Indian Communists Want to Go Back
To the Days of the Bullock Cart?
By M.P. Prabhakaran
The Industrial Revolution bypassed India. Though it happened through no fault of Indians – their economic destiny at the time was controlled by foreign powers – they were made to pay a heavy price. The price was: When the West soared into the jet age, India remained in the bullock cart age.
By contrast, India has been in the forefront of the information technology revolution that began over two decades ago. It is now racing ahead on the Information Technology Superhighway, so to speak. This phenomenal achievement has earned the country plaudits from around the world. The achievement was made possible mainly because of the economic reforms initiated in the 1990s by Dr. Manmohan Singh. He was India’s finance minister at the time and is prime minister now. But there is a danger of its going back to the days of the bullock cart if Indian communists and their fellow travelers don’t give up their obscurantist attitudes and obstructionist tactics.
The immediate reason for raising this alarm is the four-day strike they organized early this month, in protest against the Manmohan Singh government’s decision to privatize and modernize the international airports of New Delhi and Mumbai. In India, as we all know, taking any entity away from the control of the government is an essential first step toward modernizing and making it efficient. There is no denying that the two airports – for that matter, all airports in India – badly need modernizing. Even bus stations in some advanced industrial countries are better-looking and more efficiently run than international airports in India. (Readers are directed to an article published on this Web site to get an idea of the deplorable condition at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport.)
Airports Turned Into Garbage Dumps
But communist and other leftist leaders in India, to whom preserving their control over airport workers is more important than making airport operations efficient and economically viable, wanted to thwart the government plan. Prodded by them, 22,000 employees at 126 airports across the country struck work for four days. If they had hoped that their action would halt the entire air traffic in India and force the government to cave in, they were disappointed. The traffic continued with minimal inconvenience to passengers. And the government had a contingency plan ready to ward off any possible disruption. But the strikers and their leaders can take pride in having accomplished one thing, though: they “turned airports across the country into huge garbage dumps,” to quote The Times of India of February 5, 2006. Most of those who went on strike were cleaners and other ground workers.
Thanks to the government’s firm resolve, the strike fizzled out. To quote The Times of India, again, the strikers “clutched at the straw of a written assurance from the government – to look into the issue of workers’ job security and future of AAI [Airports Authority of India] in view of privatisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports – to justify their retreat.” Quite an “embarrassment for their political patrons, the Left.” While Prime Minister personally intervened and appealed to the workers to end the strike, he made it clear to them that there was no going back on the government’s decision to modernize the airports. Most Indians and well-wishers of India around the world applauded him for being firm – for a refreshing change this time. They all knew that it was not easy, given the precarious position he is in.
The Congress Party to which Dr. Singh belongs does not enjoy a majority in the Indian Parliament. It was able to form a government after the 2004 general election only when communist and other leftist parliamentarians offered the Congress Party their support from outside, without joining the government. The communists have been extracting a price for that support ever since: Every time they put forth a demand in furtherance of their agenda, they would preface it with a threat to withdraw their support.
The last time they did it was on September 29, 2005. In an effort to force the government to abandon the plan it had drawn up to speed up its economic reforms, they led a one-day strike of airport workers, bank employees, and employees of insurance companies and central and state governments. The strike nearly paralyzed public services in India and the government gave in by temporarily shelving the reform plan.
Six of the seven trade unions to which the strikers belonged were affiliated with parties that profess Marxism or some variant of it. It is ironic that in India, one still comes across loud-mouthed Marxists, while in Russia and many other countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, which practiced Marxism for over seven decades and failed, it is despised by most and communists have become an endangered species.
Bankruptcy of Left Politics
Most mainstream newspapers in India condemned the strike. According to the India Express of September 30, 2005, it showed “the sheer bankruptcy of Left politics” in India. “And what is it that the seven trade unions … actually want?” asked The Times of India of the same day, in a well-balanced editorial criticism of the strike. “They want no asset sales in profitable PSUs [public sector undertakings], a lowering of overseas investment caps in sectors like telecommunication and aviation, and a restriction on foreign direct investment [FDI] in insurance, banking and retail – which could be opened up to FDI soon.” The editorial went on to explain why the trade unions’ demands were short-sighted: “India’s recent history shows that sectors which have received large doses of overseas capital – manufacturing, telecom, banks and financial services – have done much better than those that have not…. And the unions’ Left sponsors should look to China, which attracted over 10 times the $3.4 billion FDI that India has received so far this year [2005], for clues about what posture to adopt on economic policy.”
The suggestion to leftist union bosses to look to China for guidance on economic policy is well meant, I am sure. But that’s the last thing they would want to do. They, like the rest of the world, know full well that China has been able to attract heavy doses of foreign capital and become the fastest-growing economy in the world today because of its Janus-faced policy: While adhering to authoritarian communism in political and social spheres, it has been practicing crude capitalism in the economic sphere. Workers are prohibited from adopting any posture that would even remotely suggest a threat of strike. Any violation of that prohibition entails imprisonment. Can anyone expect Indian communists, who strike work at the drop of a hat, to look to China for inspiration?
It’s laudable that India has become the second-fastest-growing economy in the world, in spite of the abundance of freedom its people enjoy, including the freedom of workers to strike. None should grudge them that freedom. It is bestowed on them by India’s democratic constitution. The question is: Should that freedom be misused by those, who have been enjoying the benefits of the economic progress the country has been making, to engage in activities which would reverse that progress?
In today’s world, the best way to champion the cause of workers is to equip them to be part of the ongoing technological revolution, not instigate them to resort to counterrevolutionary tactics, to borrow a phrase from the leftist vocabulary. It’s about time the communists and socialists of all hues who masquerade as champions of India’s working class recognized that the current revolution is irreversible.
[Published on February 18, 2006.]
[Readers are invited to comment. Send your comments to letters@eastwestinquirer.com]
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Reader's Response
Indian Communists Enjoy Nightmares
I may point out that Indian communists have not yet gone beyond the man cart, if I can use that expression. Look at West Bengal, which has been under communist rule for years. Even today, the so-called champions of the proletariat in that state let the proletariat pull carts loaded with men and women, usually belonging to the bourgeois class.
The sickening practice of a man pulling a cart (rickshaw), with other human beings comfortably seated in it, prevailed in many parts of India for centuries. While the practice has been abolished in most states – which are non-communist-ruled, it is pertinent to add – in communist-ruled West Bengal it still continues. There have been frequent announcements by communist leaders of the state that it would soon be discontinued. Who is stopping them from doing it?
Indian communists enjoy nightmares, it seems. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the support they have given to Iran in its illegal pursuit of weapons of mass destruction – in this case, nuclear weapons. They have not woken up to the reality of the demise of the old world order under which the world was divided into three – a First World, a Second World and a Third World. The demise occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Communism is long dead, but Indian communists are still alive in their
nightmarish slumber.
Kulamarva Balakrishna, Padubidri, Karnataka, India
February 19, 2006