that kind cannot be ruled out today.

On the greater role being played by India Inc in making laws and political activity in recent years: Democracy is affected when money plays a major role in the electoral arena and helps to suppress dissenting voices, like in the US. It also affects democracy when paid news become THE news. Regarding laws, we could mention several instances. I would mention only one: the RTI Act. Although it is a great achievement, the law makers have excluded the private sector from its purview and this is definitely making some Indians more equals than others. Hopefully the Indian judiciary will resist this kind of trend.

An edited, shorter version of this appears in print